SOS: Visual Arts
"If you stop laughing, you are dead."
Week 3: Semiotics and Your Secret Decoder Ring
Please see Erica for copies of the readings if you need (I had to delete them off our website memory).
Required Reading:
1. "The Photographic Message," excerpt from Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, translated by Stephen Heath. ***note: please print out 2 pages to a sheet, as each page is 8"x5". 17, 1/2 pages, or 9p***
2. "Rhetoric of the Image," excerpt from Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, translated by Stephen Heath. (12p)
3. "Signification," excerpts from A Very Short Introduction: Photography. (2p)
4. "Looking at Photographs," Victor Burgin, from Photographic Reader, liz wells. (10p)
Some good references (not required, but very helpful for understanding the material):
Wikipedia: Semiotics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
Semiotics for Beginners: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html
Notes from Rhetoric of the Image: http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/rsc/barthes/rhetoric.html