Archive for October, 2011

|

The poetry of business

Monday, October 31st, 2011

If you're searching for the sacred springs of poetic inspiration, your first port of call wouldn’t usually be KPMG, Halliburton or Pot Noodle.

But copywriter Nick Asbury has shown that poetry – hovering between the intended and the unintended – abounds in corporate and brand discourse. He's created a technique, Corpoetics, which involves replicating extracts from websites and business publications, and re-arranging them on the page to draw out their poetic potential.

Here’s an example of Corpoetics in practice:

'KPMG'

I am strong.
I am vibrant.
I am committed to a vision.

I am tremendous.
I am quality.
I will lead people to excellence.

I am delighted.
I am respected.
I am very greatly valued.

What am I?
I am the best.

Read the original KPMG text here.

While gently poking fun at the pretensions of corporate language, Corpoetics isn’t meant to be primarily critical. In fact, it’s the very subtlety of the technique that offers semioticians an interesting perspective.

These poems take existing signs and get us reading them differently, thanks to a minimal act of reframing. It shows that critical thought needn’t always look beyond the surface of the sign to find a hidden truth beneath. Sometimes all it needs to do is stay with the signifier – playing with surface forms to draw out a wider range of meaning.

‘Halliburton’, for instance, reveals a desolation that might not have come through on a conventional reading:

We operate in broad array,

starting with production –

finally to infrastructure

and abandonment.

Corpoetics is a technique everyone can try at home. Readers are welcome to share examples in the comments thread below! Here are the rules as supplied by Nick:

·     Take the text from the ‘about us’ page of any corporate website
·     Rearrange the words into a poem
·     You don’t have to use all the words
·     You can use the same word twice
·     No fragments or anagrams of words
·     Punctuation can be added as necessary

 

Links

To read more about Corpoetics, and order a copy of Nick's book, visit his website here.

Posted in Clients & Brands, Culture, Europe, Making Sense | No Comments »

Sonic Semiotics

Friday, October 21st, 2011

I just decided I wanted to write something on sonic semiotics for Semionaut. This was triggered by attending the School Of Sound at the Barbican and a session dedicated to the use of sound design in animation. I have a stubborn interest in the semiotics of music and the extent to which music can be said to refer to outside itself.

As often when you hear creatives talk, the discourse is one of accidental sagacity, happy mishaps and serendipity. One of the sound designers, Mark Ashworth talked about using his baby girl's scream alongside guitar flares to create a sinister shriek.

Another experienced female designer talked about just using instinct in her work.

There was no mention of any codes or the other nomenclature that you might expect, to guide selection of element – this may have been the nature of the genre which is maybe more SFX based than scored. It did strike me however that the only times sonic motifs were mentioned (for example a crackling light bulb used as a transition motif or way of ending a scene) these were rather dismissed as just aural clichés

I was going to pipe up in the Q&A but I knew that any answers would cleave to the groove of haphazard felicity already ploughed in the discussion.

Of course I do not impugn their credentials. There was some great work on show. I guess they just rely on abductive instinct rather than any conscious selection from pre-existing sound typologies. As a broker between underlying meaning and creative expression couldn’t semiotics play a role in making tricks of the trade more explicit?

Theorizing what these people were doing might have seemed limiting, and somehow a repudiation of creative ingenuity. Is this a natural antipathy to anything to do with book learning or because it is seen as superfluous, i.e, as 'teaching fish to swim'?

It’s ironic though that one of the issues touched on was a lament there is no common lexicon to discuss the feeling film directors want and the sonic effect that could create this feeling. The trial and error rapport built up between director and sound designer no doubt works, but i wondered whether a sonic semiotic crib might have helped here.

I believe it was Elvis Costello who once said that “talking about music is like dancing about architecture”. Stravinsky famously denied the possibility of music having any real meaning and Umberto Eco declared the music only carries denotations rather than connotations – one of the least sage things he ever wrote in my humble opinion.

