Assignment 2

Assignment 2 started off with us reading a chapter from Roland Barthes' (extremely difficult) 'The Rhetoric of the Image'. I have to admit, this was my worst nightmare. After reading the first paragraph I was feeling well and truly depressed and tired out; academic French to English translation is a tricky one to get your head around. However, it actually did get easier once I got into it. Basically, Barthes looks at the image I have attached below and gives it a 'semiotic analysis' (there is a link to a website that I used to determine exactly what semiotics are at the bottom of this post) whilst telling us what 'polysemy' is - when images can have more than one meaning. He thinks that by adding a slogan or word to an image you can give the images a much more precise and obvious meaning, also cancelling out any other possible meanings. Sooo, you could see a picture of say, a sandwich, and you might think 'snacks', but when a slogan is added to the image, you may discover that the picture of the sandwich is actually advertising a shop. Once I had worked this out, I kind of wished that Barthes had just written that in the first place instead of going out of his way to confuse the reader; but maybe that is why I am studying art and not English Lit...

Anyway, according to Barthes every single advertisement can be divided into three categories - 'The Linguistic Message' (this applies to the text), 'The Symbolic Message' (the representation) and 'The Literal Message' (what you actually see). 

Look at the previous image. What is the first thing that you associate it with? Italians? That is what most people would think when looking at it, apart from, according to Barthes, the Italians. This is because it is not using proper Italian words. Can't say that I noticed that, but then again I am not Italian! Anyway, portraying the pasta as an Italian make suggests that it will be authentic, fresh and handmade pasta, so people will be more likely to trust the food. By showing the pasta in the netted bag it gives the impression that the pasta has been bought from a fresh food grocers as opposed to a large chain super market, and generally smaller grocers are seen as having better, more fresh food. We all know what is being literally implied in the image though, the advertisers want you to buy their food.

So, taking all of that into account, we were asked to apply these idealisms to our own images. My group and I decided to make our own images simply from blobs of ink. We then showed them to people who were not art students and asked them what it was that they thought of when they first looked at the images. We then chose one ink blob image and started to add small features in order to see how easy it is to get everyone to think the same thing when looking at the image. Here are some examples of our ink blobs and people's reactions to them.

 Emily, Student, Aged 20 - Squashed frog, lobster with weird taily bit, backside of a giraffe, person.

 

A Student, Aged 19- A man fishing.

A Tutor, Aged 31 - A monster with antenna.

A Waitress Aged 21 - A fish.

A Doctor, Aged around 30 -  Urban landscape, factories, someone being hung, giant insect. 

Gary, Bar Staff, Aged 23 -  Guy with headphones on, gun.

A Doctor, Aged around 30 - Fox, leaves, autumn, fire, road kill.

Gary, Bar Staff, Aged 23 -  Guy with dreadlocks, leaves, trees in autumn map of Scotland.

 

Sam, Student, Aged 18 - Poodle.

Zak, School boy, Aged 13 - Mermaids.

Zara, School girl, Aged 6 - Hippo.

A Student, Aged 19- Owl.

A Student, Aged 19- A negative of Rolf Harris. 

A Shop Assistant, Aged 24 - A winking man.

I quite enjoyed this task as it was interesting to find out the weird and wonderful answers people were coming up with (my personal favourite was the Rolf Harris negative - what an imagination!) and comparing them to see any similarities. However, we needed one of our ink blobs to look enough like something to make most of the onlookers see the same thing. So, we chose the last image shown above, taking one of the answers as the thing we would try and make it look like - an owl. We edited the image just slightly, adding some gold ink around what should have been accepted as the eye area, and asked some people the same question - what do you see?

We had hit the jackpot! Absolutely everyone that we asked said that they saw an owl. Although we had already achieved what we set out to do, we edited the image yet again, this time adding some text. 

For anyone reading this blog tell me if you can see the owl, or anything else you might see!!!

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/ - a useful website about semiotics.