Semiotics

Last lesson we went through Semiotics.

Also, just before I start, I spoke to Ivan briefly about the blog and it turns out I've been doing it a little wrong. I shouldn't really explain what happened (even if it is showing my understanding of it), but instead just explain what I learnt and what it reminded me of.

Semiotics is how we interpret things. For exmaple, the first circle(1a) with two circles inside and a line is interprited as a simple face. The second image(1b) is portrayed as Hitler due to the mustache drawn on. Finally, once the hat was added to 1c, it no longer looked like Hitler, but instead Charlie Chaplin.

Distinct features were shown in each to establish what the drawing was of. 1a has a signifier of two circles and a line within a circle which signifies a face to us, due to it's format.

I liked also going into iconic and arbitary.

We'd have a scale

Iconic |----------------------------------------------------------------| Arbitary
The more iconic it is, the bettter it signifies what it is.
The the order of most Iconic to Arbitary.
Video, Photo, 3D Designed, Drawing, Word.

Ferdinand de Saussure - one of the 'founding fathers' of semiotics.
Charles Sanders Peirce - 1860's began writing about semiotics.
Roland Barthes - Use the technique of semotics in his work.

Then we did denotation and connotation, something of which I've come across many times but never really got what it meant. In a way, quite similar to signifer and signified, denotation and connotation are defined by what it is and what it suggests.

A good example of this would be with colours. The denotation is the colour and connotation is what the colour represents. Red could represent love and death and green could represent safety and health.

The same can be said with emotions.




Finally we looked at Syntagm and Paradign.

This lead us onto Clockwork Orange how the main character would wear all these items of clothes which represent different things and almost mash it together, giving off a very strange - yet appealing look. Also he whore white in the movie, this was quite strange as most people don't wear white, since it can get dirty easily. However he decided to wear white, which could be so that all the blood stains etc act as trophies for things that he's done. This would also scare people and keep them away from him.