So what has semiotics to say about music? Well, quite a lot as it happens. There is a rich canon of work looking at Romantic-Classical music tracing themes for instance of Faustian self-questioning in Liszt piano works or anti-Stalinist ironies Shostakovich symphonies. Finnish professor Eero Tarasti has written a book on the Semiotics of Music drawing on both Peirce and Greimas. His main theme is narrativity through harmonic tension, and he ascribes an existential will to the unfolding piece of music.

Authors such as Lidov, Nattiez and others have also written on this subject. Many of these works centre around the notion of a musical subject nestled in a ‘sonorous envelope’. Naomi Cumming’s book the Sonic Self posits a classification of musical signs via Peirce: timbre and the grain of sound linked to Peircean qualisigns, gesture  and melodic ornaments and figures of expression to sinsigns, with more syntactic tonal processes governed by harmonic rules as legisigns suggesting desire. These are all seen as iconic in the Peircean sense and are linked back to music as an expression of human gesture. Rebecca Leydon has written a fascinating paper on a series of tropes applied to minimalist music such as that of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, distinguished by uses of repetition technically known as ostinati, therefore containing less harmonic unfolding. These include ‘totalitarian’ and ‘aphasic’ tropes.

One of my personal heroes in this area is musicologist Philip Tagg who has extended serious semiotics to popular music; it is refreshing to read a forthright Yorkshireman mention semiotics, the Clash and Aeolian triads without having to apologize to his readers. Tagg takes musicology to task writing: “musicology has tended to steer clear of viewing music as a symbolic system whose structures are considered as either references to or as interpretations, reflections, reconstructions…of experiences which are not necessarily intrinsically musical”. Tagg does great work in surveying a broad range of music from jazz through rock and punk to techno and looking for musemes or minimum units of meaning of units. One of these would be the Aeolian triad which is traditionally a signifier of mourning, yearning or existential dread. Semiotics has really added to the canon since books like Cooke’s seminal The Language of Music.

I co-authored an ESOMAR conference paper on the semiotics of sound and music in advertising in 2006 and argued then that not enough attention was being paid to sound design as a strategic brand building tool and that it was still an afterthought in too many creative development schedules. In the paper, (written with Alex Gordon of Sign Salad) we bracketed off the idea of subjective experience and somatic markers. We then put forward a rough model of sonic semiotic affect on listeners based on musical encoding (universal kinetic properties from a social psychology view) and cultural encoding (broadly social semiotic, though not explicitly so) and argued that a more explicit attempt to score and compose according to this framework could help sensitize brand owners to the possibilities for managing meaning in sonic branding rather than surrendering to the lure of likeability or a despair of complete subjectivity.

Even though there has been no ‘final theory’ of music, what is commendable is the fact that semioticians continue to work to bring more sophisticated understanding to such an ineffable phenomenon. Semiotics brings the meaning that social psychology musicology and other fields lack. I am keen to promote greater interest in this area.

© Chris Arning  2011

Posted in Culture, Europe, Experts & Agencies, Making Sense, Semiotics, Technology | No Comments »

Semiotic visions

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

"My religion was semiotics," National Public radio host Ira Glass ("This American Life") told an interviewer in 2004. "Before semiotics I was, like, a middle-class kid who didn't know what he believed …. Semiotics, basically, was exactly the way I defined myself."

Glass was referring to his experience earning a degree from Brown University's one-of-a-kind semiotics degree program. When I was an editor at The Boston Globe's IDEAS section in the early 2000s, we published a story about the lasting influence of Brown's program. It read, in part: "From its founding as a fledgling program in 1974 to its morphing into a full Department of Modern Culture and Media in 1996, Brown semiotics produced a crop of creators that, if they don't exactly dominate the cultural mainstream, certainly have grown famous sparring with it. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, Academy Award-nominated director Todd Haynes and legendary indie producer Christine Vachon, "Ice Storm" author Rick Moody, pop-science writer Steven Johnson — all walked the slanting corridors of Adams House, a sad cottage at the fringe of Brown's Providence campus."

