#semiotic plasticity

[bsahely]

Reweaving Coherence: Functional Plasticity and Teleodynamic Intelligence in Neurobiosemiotic Systems | ChatGPT4o

[Download Full Document (PDF)] Reweaving Coherence presents a paradigm-shifting synthesis of biological, cognitive, and systemic theory, grounded in the observation that neurobiosemiotic layers (e.g., mitochondria, emotion, interoception) realign across the Kosmic Life-Function matrix in a non-linear, context-sensitive manner. This reconfiguration, far from being anomalous, points to a deeper…

[pacingmusings]

Seen in 2024:

Plastic Semiotic (Radu Jude), 2021

[raffaellopalandri]

The Architectonics of Being: Where Language Constructs Reality, and Reality Reshapes Consciousness

I will go deeper with today’s quote, as it serves as a practical invitation to embrace our journey into the intricate labyrinth of existence. Photo by Max Ravier on Pexels.com This liminal space, a nexus where the objective and subjective coalesce, is not a static locale but a dynamic field of potentiality, a chora (χώρα) in Platonic terms, where form and matter intertwine. It is within this…

[ani-antiquities]

The Melancholic Woman: Eva Hesse, Ennead (1965), and Trauma, De-strung

(source: ICA Boston)

I will open this essay with a line from art historian, Anne M. Wagner’s essay, Another Hesse, on her journal October, vol. 69 – wherein she writes of our subject, American sculptor Eva Hesse:

Hesse’s self-scrutiny, we learn once again, is a means of coping with “environment” – with the inheritance of the past. But it is also the measure – even the proud badge – of her “difference”, the difference, we remember, of being an artist. (p. 131)

Anne M. Wagner’s essay on Eva Hesse will be one of the main sources of this paper.

Here, we will be able to trace Eva Hesse’s art and its asymbolia to the artist’s melancholia and her journey of sublimation and working through. We will also thereby arrive at more questions to ponder Hesse’s life, and inquire about the connections among art, melancholia, and the semiotic – and possibly ponder a perspective that ties the end-goal of these Kristevan concepts together.

(Before I go on, I just wanna say that this essay may draw on similarities EVA HESSE: POST-MINIMALISM INTO SUBLIME, by Robert Pincus-Witten. I wrote this specific essay more than a year ago for my Cultural, Literary, and Critical Theory class, and I only found this essay just today, as I am writing and doing more research for this piece. LOL. However, I would like to justify that the content of my essay is to draw connections between Hesse’s art and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory. I did enjoy Witten’s essay, though!)

(Source: pbs.org)

Eva Hesse

At the height of Nazi Germany, Hesse’s family fled to America for protection from religious persecution, but it was not long until sanctuary proved to be fickle as well, in the land of the free. Due to trauma implicated by the Second World War that vehemently caused the deaths of Hesse’s extended family, the serious circumstances of (Eva Hesse’s mother) Ruth Marcus House’s bipolar disorder worsened. These events dominoed to Wilhelm Hesse’s divorce from Ruth Marcus, and Ruth’s suicide. Adding salt to the wound, Wilhelm would marry a woman named Eva. Upon the new marriage, the young girl and her step-mother would share the same name.

Identity crisis aggravated young Eva’s trauma – from the persecution of family whose faces she had never known, to losing her to suicidal mother at ten. It seemed like grief was her very being.

Graduating from Yale, she exhibited works whose style displayed that of Abstract Expressionism and paved the way for Minimalism.

Art historians speculate how these traumas were sublimated into her art. Her self-portraits showcase distorted images of faces and figures. They are almost like a child’s attempt at creating a figure painting, except that their tone is so somber that only an adult can express such a feeling.

(Untitled, 1965, oil on canvas: From: mutualart.com)

However, the most intriguing work of Hesse does not come from two-dimensions – but three. This includes Hesse’s sculpture, Ennead (1965).

(Ennead, 1965, oil on canvas. From: icaboston.org)

Eva Hesse’s Ennead (1965)

All that there is to the piece: acrylic, paper mache, some resin-coated strings, plywood, some plastic, and a title possibly referencing the Egyptian pantheon.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, describes the artwork as such:

The orderly, formulaic application of the threads devolves into an increasingly chaotic composition as they accumulate and tangle toward the floor. A few strands are affixed to the adjacent wall, cordoning off a wedge of space that becomes part of the sculpture itself. This gesture also draws the viewer’s attention to the corner of the gallery, activating this normally overlooked area. Additional material hangs to touch the floor, thus uniting three planes. “Ennead” means a group of nine, in this case referring to the nine points from which the strings extend.

