American philosopher and founder of pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce categorizes the "signs" that make up our reality by their relations to the interpreter and referent, deducing three main groups: Symbols, icons, and indexes. To put it simply, the argument argues that Symbols have a conventional relation (e.g. language); Indexes exhibit a causal relationship (e.g. footprints), and Icons are resemblant (appearance). Peirce's semiotic theory has been influential for 20th century artists dealing with words and images. In our current context, his algorithmic groupings also form the core of Social Network Analysis.
(Sources: Art Since 1900, by Foster/Krauss/Bois/Buhcloh; further info link http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#syn)
My response is a visual and metaphorical exercise on Peirce: Dreams, images and words have become interchangeable actors in a Comedia dell'Arte production, seemingly capricious, positioned (simultaneously) inside, outside, over and under a stage who lewdly unfurls herself in a vain attempt to emulate the successive moments occupied by each actor. Their masks shift again. Dreams narrate the words as they gaze at the white screen, glaringly aware of their implied silhouette: A high-contrast afterthought draping across its shoulder. Image watches every instant reprocessed and stays in the sidelines, waiting for the interruptible instant. She dons an elusive pose to defy her understudy role.
ARTGUMENT: The digitally-produced image embodies my visual examination of the simultaneous relationship between the three sign "types." On a perception level, we may not need the language filter to "read" and instantaneously recognize the crosswalk (Crosswalk itself implying crossing the classification boundaries). The street crossing "sign" exhibits a walking action, which holds potential for an indexical mark enacted by both referent and interpreter, it is a conventional symbol, and references the "iconized" human form. I play with tangential shapes and subverting fore/background relationships, as well as breaking apart the color-constituents to strip away perspective-based labels. Every color in the image in some manner refers to or complements another color within the image (it is completely self-contained in a chromatic sense, and the image tips its nonexistant hat to Ed Hopper's perfectly coordinated color schemes).
THOUGHTS: What does it mean for you to be seeing this image deconstructed in a purely digital (simulated) context? Do you see the image cancelling itself out in a visually formulaic way? If I presented a white diamond-shaped sign crafted to the exact dimensions of the road sign, would it mean the same thing? Does my work refer more to language (as a sign) or image? Is my analogy between "symbol, icon, index" with respect to "words, images, dreams" an internally interchangeable metaphor? Is this method of sign-analysis an effective comment on the artifices within digital media and text-based communication?
1 comment:
[D]iagrams must be distinguished from indexes, which are territorial signs, but also from icons, which pertain to reterritorialization, and from symbols, which pertain to relative or negative deterritorialization.
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