Here's how writer Paul Greenberg explained semiotics in that essay: "[S]emiotics is about how we derive meaning from context. … Ferdinand de Saussure… posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a 'signifier,' i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the 'signified,' or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued 'sign.' Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts. But a working semiotician doesn't go home after splitting a few signs. Signs operate within 'codes' (a.k.a. languages) which are themselves building blocks of larger structures, like narratives." I have cut the snarky bits; click on the link above to read them.

"Semiotics … was like a conspiracy theory to beat all conspiracy theories," Ira Glass told Greenberg. "It wasn't just that authority figures of various sorts did things that were questionable…. It's that language itself was actually a system designed to keep you in your place, which when, you know, you're 19 or 20 is pretty much exactly what you're ready to hear…. Oh my God, what are we going to do with this powerful information?" "It was as if you had these, like, magic lenses that you could put on," agreed Steven Johnson. "It really had the feeling of `We've cracked the code, other people don't know.'"

Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel, The Marriage Plot, takes place in part at Brown in the early 1980s — and in it, the semiotics program is depicted as encouraging pretentious, obscurantist thinking and writing. “When Madeleine asked what the book [Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology] was about, she was given to understand by Whitney that the idea of a book being ‘about’ something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was ‘about’ anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things."Also: “Going to college in the moneymaking ’80s lacked a certain radicalism. Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism — with sex and power.”

This past Sunday, in the pages of The New York Times Sunday Book Review, the lead review of which is dedicated to Eugenides' The Merriage Plot, Steven Johnson recounts his own Brown story. He is less harsh than Eugenides. Though Johnson acknowledges that Brown's semiotics program did encourage pretentious, obscurantist thinking and writing, he mostly recalls that "it left many of us with an intoxicating sense that the everyday world — particularly the world of media — contained a secret layer of meaning that could be deciphered with the right key."

Here's how Johnson explains semiotics: "Greek for the 'science of signs,' semiotics as a field dates back to fin de siècle philosophers and linguists like C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand De Saussure; in modern times it is most commonly associated with Umberto Eco. The general thrust of pure semiotics is a kind of linguistics-based social theory; if language shapes our thought, and our thought shapes our culture, then if we are looking for a master key to make sense of culture, it makes sense to start with the fundamental structures of language itself: signs, symbols, metaphors, narrative devices, figures of speech. You could interpret a Reagan speech using these tools as readily as you could a Nike ad."

Though he eventually started writing books whose "sentences were shorter and the arguments less prone to putting themselves under erasure," Johnson concludes, "what animated my work was the sense that computer interfaces or video games had a subtle social meaning to them that was not always visible at first glance. That perspective was also the legacy of my semiotics years, and it turned out to be much more durable than the prose style. … Semiotics, for all its needless complications, still taught us to look for new possibilities in the ordinary, turning signs into new wonders."

Posted in Americas, Contributions from, Disciplines, Header Navigation, Lateral Navigation, Making Sense, Semiotics | 3 Comments »

Deity with a Semiotic Face

Monday, October 17th, 2011

 

In Spring 2011, at a conference on cultures, languages and religions in the Mediterranean and the East, I presented a paper on Hermes, a Greek deity who stands as an ancient emanation and personification of semiotic activities. This is a short version of that paper. 

Decades ago the specialists deduced that the medium itself had converted itself into a message and there was no longer any reason for us to think of it as a simple bearer of information. The idea that Hermes is just a herald of Zeus plays down another significant role this god plays in the tangled web of relationships between the inhabitants of Olympus, on one hand, and between the gods and mortals on the other.  This second role raises the question of not who Hermes is but what he represents, and why that became so important for the culture of Europe as a whole. Hermes from this perspective appears as an obligatory element in the Pantheon, filling the vacuum which would exist if there were no channel of communication.  If the image of Hermes did not exist, a similar signifier or function would still need to be invented to cover the strategically important position between particular characters in mythology and to strengthen specific stages of mythological narratives. Hermes thus anticipates an idea perpetuated by Marshall McLuhan and other commentators over the last half century of innovation in communication and information technologies – of the medium having in some senses become the message.