How can we interpret art whose surface presence is devoid of any points from its meaning? Baroque art can be so interpreted by its gargantuan number of details that fit on a four-cornered canvas. Poetry can be dissected among its metaphors, language, and enjambments. How can we possibly describe a sculpture so bare of material and overly abstract in its form? Was it meant to be this way – stripped down and bare?

Asymbolia and Melancholia

Many of Hesse’s works portray a distinct use of asymbolia, and the stimulation of asymbolia to its audience.

It is impossible to speak of Ennead without speaking about Hesse – primarily because Hesse and her art are one. Hesse even says: “My life and art have not been separated. They have been together.”

Ennead is no exception – however, with absolutely little to no “initial and final'' interpretation of meaning when you see the sculpture. What can we then say about Eva Hesse through the piece? Even art historians themselves, up to this day, consider Ennead to be an enigma on its own – its minimalism minimizes itself, to the point of devoiding any meaning, making us doubt if there is any at all.

First, we must discuss the asymbolia in Ennead – the art itself. Though by instinct and intuition, the substance of Ennead is uninhabited on its own, I would like to shed a few pointers on the piece and its asymbolia through its deliberate absurdity.

The strings were meant to be orderly at first, until its tail-end, wherein Hesse describes them as a jungle. Hesse even took in the effort to dye the strings to possibly add more aesthetic depth to them. Hesse describes the process of this piece in one of her journals.

The further it went toward the ground, the more chaotic it got; the further you got from the structure, the more it varied. I've always opposed content to form or just form to form. (Quoted in L. R. Lippard, op. cit., p. 62)

However, even when Hesse describes her decision to irrationalize the hinds of the strings, the art still talks gravel to the path towards the most inane question: What does it mean?

So, we shall secondly address the audience’s confusion, that stems from the asymbolia of the audience themselves – the very inability to attach any familiarity or meaning to the symbols the art presents, because of the very fact that it lacks anything.

The only thing that makes sense of Hesse’s art is nonsense – the asymbolia found in Hesse’s art, that stems from dissecting, stripping down, and representing her trauma. Hesse states in one of her interviews: “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something… A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and vision.”

Must her own “something” be from her depression – from the trauma of losing her mother, identity, and other factors throughout?

We take the theory behind this inquiry from Julia Kristeva’s illustration of asymbolia and melancholia in her book, Black Sun – “The negation of that fundamental loss opens up the realm of signs for us, but the mourning is often incomplete. Melancholia then ends up in asymbolia, in loss of meaning…” (p.42).

Hence, to study the bare Ennead is to study Hesse’s bare melancholia.

We may never have the opportunity to bear witness to Hesse’s trauma, as only she and herself can live it, so we turn to her journals,

Throughout her life, Hesse seems to be on good terms with working through with her depression, as she sublimates it with her art – if it means going against the conventions imposed on her by four-cornered dimensions of papers and canvases, and the one-platform norm of past sculptures (Ennead takes up two adjacent walls, and thereby two dimensions).

Asymbolia and the neglect of the pre-conceived semiotic can be seen in her journals – which instead of letters and intelligible words, consist of drawings that penetrate any dividers and lines.

Kristeva furthermore explains this psychoanalytic mechanism as she illustrates the control of the preverbal in aesthetic creation: “When the struggle between imaginary creation (art, literature) and depression is carried out precisely on that frontier of the symbolic and the biological we see indeed that the narrative or the argument is ruled by primary processes” (p.65) – explaining the subnormality of Hesse’s art and entries, and how the manifestations of obscurity stem from the mere struggle of Hesse’s melancholia.

(Figure 3: Hesse’s journal. From: sugarcandymtn.com)

Other than these, her excerpts write of her own feelings of depression and anxiety: “I must write, my sanity is involved. I cry and cry, the pages are wet. I have no one, to go to and the edge of hysteria and insanity is not far apart” (October 19, 1964).

Anne M. Wagner writes: “Anyone who wants to make a serious contribution to remembering Hesse will likewise have to speak about a wound. For what is striking about Hesse’s art is its utter inwardness, with artistic languages of the day: her imagery and effects are not learned by rote, only to be parroted back more or less unchanged” (p. 159)

With this: Must her melancholia still be the root of her asymbolic art? Or was this art a testament to her ability to self-scrutinize all along? Furthermore, will there be anything to self-scrutinize when there is no trauma?

