UNIT 6: Aesthetic and visual communication.
Arquitecture
It is a process which involves the steps before constructing a building and its construction-process persé. It can be also defined as a form of art that combines aesthetic and meaning while its purpose is still to fulfil one of the most elemental human’s needs: a safe place to live. In the semiotical field, the deal between architecture and semiotics has been progressing through time, at first it was analyzed as a simple extension of aesthetics. Then, some semioticians postulated theories that established a variety of interpretation to architecture, there were set all the architectural sign’s models and structures, the various meaning that you can attach to a building (either connotative or denotative) or my personal favorite semiotical analogy related to architecture: the city as a text. As it was said before, architecture offers a response to a primary necessity of humans; that is why architecture is almost everywhere in a developed and populated world as the one we have nowadays.
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Photograph
First of all, photographs are impressions made by using a camera and pointing it to a spot or object. Its relation to semiotics on the other hand is kind of a troubled one, there were always a discussion about two postures; for instance, the photographic sign was involved in the dispute about if it was iconic or arbitrary; about whether photos didn’t convey a meaning at all or if they were actually a collection of codes reunited. However, those debates haven’t done anything but help the study of photography as a language by giving it more levels of analysis. Photographs have evolved a lot in terms of accessibility as well. The first portable camera was created in 1685 and they were kind of rare at first, only wealthy people could afford pictures of themselves, but along the passing of centuries and years, camaras have been becoming more and more accessible to everybody, right now they are even an essential feature in smartphones and computers, and with that, pictures have become obtainable to everybody.
Comics
Comics can be defined as a form of art which conveys a message using sequences of images on one hand and action lines on the other. Semiologicaly speaking, comics have been analyzed since long ago due to the narrative structures they possess and the two levels of reading conferred by Barthes’ model of myth. Moreover, comics are not just analyzed as a total, but also as the sum of their parts; thereby, some semioticians have made a comics’ breakdown in order to examine the meaning of all their parts and bring the deepest analysis possible. Finally, comics can be found very often nowadays, and their most recognizable characters can be seen everywhere, superheroes like Batman or Spiderman, and manga characters as Goku or Naruto have become cultural icons.
