Ekphrasis has been a concept that has been at the core of theoretical controversies during centuries. This might seem expected, since it had a dichotomous nature already from the start, in ancient Roman rhetorics. Indeed, its definition as “a speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes” (Webb 2009) points to the existence of two different fields that are brought together: the speech and a subject described through that speech. Scholars throughout the centuries have insisted on the complex relation between the two different fields, but even the theoretical discourse has been repleted with by different dichotomies. Thus, for instance, from the beginning, the dichotomy absentia-presentia was all important, since the object described was not supposed to be physically present for the listener. Later on, when ekphrasis became rather a literary figure, the dichotomy words-images became central, when Leo Spitzer (1955) defined it as “the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art”. Subsequent scholars used other dichotomies, such as “notional” vs. “actual” ekphrasis according to John Hollander (1995), real vs. fictitious text according to Claus Clüver (1998), “media representation” vs. “transmediation” as in intermediality theory (Lars Elleström 2014), human subject or nonhuman object (Bill Brown 2016), or even subject vs. object or mind vs. matter in general, as in new materialist approaches. This lecture will problematize some of these dichotomies, as well as some classifications, on the basis of an empirical experiment, being thus itself at the junction of a dichotomy: theory vs. empiricism. The aim is however not to resolve the existing dichotomies enumerated above, but rather to show how the friction between opposites can form such an innovative and time-enduring device as ekphrasis has proven to be.