Conclusion: The Futile Point of Interpretation

Hesse intended her work to be autobiographical, but never understood – and thus reflecting the paradox of identity: to know, but never understand. Even her journals were not meant for the purpose of understanding: “Hesse’s journals and their users have meant that it is no longer possible for viewers “not to know the artist” – or at least, not to feel they know her, and to prepare themselves accordingly when looking at her art.”

Yet, even when we have read Hesse’s journals, watched documentaries, and studied countless journals from art historians – the impossibility to fully understand still looms over her audience. So then we ask the question: What should we feel to know of Hesse? The illness caused by both personal and socio-economic circumstances of her time? Must her works be cursed with the fallacy of perpetually being tied to her trauma.

On Dostoevsky, Kristeva writes: “Works of art thus lead us to establish relations with ourselves and others that are less destructive, more soothing.” Hesse’s artifacts are therefore not records of her mania, but documentations of her survival from it. Her illness, therefore, is not what should be reflected of her life – but her sisyphean triumph over it.

Maybe it is for the better – as the point of art itself is to sublimate the traumatic aggression of the artist, and (like a monster) to never let it out of the cage of the canvas. Kristeva can even attest to this, saying: “Art seems to point to a few devices that bypass complacency and, without simply turning mourning into mania, secure for the artist the connoisseur a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing” (p. 97)

Hesse did this concealment well, so much so that it is said the artist herself might not have realized this. As Wagner would write: “If Hesse’s life did enter her art, it did so by a process that Hesse herself was in a position to describe. We would be looking for ways (Hesse’s unconscious) repeatedly configured. I think such imagery exists in Hesse’s art, and I take it to concern the artist’s feelings toward her mother above all” (p. 165) So much so, that even daring to question the trauma behind Hesse’s art, we do not only turn a blind eye to the artist herself, but arrive at a futile destination when we do: “Yet, in asking them [questions on Hesse’s art] we risk losing sight of the workings of Hesse’s unconscious – a notion that, after all, was the motivating impulse of this discussion. But the artist and her unconscious are not far away.” (p. 173)

Conclusion

I will close with another one of Wagner’s concluding lines:

“To claim that Hesse’s art aims to remember and express a common human quality or experience is not the same as attributing to it some universal force or purpose. It gives its own account of that experience.” (p. 186)

This aim of art is reminiscent to how beauty sublimates melancholia in the form of art, much like giving its own account of an experience. Kristeva writes:

“Beauty emerges as the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live. Melancholia to the point of becoming interested in the life of signs, beauty may also grab hold of us to bear witness for someone who grandly discovered the royal way through which humanity transcends the grief of being apart.”

(p. 100)

Hesse’s journey as an artist is proof that asymbolia – another result of melancholia – paves the way into sublimation. Art is therefore not rooted in the melancholic, its her way of forging a path deeper underneath it. Art is agency from the trial of inner-disagency. Art is therefore the artist’s most individual and subjective struggle, not of her depression, but one of working through. Precisely through this art, we unlock the beauty sculpted from the marble of melancholia. Hesse and Ennead are just among the myriad of melancholic beauty in the realm of art.

SOURCES

Kristeva Julia. Black Sun : Depression and Melancholia. Columbia University Press 1989. https://archive.org/details/blacksun00juli. Accessed 27 Feb. 2023.

Artincontext. “Eva Hesse - The Brief Life and Incredible Works of Eva Hesse the Artist.” Artincontext.org, 4 Apr. 2022, https://artincontext.org/eva-hesse/.

Branaman, Bianca. “Love - Eva Hesse.” Sugar Candy Mountain, Sugar Candy Mountain, 4 Sept. 2018, https://sugarcandymtn.com/blogs/the-brand/love-eva-hesse.

“Ennead.” EVA HESSE, https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-315751.

“Ennead.” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, https://www.icaboston.org/art/eva-hesse/ennead.

Evemy, Benjamin Blake, et al. “Auctions, Exhibitions & Analysis for +500K Artists.” MutualArt, MutualArt, 17 Feb. 2023, https://www.mutualart.com/.

“The Sickness of Being Disallowed: Premonition and Insight in the 'Artist's Sketchbook'.” O A R, https://www.oarplatform.com/sickness-disallowed-premonition-insight-artists-sketchbook/.

