Context of Practice: Lecture 10 - Communication Theory

• how precarious communication is

• being the study of sign systems
• linguists 
• reducing language to sign systems - imaged based signs
• use these studies and theories to create visual communication
• signifier - the signifier that signifies something - stands in place for something else
• the signified is the mental translation of the thing itself - what you conjure up yourself
• the reference is the thing or concept itself
• separate the sign from the meaning - its not inherent within
• separated the act of speech from the language - doesn't belong to us but the whole of society
• it's a language about language
• works with systems - context of it

• green - healthy, go, grass
• blue - sky, cold, water

• salt and vinger
• cheese and onion

• depends on the system
• an agreement 

• not what it is but what it is not

• not everything works on an absolute and realistic level
• cautious what we might think something will denote

• Myth is third order - no logical connection - been naturalised over time

• wine and milk 
• wine - seen has french and intelligence
• no connection with it making you intelligent
• milk- freedom, liberty, strength
• association - but no proof of it 
• agreed conclusion - has an effect on the character

• syntagm 
• 'text' - book, film, images, sentences
• syntagmatic relations 
• formal qualities of  it - formal tone
• paradigm 
• age and gender - boy, girl, man 
• changing the word in the sentence would change what has happened

 

• left ad - the composition of it - in the first 1/3 of the image - information and product in bottom right corner
• ACTOR- swarve, clean, good looking, classic
• change it with the cowboy and it changes what it means
• becomes a aftershave for rugid masculine men
• if the cowboy was changed to a women - would completely change the adverts meaning

• Metaphor
•  one sign is replaced by another which has similar concepts or characteristics
• Metonym
• a small part of the whole is used to describe
• refer to car as wheels
• chain of related signifiers

• Whitehouse could be seen as place of power

• the act of persuasion  

• Journalists use specific pictures to portray what they want to say
• not as simple to say that war is bad

• a story about all stories

• the movie is about making a movie

• art work thats talks about art

 

• how they come to represent
• what the system actually represent in the images itself

• explores the relations of music and images

• modernism - what they said you thought was true in order to make sense of the world
• post stucturalism - say modernism is wrong

• the assumed rules
• focuses on the interpretive  

• assuming the presence of the meaning
• described as logocentrism
• how are culture and society and languages have always privileged presence over absence

• Jacques Derrrida post-structuralised through and through
• not only differ but defer 
• deference is a lot more dangerous - when you find a word in a dictionary and don't understand those words - have to look up those words and so on
• start to pull away from the original meaning

• identify the gaps - the things thats are left behind
• binary oppositions
• most of the time our languages privileged in opposition eg. male/female, gay/straight

• every text that is out there is subject to everything that has come before it in its area

• only exists because of the things it references

• spaced - channel 4
• same thing

•  hyper reality in representations
• no longer represents anything real just themselves
• the representation comes before the thing itself
• experience of reality is through images 

 

• disneyland - meant to represent best things of countries in one place
• becomes distorted 

• not about how they are useful
• but about the brand itself
• 'i have an apple mac'