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• 1 media/book from the ground rezise.jpg 2016-12-06T09:55:11-08:00 (universally) Readable Text: Book from the Ground 17 plain 2016-12-11T21:15:13-08:00 In his 2003 Artist Book, Book from the Ground, Xu Bing creates a novel solely told through symbols, emojis, and icons. He explores the idea of images as a universal language, drawing inspiration from flight safety brochures and airports as places of intense cross-cultural contact. The emerging universal communication system, images require no language to interpret; however, they do require a certain cultural understanding to correctly interpret the information depicted. My reading of Xu Bing's Book from the Ground, yours, and Sarah's might be drastically different. Emoji use also demonstrates the fascinating relationship of denotation to connotation--any Millennial will describe the ​Information Desk Lady as a sassy, carefree, hair-flipping gal. (Not to mention the less obvious Teacup, Upside-down Face, or the Person with Folded Hands) This impressionistic method of interpreting text may not actually be the most effective way of communicating information due to the individual interpretations (have you ever tried to build anything from IKEA?), although this may be an intrinsic quality of languages as a whole and not exclusive to image interpretation.