Reflection 6

In today’s class, I learned allot of new things, we study Semiotics. I didn’t know there was a word to describe the signs and symbols of communication. The word Semiotics was first introduced in the 1800s by an American philosopher to categorize his work in linguistics. Linguistics can be in three forms, icons, symbols and indexes.

Before this lecture I didn’t know there was such a thing as semiotics and I didn’t know or have a distinguish definition for icons, symbols and indexes. I would see signs and symbols and categorized as the same like for example the bathroom signs that distinguish between male or female. At a random guess, I would say that there are symbols but they are actually icons. As we all know, we would call the little things on our computer screens icons.

As for symbols, I would say a symbol represents an object but it is not exactly that. It is signs with no apparent resemblance to the object. For example, the light bulb sign does not represent light, it represents an idea and the magnifying glass does not represent making tiny objects to the visible to the naked eye, it represents search.

Indexes, I’m not fully wrapped around that because there are some easy ones and then they have ones that are not easy to identify. So I’m not fully sold on what an indexes are. Indexes are tricky, you might think it means one thing but it means something else example, smoke means fire, i thought fire means fire.

We also talked about iconic forms, context in the form of low context and high context and culture. I understand a little about the low and high context but what I didn’t understand was the culture part. I can’t remember anything the professor said about that. So to my understanding a culture is where one’s from which co-insides with their ethnicity and the community background (in terms of education or historical).

Overall, I learn something from this class and I can now say I can distinguish between icons, symbols and indexes but not one hundred percent, about seventy percent. I can say I learned something from this class that I didn’t know.

The Daily Heller

The topic is: “Flowered Polish Type”

First off, I’m not sure where to start, so I scrolled down and saw an article on the topic so read it and look at the designs. A couple of the pieces look geometric and some of the painting they don’t have brush strokes, it almost looks like it was done in illustrator but I know computer design software was out at that time. In my opinion, the posters look unorthodox and makes you stop to think what is happening in this painting. For example, Gordon, “Hades.” Joyful and unhelpful things, 1911 and A.n., 1906, Why is a man riding a lion, Is that a normal thing back then.

There is one painting that remind me of my pastel painting class, “Jozef Mehoffer, 1910”. The colors of the painting is not what it should look like, example, the color of the grass is brown, I’ve notice that everything that is supposed to be green is brown and also an orange wreath. I wonder what’s the significant of an orange wreath. Also, there is not much of a hierarchy in their posters.