The most important role of Hermes in relation to mythological space. from a semiotic point of view, is on the horizontal plane of the map. The winged god is the only figure who moves without difficulty from one end of the culture field with which the Ancient Greeks were familiar and the other – visiting towns, islands, crossing seas far and wide, etc. Movement of this kind was expressed in the material culture of the Greeks through what are called ‘herms’, dedicated to Hermes, which were placed at crossroads and marked distances along the roads.

Along the vertical line of the map Hermes moved from the top of the Olympian hierarchy down below to the kingdom of the dead (in which he became ‘a Guide of souls’.  Thus he was not only honoured by the mortals as the ruler of the land movement but was also, at the same time,  the ruler of the air movement-  a member of the divine family whose work was literally to ‘circulate’ between the highest point and the lowest through the religious space of the Greeks. Moreover, Hermes was the figure who fixed and protected frontiers between the various spaces in which people lived, dividing cultural spaces and creating tipping points between them – including the points between realms of myth and science.

So, summarizing these associations, Hermes came to symbolize exchange between heaven and earth, journeys, and transitions between the heavens, earth and the underworld. Logically extending trade, journeys and information transmission we may infer that Hermes, mythologically, served the purpose of representing most things before which we could place the prefix trans- (this mobile god’s areas of jurisdiction might include, for example, transfer, transgression, transcendence, even the hermaphrodite’s trans-genderedness). Simultaneously patron of tradesmen, thieves, shepherds and craftsmen Hermes has a unique and versatile application to cases where we are speaking about a transfer of matter, ideas or messages from one state to another or from one subject to another – i.e. things that constantly change their position in space, in the broadest sense.

In keeping with these qualities of transfer and transformation, Hynes and Doty in Mythical Trickster Figures (1993) put Hermes at the top of their trickster list – with analogues in the mythologies of many other cultures. Unlike many of his brothers-in-arms from Asia or the Americas, however, Hermes is a significant member of the Pantheon characterised by being neither socially disengaged nor marginalised as trickster figures can often be. Hermes’s play at and with the frontiers of the world, as mentioned above, continues in many other forms of marking and shaping of the material world.  He becomes god of weights and measures, of the science of measure, of “proportion, relation and scale” (Harari & Bell, Hermes: Literature, Science and Philosophy, 1982). All these potentialities also become extended beyond the material world into representation in language and written texts. From this position to the introduction of hermeneutics as a concept there is only one small step. After participation in language invention, Hermes/hermeneutics also govern the meaning which people derive, attribute and share in their verbal and symbolic communication. The link between Hermes and texts Hynes & Doty (1993) describe as “an open-ended finding of new meanings that may change the interpretative force from one context to another; the values of a way-god must necessarily be flexible and adaptive”.

(This analysis will continue with an account, to follow, of the Hermes symbol in commercial messaging).

© Dimitar Trendafilov 2011

Posted in Art & Design, Culture, Europe, Making Sense, Semiotics | No Comments »

Life stories

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

It is every brand’s goal to become a defining point in your, yet at the same time everyone’s, life story, in hope of building up emotional value, lifelong loyalty and becoming a myth. In anticipation of Facebook’s new profile interface, the Timeline: Tell your life story with a new kind of profile it’s worth noting how various brands have used the same strategy to creep into our lives.

One example is UK department store John Lewis's latest TV advert  that showcases the role their electrical products have played in people’s lives over the years, played against a backdrop of iconic music tracks.

The advert consists of seven scenes, each representing a different era, ending with two teenagers enjoying a performance of ‘Shine On’ by the Kooks on the latest internet-enabled Sony Internet TV. The ‘seven scenes’ also resonate with Shakespeare’s legendary As You Like It speech (Act II Scene vii): “And one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages…”

KFC came up with a reverse timeline of a love story for their “Love is Forever” ad. It opens with an elderly couple dancing to Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ and becoming gradually younger until they eventually waltz back to childhood.

The timeline formula has also been used in the “Time Flies” advert for South Africa’s largest investment company, Alan Gray long term investment fund, which tells the story of a girl who grows up in a hurry, realising years later that time is priceless and shouldn’t be rushed.

