ImageNet Roulette, 2019
Why?
As communicators (visual and otherwise), you must understand how communication works. We all assume that because we can read, write, and interpret the visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory world around us, that we understand how and why communication works. Communication is a complex world of signs, abstract concepts, experience, context, syntax, and so on. Meaning is assigned, understood, and informed on many different levels. These readings will help you better understand the basics of visual literacy (how we “read” our visual world) and semiotics (the study of signs and how meaning is created).
Required
Language: Crash Course Psychology #16
Language: Crash Course Psychology #16 (2014), 10:01
Language & Meaning: Crash Course Philosophy #26
Language & Meaning: Crash Course Philosophy #26 (2016), 09:31
How We’re Teaching Computers to Understand Pictures, TED
How We’re Teaching Computers to Understand Pictures (2015), by Fei-Fei Ji, 17:49
Supplementary Readings
- Semiotics & Visual Literacy
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How Pink Became a Color for Girls, Racked
“For most of history, pink was just another color. It was worn equally by men and women. A line in Little Women published in 1869 refers to Amy as tying pink and blue ribbons around two babies to tell the male from the female ‘in the French fashion.’ That’s often cited as a reason pink became affiliated with girls. However, ribbons aside, babies were generally dressed in white, and if you did have twins that needed to be color-coded you didn’t have to go with pink or blue ribbons. A catalogue from 1918 even recommended dressing female babies in blue as it had a ‘much more delicate and dainty tone.’”What Makes a Truly Great Logo, Vox
“About once a month, there’s a new logo to fight about on the internet. The biggest one in recent memory was the highly controversial Hillary Clinton logo, which did not escape scrutiny from Vox.com either. But as a designer/filmmaker, something about these repeated discussions struck me as missing the point on what makes logos tick. It often has little to do with the subjective musings. So I called up Michael Bierut, the designer of that Hillary Clinton logo and countless others. He sat down with me and helped explain the elements of a great logo.”Auditory Icons, 99% Invisible
The Auditory Icons portion starts at about 10:57 and ends about 19:43. “So instead of a generic and alarming alarm sound that could indicate anything, actual information about the problem is communicated. There’s something intuitive about it, and it illustrates a larger opportunity for alarm designers to rethink appropriate solutions.”Vexillonaire, 99% Invisible
“Vexillologists—those who study flags—tend to fall into one of two schools of thought. The first is one that focuses on history, category, and usage, and maintains that vexillologists should be scholars and historians of all flags, regardless of their designs. The other school of vexillology, however, maintains that not all flags are created equal, and that flags can and should be redesigned, and improved. Ted Kaye of the Portland Flag Association—the largest subnational flag organization in the country—is one such vexillologist. Kaye has a word for these activist vexillologists of his ilk who go out into the world and lobby for more beautiful flags: ‘vexillonaires.’”Icon for Access, 99% Invisible
“There is a beauty to a universal standard. The idea that people across the world can agree that when they interact with one specific thing, everyone will be on the same page — regardless of language or culture or geographic locale. If you’re in Belgrade or Shanghai or São Paulo, you can look at a sign and know instantly, without speaking a word of the local language, that this floor is slippery. That the emergency exit is over there. That that substance is poisonous, and you should not eat it. The group behind those internationally recognized logos is called the International Organization for Standardization.”ENGL 300: Introduction to Theory of Literature: Lecture 8 – Semiotics and Structuralism, Yale University: Open Yale Courses
“In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry explores the semiotics movement through the work of its founding theorist, Ferdinand de Saussure. The relationship of semiotics to hermeneutics, New Criticism, and Russian formalism is considered. Key semiotic binaries–such as langue and parole, signifier and signified, and synchrony and diachrony–are explored. Considerable time is spent applying semiotics theory to the example of a “red light” in a variety of semiotic contexts.” - Semiotics of Sound
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Golden Record: Sounds of Earth
Listen to the Golden Record sent into space with the Voyager spacecraft. Each sound is meant to convey life on earth.Sounds Natural, 99% Invisible
