Television indeed gives us human images, but they are sprayed onto the screen with machine-gun rapidity, and we are asked to process more bits than is humanly possible at such high speeds. Both the specific subject and the abstract notion of the image stand degraded and devalued. One critic claims that the day of the work of art as an isolated object is finished. A museum will display an object, and five pages of explanation affixed to the adjacent wall will be an integral part of the extended object. My own reaction to instances of this twinning is that it is not intelligible either as art or as rhetoric.
New developments stress the verbal, the visual, and often both simultaneously.
At the same time, the now well-advanced and absolutely remarkable field of computer graphics affords much opportunity and much hope for new interpretation, discovery, prediction, and invention via the visual. A new generation of textbooks, liberally illustrated via computer graphics and often animated via discs, promises new and vitalized understanding where previously dryasdust symbolisms left one gasping for want of insight. Topological questions, often arising in biological sciences, are eased if not solved via graphical representation. Books on the visual display of quantitative information have been published, and fortunes rivalling those of the robber barons of the 1880s have been made on computer systems for the same. Journals on scientific visualization have been established.