On celebrating their 20 years’ presence in Russia, Mars have made an advert that provides a twist on the usual timeline theme. Their campaign It’s good that some dreams never come true features a young girl wishing when she grows up to “wear pink leggings and dance in the disco with a man in a crimson jacket”. Meanwhile, in another execution, a young boy wishes to “become a businessman, drive a Lada 6 and be married to a top model”.

The adverts then show a glimpse of what that may have looked like and fast-forwards to show the less ridiculous reality, reminding us of our silly childhood dreams that thankfully never materialised.  

Another in the endless list of recycling the timeline formula attempts is last year’s Unilever campaign  for its male grooming line Dove Men+Care, based on milestones including marriage and kids, in an attempt to challenge the stereotypes around “Real Men” and move away from traditional male grooming ads. 

So, for brands, an effective way to become embedded in consumers’ lives is to act as ‘biographers’ – telling life stories and ‘being there’ at key symbolic stages. Facebook’s Timeline, giving consumers the chance to narrate and curate their own unfolding life stories, will bring further attention to these symbolic contact points between brands and biographies.

 “Advertising is so powerful that we can describe our lives with it" – that's how Romanian advertising agency Next explain their campaign Advertising is a part of our life which managed to demonstrate the powerful storytelling potential of brands in intimate everyday situations. Their award-winning ‘Jealousy’ and ‘Refuse’ ad-stories both feature a dialogue which consists of listing brands.

The ‘Refuse’ dialogue is as follows:

A woman is chopping vegetables in the kitchen, when a man approaches and embraces her sensually.

Man: “Murfatlar Wine… Relaxa… Durex?”

Woman: “Nurofen… Libresse. “

‘Jealousy'  offers a more intricate plot, as a woman accuses her husband of infidelity based on a list of growing brand-based suspicions: "Avon…Toyota…Novotel?"

What is most fascinating is that this dialogue doesn’t need translation in an age of global brands, where brandspeak is a common language. And if brands give us a way to tell our stories, from everyday interactions to overviews of life stages, perhaps one day we could even rewrite As You Like It just by listing brand names.

 

© 2011 Sandra Mardin

Posted in Clients & Brands, Consumer Culture, Europe, Making Sense, Sequencing | No Comments »

When products speak

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

 

The Alpha Romeo Giulietta tells us ‘I am Giulietta’ at the end of its ads. French Connection’s blouses and bags proclaim ‘I am the blouse’ and ‘I am the bag’. Nikon repeats the trope in its current campaign. And a recent ad for San Miguel lager reveals its narrator, at the end, to be the beer itself. They’re all examples of the rhetorical device prosopopeia – in which inanimate objects are given a voice of their own. 

A similar case is the Peugeot RCZ which ‘chooses’ and ‘owns’ its drivers rather than the other way round. It’s not strictly prosopopeia, as the car doesn’t speak in its own voice. But it’s in the same conceptual ballpark: the object or product becomes a living thing with subjectivity of its own.

Of course, talking, animated products have been bouncing around at the ‘fun’ end of advertising forever – think M&Ms, Cheestrings and Peperami in the UK. But to find this trope in the serious register of high-end advertising might signify a bigger change.

It could signal a break with the consumer-centred brand-led advertising of recent years – in which the subjective experience of the consumer is symbolically central. We know the story so well. Consumers are offered not a product but the return of their own authentic being: a chance to overcome alienation and find themselves in the brand – as in Nike, Dove, Coca-Cola, and countless other examples.

But Peugeot, Alpha Romeo, Nikon, French Connection and San Miguel have all transferred subjectivity from consumer to product in their ads. San Miguel plays on the shift with particular awareness – leading us to expect from the ad yet another tedious and portentous first-person self-description, yet another expression of ‘who I really am’, before surprising us with its relocation of subjectivity in the beer itself.

Perhaps what’s happening here is a reflection of technological advance – and the fact that products are becoming smarter, more intelligent and more sentient by the day. We’re already used to cars and devices that speak to us. Maybe we’re seeing the start of a new relationship between humans and products – in which we need to start listening to what they say.

 

© 2011 Louise Jolly

Posted in Consumer Culture, Emergence, Europe | 1 Comment »