[coredumpproject]

"In the pipe, five by five"

Tried new can covers on the MKVII wearable computer.

Alien was an obvious choice, due to the availability of fan art. I laser printed clear plastic, then masked and spray painted the colors. Laser prints never 'pop' like real paint.

I was very happy with the results, and was able to use the 'semiotic standard' symbols to label the computer, bluetooth, video transmitter, and right/left switches (you can't see the switches for all the computer functions on the bottoms of the cans).

[dustedmagazine]

Blood Monolith — The Calling of Fire (Profound Lore)

Photo by Melissa Petisa

Your reviewer is moderately tempted simply to repeat “this rules” a few hundred times, in place of attempting to describe or understand the music on The Calling of Fire, Blood Monolith’s debut LP. While repeating the clause (foaming at the mouth, clenching fists, roiling in a dank cellar…) would constitute a review of sorts, it’s likely not what folks show up to Dusted to read. Too bad.

To attempt another way in, we might note that Blood Monolith has recorded some very muscular, very aggro Metal ov Death, calling back to numerous primal sources: Morbid Angel at that band’s most demented and raw, c 1991; Siege at their grittiest and most grindingly unpleasant (“Sad but True” is a pretty good representative of the requisite textures); Assück, when Misery Index thickens into a caustic, muddy paste. But none of those venerable references provides an adequate marker for how immediate, vital and extraordinarily pissed off this music sounds, and feels.

So, it misses the point somewhat to suggest something is interesting about Blood Monolith’s music, as opposed to shutting up and feeling it. Songs like “Viscera Vobiscum” and “Trepanation Worm” demand your complete attention, and they pound and scrape and rend that attention all out of shape and proportion. Still, something is interesting: as a counterpoint to the immediacy, much of the record’s attendant semiotics call back to old things, primitive sensibilities. One song is titled “Prayer to Crom,” likely a reference to Robert E Howard’s Hyborian Age stories. The band’s name implies ritual, blood sacrifice, ancient glyphs and sculptural edifices. Even the cover art — by anarcho-punk, pen-and-ink-draftsman extraordinaire Nick Blinko — is a kind of throwback.

Invoking Blinko situates the throwback, in a mid-1980s milieu in which distinctions among metal, punk and grind were not yet doctrinaire or sectarian. What mattered was the music’s antipathies, for authoritarian political power and for the glossily plastic surfaces of Official Culture. In a similar vein. Blood Monolith’s band leader Shelby Lermo has long made music that holds authority and consumerist pablum in profound contempt; in Vastum he explored all manner of libidinal counter-pleasures and disgusts, and his other current band Ulthar embraces H P Lovecraft’s weirding, anti-modern paranoias.

Lermo formed Blood Monolith (with other scene luminaries Tommy Wall of Undeath and Aiden Angelo of Brain Tourniquet and Deliriant Nerve) after a move to Northern Virginia. There, under the shadow of the massive obelisk on the National Mall, the image of blood sacrifice resonates with recent foulness: a gallows outside of the Capitol (“Where’s Mike Pence?”), the stench of fuel burned by jets winging toward CECOT, the American supported atrocity in Gaza. Rarely does the death in death metal feel so grimly present, and so unforgivingly angry. Some things don’t get old, much to our collective shame.

Jonathan Shaw

[lesb0]

I would love being a stylist as a hobby because so many people have SUCH a great body but their clothes never work well with their overall shape and they think their body is awkward/dysphoric when it's just AN OPTICAL ILLUSION caused by clothes that might fit right but they feel bad. or maybe they pick a piece that matches their vibe but doesn't fit their personality. Or they have the right pieces but they can't put them together correctly. Or they don't know how to shop for the right fabrics, so they only own plastic outfits. or they keep wearing stretch when cling is what makes them hate the way they look/feel so they really need hang/drape. It's just so frustrating when people almost know how to "do" their second skin but they just do what they think they're supposed to with no semiotic grammatical system to their style....

