An historical account of indexical images : from ancient art to the Web

We develop an analysis of visual knowledge and the use of pictures in electronic communication. We focus in particular on indexical images, which are at work in our current practice of navigation in multimedia documents and the World Wide Web. For this purpose, we base our study, on the one hand, on semiotics, the core concepts of which were introduced by C.S. Peirce at the beginning of the 20th Century; and, on the other hand, on a more classical historical analysis, in order to point out the deep roots of the notions used in contemporary computer communication. We therefore retrace the history of the 'universal computer language', and link it to that of the 'universal language of images', which has a long tradition in the history of ideas, going back to Cicero's 'Art of Memory' in antiquity and various other mediaeval and Renaissance curiosities.