Assignment Information
Name of Assignment: Practice Reading Assignment 2
Class: Illustration
Due Date: 9/28/2020
Date Posted: 9/24/2020
Assignment Description: After reading an exert on Saussure’s semiotics, we were tasked with finding different illustrations that portrayed various topics in his reading. We have to identify what the specific topic represented was and how it fits that topic.
Practice Reading Assignment 2
Prompt 1: Find a recent illustration that demonstrates Saussure’s description of a sign as being made up of a signifier, and a signified. Describe in writing how the illustration fits his description.
Big Tech by Olivind Holand shows a couple sitting in their electronics-filled living room. Within the piece, each electronic present, whether outside or inside the living room, has one or more yellow eyeballs plastered all over its’ surface. The signifier, a particularly overwhelming one, in this example would be the eye, whereas the signified would be the feeling of ‘being watched.’ The sign represented in the piece is, at its core, about surveillance from an outside force, possibly from the car outside in the background of the piece.
Prompt 2: Find recent illustrations that demonstrate each of Pierce’s classifications of signs as icons, symbols, and indexes. Describe in writing how they are demonstrated.
Icon
È Tempo D’amare by Federica Bordoni portrays an hourglass of sand falling on top of a miniature house. The use of an icon such as an hourglass leads to the physical representation of time and the passage of time, whereas the life of the house may be coming to a close as their time is shortly running out. Additionally, the shape of the sand in the top section of the hourglass is elusive to a heart, which physically stands for love.
Symbol
Teen Breathe by Charlotte Fu depicts a young girl standing in between a teetering seesaw, with her friend to the left side and her parents to the far right. The seesaw in the piece represents the symbol of the struggle for balance between family and friends throughout adolescence. The way the seesaw is unevenly tipped portrays the stage whereas the world outside your family begins to open up to you, but your parents are not ready for their bird to leave the nest.
Index
Here Comes the Suzn by Lee White portrays a girl holding an apple watching orange leaves fall from a tree. The changing colors of leaves into warm tones, such as orange and yellow, combined with the falling action naturally indicate the fall season in rapid formation. The leaves act as an index because of how universal its meaning is represented.
Prompt 3: Find recent illustrations that display denotative and connotative aspects. Describe in writing how it does that.
Denotation
Transitions by Jeff Lowry depicts a skull in the middle of a well vegetated area. The skull portrayed acts as a denotative caricature as it is used to literally resemble the death of a human figure. When skulls are used in fictional media, like movies or comics, they typically represent the long-time passing of a character. Although skulls can have a variety of subtle meanings when given a context, this case in particular demonstrates little more than its’ simplified meaning. This signal of death is supported by other commonly used demonstrations of decay and diminishment, such as spider webs, flies, and infesting animals.
Connotation
Dangers of Gun Culture by Fausto Montanari portrays a man holding a handgun-shaped balloon above the height of an eager child. The handgun portrayed in the piece reflects on many different issues and connotations of modern society. On the surface, the handgun signifies violence, whether self-inflicted or onto another animate being. The handgun is pointed at the man holding the balloon, who happens to be a black or ingenious person of color, reflecting on the decades of unprovoked and oppressive aggression and murder of that demographic. Finally, the action of the child reaching for the handgun-shaped balloon demonstrates the ongoing over-glorification of weapons and guns, predominately in the United States of America, and how newer generations are continuing to be fed this narrative of a culture that unfortunately refuses to be regulated.
Julie Elwood 