View allAll Photos Tagged semiotic
RIP Umberto Eco.
Reconnu pour ses nombreux essais universitaires sur la sémiotique, l’esthétique médiévale, la communication de masse, la linguistique et la philosophie. Il est surtout connu du grand public pour ses œuvres romanesques. Comme beaucoup de gens, j'ai découvert Eco avec le livre Le Nom de la rose (Il nome della rosa) au milieu des années 80.
Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist, essayist, literary critic, philosopher, and semiotician. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 historical mystery novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He later wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before).
The industrial vernacular, with its rusting railway signals and chain-link fences, speaks to a particular kind of American West that has migrated south to these Australian suburbs. The horizontal lines - the barrier, the tracks, the storefronts - are interrupted only by the vertical thrust of the signal pole, its crossing arms extended like a strange mechanical crucifix against the turbulent sky.
What draws the eye is the peculiar poetry in this thoroughly commercial landscape. The hand car wash sign, stark in its simplicity ($20), faces off against the more elaborate "WILD CARWASH" - two approaches to the same mundane service, separated by railroad tracks that bisect the community. The clouds above lend drama to what might otherwise be dismissed as mere urban sprawl.
There's an honesty in the weathering of the signal pole, its original paint giving way to rust, marking time like the businesses that come and go behind it. The security camera mounted high on its pole watches impassively, a modern addition to this scene of constant transition. Even the "No Bicycles" sign contributes to the narrative of how we navigate these spaces we've built - always with restrictions, always with rules.
The photograph attempts to capture a moment of stillness in a place defined by movement: passing trains, cars being washed, people moving between the shops whose colourful facades attempt to enliven the utilitarian architecture. It's a landscape that resists romanticisation, yet in its very ordinariness reveals something essential about how we live now, about the infrastructure we depend on and the small businesses that persist at its edges.
This is not the sublime landscape of the American West, but rather its everyday descendant - functional, commercial, and unexpectedly poignant in its embodiment of contemporary life at the margins of the urban experience.
Westside Bitches!
One of several projects, that explore photography as evidence amongst other ideas.
Blog | Tumblr | Website | pixelfed.au | Instagram | Photography links | my Ko-fi shop | Off Ya Trolley! | s2z digital garden | vero | Dpreview albums | my work archived on trove at the National Library of Australia.
“The Act of Creation” is a collaborative neon sign artwork, created by Joe Banks and Zata Banks. Genesis 1:3 states “Let there be Light”, and John 1:1 states “in the beginning was the Word”, while the philosopher C.W. Morris defined semiotics as “the science of signs”. In terms of visual semiotics, “The Act of Creation” is an artwork which articulates a message that’s implicit in all neon signs - namely the association between illumination and language; and, in articulating the phrase “Let There Be Language”, “The Act of Creation” is unique among neon sign artworks in the depth of integration between medium and message, since it’s light itself that (literally and metaphorically) illuminates the nature of the play on words. “The Act of Creation” is the winner of the Cambridge Assessment Award for an artwork on the theme of language and light, and was commissioned by Art Language Location for exhibition at the Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge, October 2016.
__________________________________________________
Outlining a Theory of General Creativity . .
. . on a 'Pataphysical projectory
Entropy ≥ Memory ● Creativity ²
__________________________________________________
Study of the day:
. . / . .
__________________________________________________
rectO-persO | E ≥ m.C² | co~errAnce | TiLt
Illustration of the typical underlying structure of Geometrolian gods and goddesses.
watercolor, ink, pencil, on paper
9in.x6in
2023
People have called me cold-hearted because I have said the word love - in the sense of 'I love you' - is meaningless. But when I say that, I am speaking from the mind, not from the heart; I am speaking of language, not feelings. If someone says 'I love you' to me, I do not know what they mean. To say to someone "I care very much for you", "I miss you so much that I cry when you are not here", "you make me a better person", "I have never been happier than when I am in your arms" "I would do anything for you", "I want to be with you forever": we all know what these mean, because they refer to things and feelings that we all understand. But 'love', a word loaded with cultural baggage accumulated over millennia, has almost as many different meanings as there are people, and a word with a billion different meanings has, in my opinion, no meaning at all.
When I was younger I used the word and the phrase as freely as hormonally imbalanced teenagers will. I was dimly aware, even then, of its futility. I would hear people say, either in the dramas of the school common room or on American TV series, "I love him, but I'm not in love with him" or "I'm in love with him, but he's not my soulmate" or "he's my soulmate, but it's not true love": they would shift the semiotic goalposts to justify what they had said before, rather than admit that what they had said before was either misguided, untrue or meaningless. The end of my first serious relationship - which lasted almost five years, from the ages of fifteen to twenty - made me wary of not only my own emotions, which I felt I had failed to understand, but of the language I had used to express them.
