Visual literacy quiz 10

Form and content

modes of analysis may tend to focus on one more than the other

Manifest content

what is shower; objects recognized by most; obvious or literal level: denotation

Latent content

attached secondary meanings: connotation

Mythologies

Roland Barthes’ decoding essays

Denotational

what is shown

connotational

how it is shown/what it means

content analysis

Quantitative analysis of data— count numbers of certain imagines, not indicative of qualitative value, but precision and variability

Panofsky’s 3 levels of content

Primary or natural

1) Factual- what it is

2) expressional— how it is rendered

secondary or conventional— what story is being shown; “stock characters”

Intrinsic meaning or content—” underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religion or philosophy

Genre

Species, kind or sort; a classification or grouping of visual artifacts that share certain iconography elements, themes and stylistic conventions

Painting

Landscape, history, nude, painting, still life

film

documentary, western, melodrama, film noir, horror, teen

TV

sit com, talk show, news, often seen as gendered— rom coms— ladies or action— guy thing

Architecture

airport, hospital, bungalow

Design

Car, chair, telephone

form

color, shape, value, lighting, what things look like; formalist critics or historians

Style

Handing, manner of express— how something is said rather that what is said

style can be controversial variously seen as

set of formal characteristics

specific combination of content and form

spiritual form

Semiotic analysis

semiotics— study of signs within society; fashionable beginning in 1960s

sign

something that stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity

referent

what it stands for can be real or imaginary

Ferdinand de Saussure

signifier- material dimension of sign

signified- conceptual dimension

Value of a sign comes from what is not

Signification

is the process which binds together signifier and signified to produce the sign

a sign is understood as a relation which has no meaning outside the system of signification

Syntagm

collection of signs in linear sequence

paradigm

a set where each unit has something in common and is obviously different from the other units

analog

paradigm with no easily fixed number of unites

digital

Paradigm fixed number of units

objects

external reality

representanmen

material dimension of sign

interpretant

not fixed; user of sign, user cultural experience of sign

index

record of; a direct, causal connection(footprint)

Icon

resembles referent in some way(realist art; photo)

symbol

arbitrary,depends on convention; agreement on how we should respond to a sign

Motivation

how much the signifeir describes the signified: highly motivated—very iconic least motivated-very symbolic

Semiosis

act of signifying; not one-way, similar to apperception

unlimited semiosis

representamen gives interpretant, which “becomes” a representamen and triggers new interpretant; a chain of associations w/o limits

Myth

when connotations for a subgroup are made to look “universal” and ideology is made to look natural or denotational

Barthes

Concepts for reading text, images and their combinations

Linguistic message

text as caption

coded iconic message

connotation( latent) level

non-coded iconic message

image only

anchorage

text controls reading of image

relay

text supplies meaning not in images

hyperreal

reality is fabricated by technology

Jean Baudrillard

1) it is reflection of a basic reality

2) it masks and perverts a basic reality

3) it marks the absence of a basic reality

4) it bears no relation to any reality whatever— it is its own pure simulacrum

Simulacra

postmodern blurs real/copy distinction