tailieunhanh - Art and the Semiotics of Images: Three Questions About Visual Meaning

In the last five years, the Internet has vastly enhanced our ability to display images to each other, and we can now think of ourselves not just as viewers and consumers of images but as makers and users of them ourselves. Indeed, if on the Internet we do not use images, we appear stuck in print culture and oblivious to the possibilities of the new medium. We can of course avoid giving these impressions by including some wallpaper and a few bits of eye candy, without thereby getting very far at all into graphics as a mode of conveying meaning | Art and the Semiotics of Images Three Questions About Visual Meaning In the last five years the Internet has vastly enhanced our ability to display images to each other and we can now think of ourselves not just as viewers and consumers of images but as makers and users of them ourselves. Indeed if on the Internet we do not use images we appear stuck in print culture and oblivious to the possibilities of the new medium. We can of course avoid giving these impressions by including some wallpaper and a few bits of eye candy without thereby getting very far at all into graphics as a mode of conveying meaning. Schools and colleges certainly offer very little guidance outside of the area of technical communication. At present we have more questions than answers among which three seem quite fundamental 1. how language-like are images 2. how do images and words work when they are both present 3. how do scenes of people gazing and posing convey visual meaning I will expand briefly on each of these questions and then take them in order. Some say that images work via a second communicative system one fully as expressive as natural language but separate and structured independently of it. Others find visual and verbal meanings more dissimilar than similar with the visual lacking a kind of determinacy for which verbal language seems better suited. This question of the nature and indeterminacy of visual meaning will be the first point we will take up. The second question is obviously related namely how do the two signalling systems work when they are placed together In principle visual meanings may be entirely separate from verbal ones but as a practical matter we rarely find pure images with no text attaching to them. Some 35 years ago Roland Barthes wrote of our very common practices of surrounding images with words which help to specify and stabilize the interpretations of particular images all images are polysemous they imply underlying their signifiers a floating chain of