Semiotics and Title Sequences

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The rebus mode, much like the lower-level calligram mode, originates with the text::image play of children’s books that deploy the ambiguous form of the “rebus” or word-image puzzle. Text and image remain as independent fields (as with the figure–ground mode), but they are related to each other, the linkage producing an ambivalent meaning dependent on past experience, a product of their entanglement. Understanding this form requires a careful attention not just to the text itself, but to the graphic nature of that text aside from issues of lexical intelligibility or legibility: consider Liar created by Paul Agule in 1987 [Figure 4.1]. It is an ambigram, a type of optical illusion whose identification is uncertain—Liar can be interpreted to ...