“And then there’s the question of sound. In most wildlife films, the sounds you hear were not recorded while the cameras were rolling. Most filmmakers use long telephoto lenses to film animals, but there’s no sonic equivalent of a zoom lens. Good audio requires a microphone close to the source of the sound, which can be difficult and dangerous. And so many of the subtle movement sounds—a chimpanzee rustling through leaves, or a hippo squelching in the muck, or a lizard fleeing snakes—don’t come from animals at all. They’re made by Foley artists.”Auditory Icons, 99% Invisible
The Auditory Icons portion starts at about 10:57 and ends about 19:43 “So instead of a generic and alarming alarm sound that could indicate anything, actual information about the problem is communicated. There’s something intuitive about it, and it illustrates a larger opportunity for alarm designers to rethink appropriate solutions.” - Creating Languages, Visual & Otherwise
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Ten Thousand Years, 99% Invisible
“In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. [. . .] This WIPP site is going to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, though this panel was only responsible for keeping this place sufficiently marked for humans for the next 10,000 years—thinking beyond that timeframe was thought to be impossible. [. . .] Who knows the world will look like 10,000 years from now? The panel began by thinking about language. But language, like radioactive materials, has a half life.”Shaka, When the Walls Fell, The Atlantic
“In one fascinating episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation traced the limits of human communication as we know it—and suggested a new, truer way of talking about the universe.”The Inevitable, Intergalactic Awkwardness of Time Capsules, Atlas Obscura
“It’s easy to make fun of time capsules, but [. . .] it’s much harder to fill them with the kind of material that will actually stand the test of time. Often, the things we tuck away for posterity are embarrassing or boring. Sometimes, they’re much worse—racist, bigoted, wrongheaded. Most take that old adage about the winners writing history to its logical conclusion. And they are always, by their very nature, exceedingly presumptuous.”The 116 Images NASA Wants Aliens to See
“The Voyager team tapped famous astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan to compose that message. Sagan's committee chose a copper phonograph LP as their medium, and over the course of six weeks they produced the ‘Golden Record’: a collection of sounds and images that will probably outlast all human artifacts on Earth.”Golden Record: Sounds of Earth
Listen to the Golden Record sent into space with the Voyager spacecraft. Each sound is meant to convey life on earth.The Foundations of the Voyager Record, Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record
“In 1977, two extraordinary spacecraft called Voyager were launched to the stars. Affixed to each Voyager craft was a gold-coated copped phonograph record as a message to possible extra-terrestrial civilizations that might encounter the spacecraft in some distant space and time. Each record contained 118 photographs of our planet; almost 90 minutes of the world's greatest music; an evolutionary audio essay on "The Sounds of Earth"; and greetings in almost sixty human languages (and one whale language). This book is an account, written by those chiefly responsible for the contents of the Voyager Record, of why they did it, how they selected the repertoire, and precisely what the record contains.”Voyager: The Interstellar Mission: The Golden Record, Jet Propulsion Laboratory: California Institute of Technology
You could go down the rabbit hole with this site since there are sounds, images, and multiple texts to read. “NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2-a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” - Perception
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Perceiving is Believing: Crash Course Psychology #7
“So what does perception even mean? What’s the difference between seeing something and making sense of it? In today’s episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank gives us some insight into the differences between sensing and perceiving.”Sensation & Perception – Crash Course Psychology #5
“Just what is the difference between sensing and perceiving? And how does vision actually work? And what does this have to do with a Corgi? In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank takes us on a journey through the brain to better explain these and other concepts.”
Response Questions
Remember to cite specific instances from the text to support your views.
- How have these readings on semiotics and visual literacy made you think about how you communicate as an artist?
- If you think of your work as a time capsule akin to the Golden Record or the 10,000 Years project, is it important to you that you work communicate through time? Why or why not? What about your work is specific to contemporary contexts and how much can have a longer life span?
- How might these readings impact your thinking of representational vs. non-representational work? How might non-representational work communicate?