I did not have any motivation to formalise these thoughts until I was twenty one, when my partner at the time asked me why I would not say 'I love you'. I explained my reasoning, but he was not appeased and, eventually, I caved to pressure from him and from the vague outside - convention - and said it. I did not consider it a lie because to me it was meaningless. It was not meaningless to him, though, and that is why it was wrong of me to say it: I was using a word that had meaning in his language, but not in mine. The memory of this fact is a constant reminder to me of the importance of language.
By the time I was twenty one, I was aware of the ways language can be used to manipulate people, and aware too that I was very good at them; that I could often make people think, feel or do what I wanted them to by saying certain things in a certain way. I had to, and still have to, be continually vigilant not to abuse this. In doing so, there are three things I bear in mind:
• Dr Seuss's Horton - "I meant what I said and I said what I meant..."
• Something I once read which went along these lines: "The main purpose of language is not to make one understood, but to make it impossible for one to be misunderstood."
• Orwell's Politics and the English Language, which I re-read regularly.
Have most people thought about what they mean when they say 'I love you'? Are most people understood when they say it? It is hyperreal (hyperreality: "a hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality"): for example, one person says 'I love you' because it is what Othello says of Desdemona; another because it is what Von Aschenbach says of Tadizio; another because it is what Ally says to Billy: all very different kinds of 'love'. I once read an article about Romantic Comedy Syndrome: a study at Edinburgh University "found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner. Many held the view if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them."
Until this year, I had never said "I love you" in a romantic sense without feeling immense pressure to do so. Then one night, in the passion and intensity of a moment so magical I wanted to live in it forever, I started, involuntarily and spontaneously, to say it: I said 'Oh ____, I love—" before I caught myself, and continued "—this." That I didn't finish it is unimportant: that I began to say it, instinctively and unconsciously, made me feel liberated in some way; that, for a moment, I escaped from the confines of my own mind and connected with the energy of someone else. It's not like me to say something so new-agey, but I'm not speaking scientifically.
The next day I tried to discover what I had meant, and whether I could begin to understand the meaning of the word love. I experienced a depth and intensity of emotion and attachment that I had never felt before, and I wanted to express it in words. To say 'I am experiencing a depth of emotion and attachment I've never known before' would have been almost comical in its frigidity - like something Lilith would say in Frasier - and so 'I love you' is what my mind gave me. Perhaps, through this, I have reached my own understanding, my own definition, of love: the pinnacle of affection and shared pleasure. I would guess this is actually the understanding that most people have of love, but what they will not accept is the possibility of its temporariness, because culture and media tell us that love is forever. If love is the pinnacle of our affection then it is subject to change as we mature, as we reach new heights of feeling and experience. This explains the moving of the goalposts that I mentioned earlier (love but not in love…), and I think that when done retrospectively it is an unnecessary attempt to devalue the emotions of the past in order to make the emotions of the present seem more significant, more visceral, more real.
What have I learned from this? A slightly clearer understanding of what love means to me which might make me more comfortable using the word in the future. Most importantly, though, I have felt the limits of language: something as deep and as beautiful as the shared affection, understanding and connection between two human beings cannot be expressed in a single word, or ten thousand words. We must express love not only with language, but in the way we treat each other and the way we live our lives.
Photograph: Glasgow, 2011.
Words: Glasgow, 2012.
Expansion and Contraction (Expansion)
This is the first part of a diptych. The second part can be seen here:
www.flickr.com/photos/craigwalkowicz/51985379849/in/datep...
watercolor, ink, pencil, on paper
9in.x6in
2022
Netherlands, Rotterdam, Kop van Zuid, Wilhelminapier, Cruise terminal, Santa Teresa container vessel, Draught line (uncut).
On top we see parts of two giant letters that are part of the name of the shipping company "Hamburg Süd"
In the middle we see the D - L sign first. This sign (the “D” is for draught “L”is for line) indicates the position of the waterline while the ship is fully loaded. On the right is the density sign, to correct the D – L level for the different types of water. The signs are language specific, the D is a G here.
Fresh water (the “F” on the scale) exerts less upwards pressure, so in fresh water the ship rides deeper in the water. In the winter due to the lower temperatures this effect is reversed (the “W” on the scale).
On the left is the moulded depth scale, showing the vertical distance from the keel.