[thatrickmcginnis]

TODD HAYNES, Toronto film festival, 1988 & 2007

You'd have to be a special kind of film fan if you knew who Todd Haynes was when he arrived at the 1988 Toronto film festival. He'd studied semiotics at Brown University before moving to New York to make short films, one of which had attracted some attention and a screening in Toronto. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story was a biopic of sorts of the singer whose eating disorder had led to her death in 1983; Haynes' spin was that he told it using Barbie dolls, carving away at the plastic features to illustrate Karen Carpenter's wasting illness. It copied the visual style and tropes of the usual made-for-TV fictional bio except for the fact that it was told using dolls. The film would be an audacious launching pad for Haynes' subsequent career. The young director was at the Toronto festival as a sort of outlaw figure, and that's how I shot him in a stripped down hotel room at the old Four Seasons in Yorkville.

After screening Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story at film festivals and special events, director Todd Haynes lost a lawsuit launched by Carpenter's brother and bandmate Richard, forcing him to withdraw his short film from circulation (though it can still be seen online if you know where to look). But Haynes attracted enough attention that he was able to get funding for his first feature, Poison (1991), which led to a second, Safe (1995) and his first collaboration with actress Julianne Moore. He's gone on to court both controversy and the mainstream with films as different as Velvet Goldmine (1998) and May December (2023), and his pair of reimaginings of the '50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk - Far From Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015). But I wouldn't have known this back in 1988, when I tried to capture some of the controversial director's provocative attitude on half a roll of Tri-X in that half empty hotel room with the TV set in the background.

I'd end up photographing director Todd Haynes again in 2007, in another film festival hotel room, when he arrived in Toronto with I'm Not There, his very unconventional Bob Dylan biopic, which told a version (or several versions) of Dylan's life (he's never been a reliable narrator and Haynes embraced that) by casting six different actors to play Dylan, including Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett as the post-folkie Dylan going electric. It's my favorite Haynes picture so far, though I love his HBO miniseries adaptation of the James M. Cain novel Mildred Pierce from 2011. By this point film festival shoots had gone from up to ten or fifteen minutes to barely a couple of minutes, and I had to work fast in what I can only assume was one of the dimmer hotel rooms at the old Intercontinental on Bloor (now the Yorkville Royal Sonesta).

[kunosoura]

If I was more into occult semiotics I'd read something sinister into the way pop culture's biggest event of the year was a film double header celebrating nuclear energy and plastic

[girltify]

Helter Skelter (2012)

LET ME PRESENT TO U, OUR JAPANESE IT GIRL, LILICO!!!

i would nvr regret the 2 hours i spent to watch this movie, SO WORTH IT. this is gonna be one of the best movie i've seen so far.

Lilico, the top model in Japan, had to faced the fear that her career will crumbling down if she stop being pretty. a nightmare began to haunt her when she found that her body shows some bruises as the side effect of her entire body plastic surgery.

"i hear a ticking sound. something inside of me is going to end very soon."

at 1st, i thought i would hate lilico for her bad attitude and behaviour towards her team. but i blame myself for being so judgmental cause the more u see and know her, u will find how vurnerable she is.

i still cant get over this movie. everything about this, it's just perfect. there's so much i can learn on this movie esp it tells about how media industry represent woman and only associate us with sex, body, and beauty (kinda reminds me of (G)I-DLE - Nxde). the message it's so deep. lilico's fears of being forgotten, replaced, not loved, failure, and also her desire to be free but in the same time she loves to be famous. perfect score, 5/5.

disclaimer: this is not a chick flicks where everything's fine, but a psy-horror. if u ever watch The Love Witch, Perfect Blue, Mask Girl, i think u will love this one. contains some explicit scenes, drugs, plastic surgery and hallucination.

in case after u watch the movie u need some explanation and semiotic analysis about it, u can check this one! u'll be more in love cause i do.

[soupedecroutons]

Plastic Semiotic (Radu Jude, 2021)

[iplaywithlife]

Cognitive Benefits of Traditional Games

Cognitive Benefits of Traditional Games - Cognitive abilities are intellectual abilities that help in thinking, learning, and communicating. They help in analyzing information visually and spatially and are made up of various aspects of thinking and reasoning. There are many cognitive abilities on which traditional games have an effect, and many studies have focused on such effects. In this age of modern gadgets, parents tend to buy gadgets for their children rather than playthings, which are actually healthy for the children. Even if some parents buy playthings for their kids, they are mostly made of plastics that are harmful to health; when kids put them in their mouths, they may be contaminated by plastic. This paper tries to study the effects of traditional games and the benefits of using traditional games for kids.

