This week we had two readings:
1. Victor Burgin, ‘Looking at Photographs’ (Ch.6) in Thinking Photography, 1982. [Download from Blackboard]
2. G.Branston & R.Stafford, ‘Approaching Media Texts’ (Ch.1) in The Media Student’s Book. London: Routledge, 2010.
1. Burgin states in his reading that photographs have no specific time or place allotted to them, that they are often a part of the environment we live in and are often taken for granted. This is in comparison with paintings, which are still visuals like photographs, and films, which are taken with a camera, like photographs. This statement made me think about the rising trend of craft-makers and home-makers who are bringing back the practice of scrapbooking, album keeping and photograph display in the home (e.g. A Beautiful Mess). Scrapbooking creates a place for photographs to be kept and shown off, something that takes time to create and has a lot of art elements involved. I myself found this problem when I was taking pictures; they were all kept on my harddrive or in albums on facebook, but i felt like these were inadequate ways of appreciating them. I started scrapbooking and the combination of have them all stored neatly in beautiful books and being able to show them off is a great feeling.
But what has this got to do with semiotics? Well, these scrapbooks that I have created have made new meanings for the photographs. The photographs denote the actual event portrayed in each photograph (such as a picture of my friends camping denotes that event), but in a scrapbook filled with other pictures of my friends and I doing different things (such as going to the beach, or seeing a concert), the scrapbook and the combination of the photographs becomes a representation of our friendship, which can evoke whole new feelings when people flip through the pages.
This idea is very exciting for me and hopefully a jumping point I can use in project brief 4.
2. This reading provided a summary of how different theories approach media texts.
- Texts (narratives) are weaved with internal strands (within the text), external strands (as the text relates to the real world) and intertextual strands (texts relating to other texts). Note: this is very similar to the idea I was getting to about scrapbooking earlier.
- What is truth and to whom? Steering away from academic/elitist critique of culture
- Semiotics: asking how are a meanings constructed in a text
- Sign, signifier, signified: Rose, the word rose or a picture of a rose, love
- Indexical signs – casual link between the sign and what it stands for, e.g. smoke is the indexical sign for fire. something that indicates something else
- Structuralism – social order is determined by social or psychological structures which work independent of human will. Freud and Marx. Dreams and slips of the tongue. Note: This was one of the things that we discussed in our group meeting, where we drew a link between the structuralist theories and my own project 2 dream sequence. Thinking of exploring dreams and subconscious further
- Meaning can be understood within systematic structures and how these create differences or distinctions, emphasis on oppositions: this influenced semiotics
- Signs DENOTE (or signify, name) different aspects of our world. Signs CONNOTE (or link) things together.
- Limitation: semiotics does not cater for ‘misreadings’ of the audience, is often only used by academics
Notes on the lecture
A list of key semiotics terms:
- sign, signifier, signified
- denotation – literal meaning
- connotation – cultural meaning
- codes
- formal codes: technical, composition, genre
- social/ideological: gender, sexuality, race, class, age
- myth/ideology
- indexicality
the affordances of sound and moving image
every media form has unique capabilities and how they are used/how they are perceived
SOUND: pervasive, multi-directional, complexly layered – many sounds can be experienced all at once, ears can prioritize sounds, sound is immersive and intimate.
aural semiotics
- perspective: prioritizing
- figure: focus
- ground: setting/context
- field: background/ambience
- social distance
- relations of intimacy, formal, informal
- related to speech and language
The sound section of the lecture was interesting because it spurred a discussion in my group of how we could use a soundscape in our project. Amy liked the intimacy of sound when listened through headphones, and we tried to think of ways to incorporate that into our presentation: the different ways of experiencing sound.
