Image Analysis

Art & Design in ContextSara Andersdotter

Today’s session

• Introduction to the Wish You Were Here brief

• Introduction to image analysis and semiotics

• Individual image analysis (your brought-in image/s)

Brief: Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here is an individual, written assignment that runs parallel to the Time Travel group assignment you are currently involved in.

For Wish You Were Here, you need to pick an artist or designer from your time period in your Time Travel project and then research them in depth using libraries and the internet. Richard Billingham,

Ray’s a Laugh, 1995

Wish You Were HereOnce you have chosen your artist / designer, you will the start a correspondence with them in the form of a series of postcards, letters, text messages, e-mails [or any other form of written communication you can think of]

This will be a fiction and be made up all by you, but based on all the research you have done about the artist/designer. You will also have to introduce your chosen designer to one that will be given to you randomly.

Martin Parr, Benidorm, 1997-98

Wish You Were HereYou will be both yourself and the artists/designers in this correspondence. Your first series of post cards/letters will be to introduce yourselves. This will be easy for you but you will have to do a great deal of research for your artists/designers.

After you have introduced yourselves you may want to ask a series of questions to gain as much information about each other as possible.

August Sander, Peasant Girls, Westerwald, 1928

Wish You Were HereEach time you send a message it will need to be illustrated with either some of your own work and that of the artists/designers when they send you their correspondence. These could be drawings, photographs, stuff you have done in this or any of your other modules, or something completely new.

This correspondence will build up over the next few weeks and it should become longer and more complicated as the more you find out about your artist/designer. The first set of cards/letter could be about 100 words and towards the end could be up to 300 words.

The research you will have to do for this will also help you with your Time Travel project.

Richard Wentworth, Genoa, Italy, 2004

Wish You Were HereWhen you have finished your correspondence [postcards/letters] you must then present them as a part of your own blog. You should make sure that:

• they can be read easily and are presented in the order that they were written

• the correspondence itself indicates where you got your information from (eg. ‘When I read this book [insert name of book] by Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich he said, “You liked to design letter forms in your spare time”. Is this true and why did you do it?’)

• you include a separate bibliography of your information sources

Wish You Were Here

This summative assessment (25%) should be found on your blog, should be uploaded onto Moodle, plus form part of your presentation of your final portfolio during the last session of this term:

Wednesday December 14

Robert Smithson, from the series Incidents of Mirror-travel in the Yucatan, 9 parts, 1969

Image Analysis

• Semiotics: the study of signs- semiotic analysis

• Context and context

• Visual analysis

René Magritte, The Treachery Of Images, 1928-9

Actually, it's not a famous painting by Magritte…

… it's a digital image of the painting

Or, to be even more precise…

… a digital image of a photograph of Magritte’s painting

All of which illustrates Magritte's point, which is simply that an image or sign of a thing is not the thing itself. One could make the same point with any

number of images, signs, and symbols…

Semiotics – the study of signs

ns. Semiology, Semiotics

Branch of linguistics concerned with signs and symbols.

As a discipline, it is the analysis of signs or the study of the functioning of sign systems.

From Greek: sēmeion = sign (sēma = mark)sēmeiōtikos = interpreter of signs

+ -logy or -ics(semiology or semiotics)

A sign is anything that makes meaning

“Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)

Sign

A sign is a meaningful unit which is interpreted as 'standing for' something other than itself. Signs are found in the physical form of words, images, sounds, acts or objects – the result of cultural productions. As such, semiotics can be used in order to analyse anything from images, texts, TV programmes, ads, radio, songs, etc.

The sign (or word etc.) is made up of two parts: - a signifier (the acoustic image; the ‘thing’ / object represented)

- a signified (the mental concept; the idea this ‘thing’ signifies)

What is a sign?

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954

… these two terms are used in semiotic analyses of signs

Saussure & the sign as a dyad

The signifier = the material aspect of the sign

The signified = the mental concept of the sign

“Dog” is made up of the signifiers d, o & g

The word prompts the hearer to think of a mental concept (signified) of “dogness”

Canine, quadruped, barks, has sharp teeth, wags its tail, buries bones, howl, eats biscuits, fetches sticks, growls, urinates on lampposts.

Cultural meaning/s?

Variations?

Advertising & SemioticsThe reading of images, texts etc according to semiotics is always dependent on a cultural and contextual understanding.

What does this mean?

It means that: we read the image/text based on a certain cultural familiarity, and the context in which it appears affects our reading of it. It may mean a cultural familiarity of other countries (quite often stereotypical ideas), those of our own or particular elements of those cultures. The context of the sign may vary – a TV ad is seen differently from an ad in a medical journal, from an ad in the Sun, to an ad on a billboard… to the back of a New York cab!

If we see this ad for a Seeds of Change Jalfrezi sauce as a sign (which we could say contains further signs)…

Signifiers

Signified/s

Thinking about images: content and context

Content- what is the image of?

- what information does it give us?

Context

- context in which image is made -social processes in which it is produced

- context in which the image is seen - mechanisms governing its circulation & consumption

More information: Open University, Reading Visual Images: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=398988&section=1.5.4

Three Part Visual Analysis

Anecdotal: Describe the artwork in general. What is its medium (oil painting, tapestry, lithograph, cast sculpture, domestic architecture, etc) and its genre (landscape, still life, portrait, commercial art, etc). Is it representational and does it tell a story? What is its background or historical context? For what purpose was the artwork created?

Formal: Explain the mechanics of the artwork, using terminology appropriate to the medium. Discuss focal point, color, texture, movement, perspective, etc.

Symbolic: Analyse the hidden meaning. Discuss gestures, objects, lighting, color, etc, and explain how the anecdotal and the formal aspects of the artwork create a synthesis which imbues the image with meaning.

Nan Goldin, One Month After Being Battered, 1984

Image Analysis

Look at the image your brought in for today’s session and think about ways of analysing it. Take notes by hand or use your laptops in order to write a brief analysis of your image:

• Content and context elements

• Anecdotal, formal and symbolic parts

• The image as sign (signifiers and signifieds)

Next week’s sessionIn connection with TIME TRAVEL & WISH YOU WERE HERE... you are required to conduct your own research on Modernism and Postmodernism at the Victoria & Albert Museum and/or Tate Modern in place of taught classes on Wednesday 16th November

Use the instructions found on the Art & Design in Context Moodle page (Word document relating to G2 & G4), or on the Art & Design in Context blog under Sara Andersdotter / Tasks / Tasks to do before 23 Nov 2011

Please allow at least three hours for your museum visit. You should complete this worksheet and use it as the basis for discussion and the development of further research on your blog. You should come prepared to discuss your findings in class on 23rd November.