Traditional games can also benefit children in the cognitive aspect. One of the cognitive abilities improved by traditional games is attention. By constantly playing these games, children learn how to concentrate during storytelling, ask for help from parents, or while completing a task. Another cognitive benefit is lateral thinking. After playing a certain game, a child can interpret a new possibility from what has been said before. Pattern recognition is the next cognitive aspect that is improved by traditional games. By playing traditional games, children can discover patterns as these games arise and can use these patterns to solve problems. Cognitive flexibility is also improved when playing these types of games. The player has to switch to an opposite variety of reduced brainstorming from within the same scenario. Moreover, a stronger brain is also developed, as the number of games played is related to higher levels of thinking ability. Traditional games also promote mindfulness by requiring the player to consciously focus on their behavior in the present while managing stress and frustration.

Problem-Solving Skills

Problem-solving skills are basic in traditional games, especially those that involve manual skills, that is, games with a higher semiotic load. These games propose different levels of demand from a transformation of the semantic context of the activity. There are different levels of a typology of tasks to carry out, and different strategies must be deployed considering different variables. The patterns and decision algorithms that are implemented affect the development of the skills trained in the subjects themselves. This type of game trains children in a series of problem-solving strategies, in redirecting tasks with variable difficulties, with adaptive response processes, generating action–reflection–action schemes, and with different results from the exercises carried out. The implementation of these devices generates a partial vision of reality that the child must complete using cognitive and operational resources, experience, reflection, and decision-making to complete the whole conceptual framework. The work is on model training and on the diversification of operational strategies and systemic thinking. The child shapes a conceptual matrix that establishes relationships between perception, expression, knowledge, reflection, projection, and action.

Critical Thinking

Over the years, developing critical thinking has been identified by many scholars as one of the goals of early educational models. In that sense, traditional games of children around the world can be considered activities that have proven to facilitate this process in a playful atmosphere, where children develop complex patterns of thinking for problem-solving. Critical thinking refers to the discipline of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information generated by observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. Traditional games, the ones that have been transmitted from generation to generation, are characterized by their spatial and mathematical structure, which is the core of the game’s rules. Rules have to be understood and practiced, creating endless moments of conflict.

Despite the fact that games are partially motivated, it is clear that long sessions of games turn into boring activities. After a while, excitement dissolves into dissatisfaction. The children will demand challenges. To be able to win the game, children must understand the rules and mark the essential moves that can lead them to victory. Also, children will imitate their older peers and will create new strategic moves. Misinterpretation of a move by the children or an attempt to establish a new move will trigger an extended conflict. Therefore, children learn how to discuss a problem and how to respect the rules.

Memory Enhancement

Traditional games require players to remember specific rules, game patterns, and instructions in order to decide the next steps or moves. Each player is required to have a good memory capacity in order to maintain the game process. In designing a traditional game, it is important to modify it according to children's cognitive development, making it easy for them to remember. The need for referencing rules from time to time is an indication of an incomplete memory, so children are motivated to improve their memory in order to play better and achieve higher scores. When traditional games that require recalling the detailed process in the game are played frequently, it becomes good memory training. Four traditional games that were applied in playing were utilized in the experiment, which showed that language-based traditional games can help to develop long-term memory as well as improve children's brain functions. In addition, they can improve children's attention, as they serve as a fun and joyful way to build cognitive ability.

[es0teric04b30]

Connections between media theories and the story

As part of the media studies course, we've learnt about different theories and how they help shape media as well as analyze it. For my film, I've chosen three key theories that best relate to my production:

-Stuart hall's encoding/decoding model

-Roland Barthes' semiotics theory

-Todorov's narrative theory

Stuart hall - encoding and decoding model

Hall's theory suggests that the media producers encode messages into their work, but the way audiences decode those messages may vary. He identifies three types:

preferred reading- audiences fully understands the meaning and agrees with intended message.

negotiated reading- audience pertly accepts the meaning but interprets in in their own way.

oppositional reading- audience rejects and misinterprets the intended meaning.

Given that the main meaning behind the film that I wish to convey to the audience, I am hoping that by carefully using macro+micro elements I will be able to help the audience have a preferred reading of my text (as outlined by Stuart hall's theory).

Roland Barthes - semiotics theory

Barthes' theory explains how signs, this can be images, objects or words, create meaning. a sign has:

-signifier - the physical form (mannequin).

-signified - the deeper meaning (rigid beauty standards and feeling of being trapped in a body).

