The odd and beautiful image by Bresson, of a coat enveloping the dislodged head of an elderly man huddling across a rainy Parisian street, is my Mona Lisa. What would I see if I didn’t know it was Alberto Giacometti in the photo?

Across the deep ravines and narrow valleys that define the landscape of the tiny volcanic island of La Gomera, the locals once communicated through a sophisticated whistled language called El Silbo (“the whistle”). The whistles, which traveled kilometers, broke through the rugged topography by riding the air currents over the gullies. It seems fitting that in a landscape dominated by extremes, the whistle returns language to the wild, joining in the chorus of the rare birds that inhabit the island.

Josh Raskin’s “I Met the Walrus” is perhaps as close as you can get to a cross-modal homophony: each word is “pronounced” visually in strict unison with the audio recording. This tight literal visualization creates an experience of mutual amplification, as each visual and its corresponding auditory snippet seem to bounce off of each other like two metal balls in a two-ball Newton Cradle. But why do I experience them as constantly colliding and rebounding rather than flowing together? Perhaps because each image, while seemingly predictable, is totally surprising. The whimsical, trippy, Monty-Pythonesque, “Yellow Submarine”-like, animation style illustrates the obvious yet always intriguing fact that while seeing may depend upon language, language can never determine the look of things.