LASER TALKS Jerusalem :: When Words Become Images: The Visual-Verbal Continuum

October 20, 2025, Jerusalem, Israel / Online

As part of LASER Talks Jerusalem and LASER Talks CYLAND

Monday, October 20, 2025, at 7:00 PM (UTC +3) — Find your timezone here.

The President Hotel Art Center, Ahad Ha-Am str. 3, Jerusalem, Israel

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Participants: Nadia Adina Rose, Shir Meller-Yamaguchi, Dr. Evgeniya Vezhlyan

Chaired by Galina Bleikh

Moderated by Daria Kesler

Organisers: INEMEA Art & Science Lab, CYLAND MediaArtLab

This talk investigates the intersection of language and visual form. By examining how text can function as both sign and image, we explore new frameworks for cognition, perception, and artistic expression. The continuum between verbal and visual systems reveals the materiality of language and its potential to mediate complex interactions between humans, technology, and environment. We will also explore what “text” means in contemporary artistic practice and what new expressions can embody or perform it today.

Nadia Adina Rose

presents her talk Text Beyond Words. This presentation traces how childhood stuttering and later linguistic displacements were transformed into an innovative artistic practice. At 22, immersed in a foreign language environment, Roz first experienced text not as meaning but as pure graphic form—a constellation of signs without verbal reference. Through textile installations, she explores the porous boundary between language and image, between communication and perception. Branches, windows, silhouettes of trees: at once they appear as visual figures and as text-like inscriptions, readable yet non-verbal. By suspending language between legibility and image, her talk redefines what it means to “read,” expanding our sense of text as both material and message.

Shir Meller-Yamaguchi

Her Visual Scripts talk presents an exhibition curated by the speaker in Wilfrid Israel Museum of Asian art, exploring the intersection of writing and painting, where language becomes visual. Tracing the origins of script from pictorial forms in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, it highlights how writing evolved from sacred, elite knowledge into a system of abstract representation. The exhibition presents Israeli artists who transform ancient scripts into contemporary visual languages—oscillating between personal marks and cultural signs—revealing how the pictographic roots of writing still resonate today, bridging spirit, image, and thought across time and culture.

Evgeniya Vezhlyan

in her presentation Text and book: between thing and medium, will discuss how audiovisual media create new frames for perceiving text in its materiality, and how the cultural meanings of the book as a medium are changing at the boundaries of spatial representations of text.

Together, the speakers expose text as a mutable organism inhabiting the threshold between sign and image. Their talks reveal how language, when unsettled from its conventional functions, becomes both matter and medium — reframing our understanding of reading, perception, and meaning within a hybrid ecology of art, science, and culture.