I use semiotics in my film through the mannequin, here's how:

Mannequin as a sign

Denotation - lifeless, rigid figure made out of plastic

Connotation - artificial beauty standards and the idea of being trapped in an identity you don't resonate with making it almost not alive or not authentic.

Cracking and peeling of the mannequin

Denotation - mannequin physically breaking apart.

Connotation - inescapable gender dysphoria faced by trans women and societal pressures.

Todorov - narrative

Todorov's theory suggests that narratives follow a five stage structure:

-equilibrium

-disruption

-recognition

-repair

-new equilibrium

^ Disruption, recognition, and repair can all be put under a category called disequilibrium.

As the film is can only be 2-3 minutes long , I have decided to focus only on the equilibrium and the disruption. this leaves the story on a cliffhanger, creating intrigue and making the audience want more.

The equilibrium will have a sense of stability, even if it's uneasy due to it being a mannequin. The disruption will then be the mannequin seeing the cracks and having the actual screen starting to crack.

By applying these theories, I aim to create a striking and meaningful message that resonates with the viewers in various ways.

[txy-aiuoou]

Week 4 Semiotics

The goal of today's lesson was more of how we can study signs, symbols and how they communicate a meaning.

This activity challenged my thinking and analyzing. My group focused on a Volkswagen Advert, and we found it particularly intriguing on how the brand utilized a Porcupine, 3 Goldfishes in water bags to showcase the technological prowess built into their cars. The Porcupine (Presented as a car) relies on Park Assist, being able to park between 3 Plastic bags full of water (With the goldfishes inside) without bursting the bag.

Everyone had a fruitful discussion afterwards regarding possible alternative interpretations. Everything was studied, the provenance, implied meaning and graphic shown in the poster. In short, knowing the target audience, historical context and product intention are key to understanding semiotics.

While researching for inspiration, I found this vintage cigarette poster. The advert uses our trust in a specific person or profession (In this case a doctor) to sell us their product. The interpretation of this advert is these smokes are safe for you, and even a famous person (As indicated by a signature) endorsed it.

And as according to the advert, it should be healthy to smoke. Contrary, It is known that smoking causes cancer.

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 3, Harper & Brothers, 1850, pp. 1–20.

This quote represents the study on semiotics well.

(248 Words)

[file-cabinette]

Much of Cindy Sherman’s work functions as a semiotic investigation into the boundaries between the private and public body. Many of her images depict cracked, discarded, and depleted medical dummies, their faces vacant, and disengaged. Their dull, waxen skin recalls that of a corpse, heightening the unease generated by their droning stare. In this specific image, along with her 1992 work, Untitled (male medical dummy with black hood and axe), the camera calls attention to the subject’s genitals, which appear impossibly smooth and artificial. They resemble the molded plastic of a Mattel doll: stiff, glossy, and armored.

The subject’s pose is intensely compromising, their pelvis and genitals raised and angled towards the viewer. Their face, partially shrouded by their own shoulder, peers distantly, not quite meeting our eyes yet faintly acknowledging our presence. The red velvet drapery evokes intimacy, suggesting an invitation to gaze upon their bare, sexualized body. At the same time, it positions the viewer in the uncomfortable role of voyeur or exhibitionist. Our presence feels intrusive and unnatural, as we peer into the private life of the subject. Sherman’s work occupies this tense intersection, asking: Which parts of our body are public versus private? And how do these social constructions shape, restrict, or invade our lives?

With the subject coded as female, the critique deepens and highlights how women’s bodies are endlessly drawn into the spectacle of American media: groped, strained, violated and relentlessly depicted in everything from film and pornography to mainstream advertising.

Anyway, Cindy Sherman is one of my favorite photographers, and the intensity and intimacy of her portraiture inspires a lot of my personal work

Thanks for reading and sorry for typos lol.

Cindy Sherman

[harpgriffin]

Polar Pathways Preview

It looks so cute but it is such a mess. To start with, you are a penguin who can't swim. Please, explain this to me. The camera and its control is very badly implemented - on gamepad the game is unplayable, and on keyboard and mouse, it's just very unpleasant. There's screen tearing and motion blur (can't remove). No text is required but the developers need a course in semiotics because some of it is very confusing. The game controls so badly that correct actions feel wrong. It has a weirdly plastic look that I don't usually get even with my weak computer and low settings. The music loop is too short and becomes maddening. Basically, if I could tolerate it longer, I'd absolutely submit it to Kusogrande.