These signs give a reliable and easy indication if a ship is overloaded, for reference of the crew and the harbour authorities.
This is the thematic sequel of: Meet Jens Maersk
__________________________________
Outlining a Theory of General Creativity . .
. . on a 'Pataphysical projectory
Entropy ≥ Memory ● Creativity ²
__________________________________
Study of the day:
In earlier times, Watch it ! The little bird is coming out ! was a common sentence used by my grandfather to signal us to stay still during the exposure ! I was waiting for a long time without to see any bird coming out, of course. Now I believe I know why !
THE ALLEGORY OF CAMERA & OBSCURA
Once upon a time there was two small dark boxes, illuminated with certainties. Two small empty heads, full of hope, and whose sensitive soul was waiting until the external light penetrates them to dazzle them with an image of the "True Reality”. At the proper time, they finally opened.
Camera in pursuit of the Absolute, wanted all to see without any reflection. All, absolutely All ! Then, at the proper time, she decided to be totally overcome by the "True Entropic Reality", all her sensitivity offered to intensely feel everything, without any prejudice, without thinking one second with all these words which darkens the mind more than they enlighten it. She installed a hypersensitive film which she will push in spite of its coarse grain. She tuned her diaphragm to the maximum aperture, a long time, and gave up herself to ecstatically feel the whole true light of the whole True Entropic Reality.
Obscura in quest of the Universal Knowledge, wanted all to know precisely, he wanted all to understand and memorize with a maximum of details and discernment. Then at the proper time, he decided to focuse a depth of field as deep as possible, to choose a pause time as short as possible, to be sure to get the highest neatness of the True Real Universal Memory. He installed a hyperfine grain film which he will develop energetically to compensate its low sensitivity. He tuned the aperture at less than anything, and adjusted the pause time at an infinitesimal fraction of nothing.
The moral of the story ? All the photographers will say it to you !
Camera obtained the most luminous image which is at ounce the fuzziest one, an immaculate uniform Absolute Entropic white 100%blank.
Obscura obtained the finest image which is at ounce the darkest one, an immaculate uniform Universal black 100%blank.
From now on, they choose exposures suitable to create less blind images.
Camera finally formed in her several suspicions of True Reality. They are images as poor of Absolute Sensitivity as weak of Universal Knowledge, but they are marvellous and magic images, illuminated by unexpected shapes and colors, whistled by the calls of colored shadows. In the neighbourhood of the Absolute Entropy, each cell of Camera opens like a white sapphire prism dispersing and breaking up the Entropic light in colored iridescences. Now, from her cells juxtaposition are emerging lines and shapes, metamorphosing the dazzling Entropic light in simple but unknowable .. transcendent shadows, only lacking some .. illusive bird calls to give them a name.
Obscura finally formed in him several suspicions of True Reality. They are images as poor of Universal Knowledge as weak of Absolute Sensitivity, but they are marvellous and magic images, rich of ambiguous signs and senses. In the neighbourhood of the Universal Memory, each cell of Obscura opens like a black sapphire crystal dispersing and breaking up the universal darkness in colored enlightening sparks. Now, from his cells juxtapositions are emerging vowels, consonants and others signs, metamorphosing the gloomy universal darkness in simple but unknowable .. transcendent bird calls, only lacking some .. illusive shadows to give them a sense.
Listen ! The little birds are shading off !
_________________________________
rectO-persO | E ≥ m.C² | co~errAnce | TiLt
it's not a desert (if your looking at the thumbnail and wondering), it's actually a beach in ireland.
Holland Blumen Mark (a popular flower shop chain in Austria) became effectively insolvent in 2014. Most still existing locations at the time ceased to operate under that name over the following years. Seen this very old building facade ad in late 2019. Never been much of a flower shop person, but that sight triggers some images from my childhood in the 90s and early 2000s. Weird how things in life change ever so slightly and sometimes you lose track. Until suddenly you're confronted with some semiotics from the past and go "Oh yeah, that used to be a thing, where did it go, actually?".
Fujica ST 605
Kodak Color Plus 200
October 2019
____________________________________________________________________________________
|| Xi Ξξ || Symbole - Das Dreieck || Code Δδ || Αα - Ωω || Wikipedia: Semantic Triangle || SPACE ||
___________________________________________________________________________
The relations between the triangular corners may be phrased more precisely in causal
terms as follows:
1.The matter evokes the writer's thought.
2.The writer refers the matter to the symbol.
3.The symbol evokes the reader's thought.
4.The reader refers the symbol back to the matter.