As we know from the idiom, a picture is worth a thousand words. But what does that mean? What does it mean that the picture, allegedly by its visual nature, can be worth more? And more than words? Nevertheless, it is fair to argue that this kind of conundrum has been a driving force in the approach to the visual since the beginning of depiction. Fascination with the visual, what it is, what it can do, whether it can be trusted – for instance, in the shape of pictures – has proceeded along with hesitation. The visual brings something into the foreground, it appears, but at the cost of scepticism
The idea of transvisuality seeks to develop a new approach to the visual beyond the issue of aliquid statpro aliquo. It aims at developing a practice-based theory of visual expression as a kind of doing, which allows one to focus on the very transience coming hesitantly to the fore when saying a picture is worth a thousand words.The idea of transvisuality approaches the visual as productive, in the sense that it adds constructively to the world. The visual is not predominantly an issue of aliquid statpro aliquo, but a conveyer of something that is thus creative by its own means. It is something that cannot really be grasped if we keep to the mutual ‘grappling’ of the visible and the sayable which informs our idiom, whether one needs the other or not, that is, the visible understood in light of the sayable, in words, or conveying something much different than a sign of language.