Eementi semiotics At the end of the first lesson will be to achieve, from a real map and scale, a new graphic image and to redesign lettering, textures, symbols and colors of the original plan, trying to follow their emotional perception of the places depicted on the map.
various disciplines have been interested in the signs.
The medical tradition was one of the first, to arrive at the diagnosis of a disease must take account of the symptoms. For philosophy, however, the concepts are also signs, and in the various religions in theological tradition, the signs have an 'important symbolic value. In the tradition
logical language, however, are the text and words to represent the signs studied.
Leaving aside the infinite field of linguistic signs, we just think of what devote time each day to play - and to produce-all signs that are part of the world in which we are immersed.
not always aware we are, in fact, but the signs and a phenomenon that has always characterized the relationship between humans and the environment in which they live (including the relationship between human beings), and in which the human eye, to say with Aristotle, is always too weak even to grasp what is most evident.
Consider, for example, the gestures, the looks, the words that come from the beloved and much reflection, that those who love without even the safety of the reciprocity of sentiment dedicated to the interpretation of these signs.
Balzac:
It was good connoisseur and knew that in a sense, the nature of love is revealed in little things. An educated woman can read the future in a simple gesture, just as Cuvier could say seeing a bit of leg: this belongs to an animal of such size, etc.. (Les secrets de la prinncesse de Cadignano).
(Roland Barhes, fragments of a speech amoros or pag.187 Signs).
Reading the section entitled "Signs" from the "fragment" of Barthes, establishes the importance of the relationship in the process of signification. Speaking of signs, inevitably leads to talk of a relationship.
The natural signs, those that come from Actually, in fact, they always need to be such an interpreter, of a mind that is able to listen, watch, understand, or smoke and the smoke is no longer the sign of the existence of a fire, as the baby's cry is that, if there is no mother-she-or anyone, to interpret it as a sign that communicates a specific need.
Through the sign, also, the human mind discovers natural relations (as in the example of mother and child), or cause and effect, as in the case of fire and smoke. With the discovery of these relationships, we become able to set up new ones, no longer necessarily true, but based on the thought, the ideal type or, if you want to, conventional.
A community, for example, decide that the word house is a sign of the concept of building built as dwellings, or a white flag and surrender, or that the hourglass that appears on the computer screen is a sign that you must wait for the process of the CPU
These relationships are not natural but rather carried out by a social agreement.
With regard to linguistic signs, then, the relationship rather than being of natural origin, has a connotation replacement. A sign language, expressed in a graphic or sound engineer, often replaces something that is not perceptible at the time and place where the communication process.
I can speak of a place far away, like an exotic animal or a dress that I would buy and that is not present at the place where I talk about it.
The sign language also allows you to communicate something whose nature is not perceptually comprehensible and allows the philosopher, for example, to express concepts such as the unimaginable ol'inesprimibile. All this is due to the replacement of the absent or the nonexistent through the sign.
The nature of the sign, then, is dependent on its relationship with the object to which it relates and may be, as we have seen, that are natural, conventional replacement.
Many artists have conducted investigations in this direction, because it is obvious that the image, the picture is not often that the replacement of an absence. To tell us about the greek myth about the birth of the images and the Western tradition of portraiture linked to the funerary cults .*
Rene Magritte, conducted a comparative study between sign language and visual sign that we know is famous ceci n'est pas landed on a pipe and the famous synopses. Many other contemporary artists have devoted a lot of work to interbreeding between objects, as if the relationship between them could be the same basic principle of artistic activity. Think of the role played by the report in the objects used by Duchamp in his ready-mades (School-clothes-bottles, sticks etc).
Thomas D'Aquino, has contributed significantly to the reflection on the sign, defining it as a known thing that leads us by the hand towards something unknown.
The works of many surrealist artists, have precisely this value. Starting from the surface of the canvas, or an object, or a photograph or a film making, we are led to something else that is hidden to us, and this is precisely the function of the sign.
In the relationship between conventional signs, it does not matter what comes before or after in nature, or rather what is more important meaning of the sign or object.
If we take two objects, it's just a matter of Convention, in fact, determine which of the two is the sign of the other.
Once the Convention becomes the first sign of what I perceive and think through which the next.
The sign in itself implies something that is obvious to us but from which we then conducted to further knowledge of the other. The word elephant, for example, can make us think we know something but that is not obvious when reading a text or conducting a conversation taking place.
Umberto Eco has called the semiotic theory of lies. " In fact, if the natural signs can not lie, linguistic signs allow you to issue false opinions.
Lies, for example, can easily be conveyed by writing, as we know allows you to hide the feelings of those who communicate through it.
Example: "Of course I love you," Paul says to Sara, but then she looked away or the quivering of the voice or the fingers of his hands crossed can suspect is lying.
If this statement had been written, Mary probably would not perceive implicit messages.
But there are cases where the natural signs can mislead us, as we demonstrated Rudolf Arnheim in his diary
Parables of sunlight.
Several times a day, the inhabitants of the apartment they drop on over to our floors of an object the size and sound of a knitting needle. Since this is all we know of them we took the idea that the launcher irons, a rare species of porcupine quills that launches periodic mind, or the followers of a secret society that have to appease the knitting needles or of preparing the tools to kill their enemies with a voodoo rite.
* Maurizio Bettini, "The portrait of the lover" Einaudi.
