alexia

alexia is an experimental video about word-blindness and metaphor. Word-blindness is a condition that usually afflicts people who have suffered a stroke, causing them to lose the visual recognition of individual letters but perceive the entire word, or vice versa. Metaphor is here discussed in its function to reveal and obscure perception. Divided into five short sections, the video draws a pattern with the motif of the finger and the moon to ruminate on language and blindness. alexia opens with a quote from a well-known buddhist passage: "Do not mistake the finger for the moon." It goes on to present Giambattista Vico's theory on the origin of language and Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory on aspect-blindness, and ends with an (fictive) account of Kussmaul's (who coined the term alexia) wife as she experiences word-blindness, or alexia.

This title is also available on Tran, T. Kim-Trang: The Blindness Series.