Visual Culture – Signs, Symbols and Semiotics Lecture

Semiotics

Semiotics or Realism?

Face Perception - Identity, Sex, Race, Age, Emotional State detect with relative ease from a face

Photos and Film are examples of being Indexical - Signifier

Signified = Reality

Mimises = Imitation 

Context and research can change the reading and meaning of an image

Highlights difference between what we see in pictures and the actual reality 

Semiotics was a paradigm shit into the way we think and th "premise" of thought itself

One method of interrupting the world and accounting fr the production of meaning by treating everything as a collection of signs to be read

Saussure  

Charles Sanders Pierce

"Visual Literacy"

Sign = Signifier
           Signified


Dog = Signifier

Image of Dog = Signified

Icons, Symbols and Index

Symbols are culturally learned

Labels are arbitrary and only correspond to objects because we are culturally conducted to recognize configuration f letters with an object in our language

If we decipher the clues What is the intended commentary?

Letters/fonts and type have a language

Letters have visual vocabulary 

Colours are signs

Denotation

Connotation 

Meaning changes depending on context

Metaphor

Visual metaphor uses mages instead of words to make comparison 

Slippage

Different genres to to emphasis different combinations of codes, colours, flags, other conventions 

Post Structuralism

Meanings are not fixed but have multiple meanings are subject to change

Banksey

Douglass Greenlee

Umberto Echo

Christian Metz 

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