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Biophilic Design

Thursday, May 24th, 2018

Planting Meaningful Biophilic Design into Brand Spaces: Learnings from the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2018

A pre-occupation of botanical realism continues to pervade and grow into our lives. Think back to the 1947 Christian Dior’s first collection famously known as ‘women-flowers’, that described the fullness of skirt with accentuated ‘nipped’ in waists. Dior wanted women to feel like they were beautiful flowers; an utterly decadent, sumptuous and ultra-feminine look, following a necessary conservative war era. To this day, collections still illustrate and embrace botany and fashion houses continue to signpost the way of the significant positive relationships that we have with nature. This year, Gucci has unveiled its three-storey Gucci Garden in Florence – a term used endearingly to describe its house and heritage and its pledge to donate two million euros to restoring the city’s Boboli Gardens.

Now well beyond haute couture, botany has expanded and woven itself into physical spaces such as offices, home interiors, hospitals, shopping malls and stores themselves. Flowers and gardens are fundamentally some of the most significant symbolism of utilitarianism; the thinking that pleasure and being happy are intrinsically valuable and of high moral worth.

Gardens can enchant, calm and delight. Today we run, walk, sleep and sit among them, eat from them, photograph them. We party in them, exchange vows, say farewells, welcome others, become citizens and showcase them. They mean a lot to us and as urbanisation and technology continues to define so much of life, the botanical environment matters even more. Urban forestry and re-cultivation of un-used spaces such as the Highline linear park and rail trail in Manhattan’s west side have profound effects on gardens’ ability to deliver exceptional well-being experiences.

We have come to know that plants and flowers tap into humanity’s need to be close to nature. Last year, the Pantone colour of the year was greenery. So it’s no surprise that biophilic design in retail environments continues to gain popularity. A shopping mall cannot afford to be built without vertical garden walls and conservatory-style green planting. To harness the pleasure of green environments is hugely compatible to the shopping experience. It’s proven that it keeps shoppers feeling more stress-free and in conjunction with daylight, it can increase sales by up to 37% (Callison RTKL, 2017)

However as the integration of greenery becomes more of the retail environment norm, its potential to enchant, calm and delight is less fully realised. Arguably some retail spaces are more innovative in biophilic design than others. Think Apple on Regent Street, London with its twelve tall trees in planter pots that also provide seating at their base. The World Green Council stated in its 2016 report that biophilic design incorporated into the retail interior space can improve air quality, improve upon acoustics and noise pollution, adds texture & vibrancy and improve customers’ dwell time.

So with such fundamentally functional elements, there is scope to move beyond the pure aesthetics of plants in-store to something far more dynamic and creative. It’s time to innovate the garden in-store for greater meaning and impact. In search of inspiration, I’ve undertaken a semiotics analysis of this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show’s 27 gardens displayed, to understand what the emerging codes of meaning of the garden are, to aid relevance and to inform biophilic retail design.

Chelsea depicts four key codes of meaning in gardens: 1) Romantic Escapism, 2) Urban and Environmental Marriage 3) Cultural Curiosities and 4) Raising Awareness.

This year, five gardens at Chelsea symbolically deliver what gardens have always attempted to do – in providing a retreat that is luxuriating and secluded – a romantic notion of escaping from life to either contemplate, immerse alone or with others and savour. The M&G Show Garden expresses such timelessness via core objects: a wall, a tree and a seat. The Wedgewood Show Garden exudes fun, history and femininity in its sensorial modern take on 18^thCentury secret gardens and places to drink tea. The Silent Pool Gin Garden in the Space to Grow category provides calm via it’s planting five of Silent Pool Gin’s 24 botanicals for the professional couple to have a sophisticated yet enchanted space to call their own. These sort of gardens are rich in texture and yet balanced to welcome a withdrawal; a moment or passage of escape. It could be argued that in retail, the opposite is sought; that we don’t want a detachment of the consumer when inside a retail space. Yet if the retail space in its totality, was designed with escapism in mind, it could extrapolate escapist garden elements and symbols that invoke pleasure and joy. This could be throughout the store, or in a changing room, or at the entry point or even at the counter. To experience a biophilic escapism is to surprise and delight the consumer in ways that are not expected.

Urban and Environmental Marriage is signified in four of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show gardens. It acknowledges urban life and how it and nature can achieve harmony. It speaks of the threat of urbanisation on the environment, such as the Pearlfisher Garden that depicts the underwater gardens of the oceans and the impact of plastic waste on the ecosystem. It also shares how the relationship can become stronger via being informed, smart and resilient. The Urban Flow in Partnership with Thames Water garden provides planting schemes to tackle pollution and attract wildlife. The LG Eco-City Show Garden also plants intelligently for unpredictable climate conditions and the reduction of carbon dioxide. The David Harber and Savills Garden beautifully depicts the ever-growing relationship between humans and the environment via a layering narrative that is described as ‘garden theatre.’ Two things are happening here – one is to convey the threat on the environment and the other is to provide a functional approach in ways to deal with environmental challenges. However, the overall theme is the respect and commitment to the environment. It is this degree of intellectual devotion that retail spaces could embrace. Values such as astuteness, cleverness, positivity, preciousness are imbued in such gardens and offer the potential to be leveraged in retail. A brand space that shares such values could further be endorsed and developed via a greener design. It does not demand a worthy message from the retailer, but an expression of understanding the relevance of urban and environmental harmony.

Cultural Curiosities is the most popular code of the Chelsea Flower Show gardens, with ten gardens going deeper in their appreciation of culture and country and providing authentic portrayals, void of cliché and expectation. Refreshing perspectives are presented and celebrated of specific cultures, offering an opportunity to learn and observe. The quaintness, humility and wonderment are captivating and gradually discovered. O-Mo-Te-Na-Shi No NIWA Japanese Hospitality Garden conveys the concept of sincere hospitality via 15^thcentury Japanese flower arranging techniques. The Viking Cruises Wellness Garden depicts the Nordic way of life and the role of the spa, sauna and Nordic herbal plants. The Seedlip Garden celebrates the garden pea and tells the story of three men from three different centuries, responsible for its cultural significance. The Wuhan Water Garden in China Show Garden connotes nature of Hubei Province through arousing all of the senses. The British Council’s India Garden reflects the UK and India’s love of cricket and the striking Welcome to Yorkshire’s Garden, depiction life on the Dales.

Retail spaces could apply this code to biophilic design in a number of ways: invoking a strong welcome to space to instil a stronger sense of ‘my place’ for the consumer; to share an interest in tradition, custom or history through colour and format of greenery or to inject even the smallest of spaces with deeper connections to cultural nuances if relevant to the brand values. For example, a children’s shoe store, could depict Alice in Wonderland’s gardens of fancy and whimsy. Or an off-trade liquor store that depicts aspects of woodland or segments its wine origins with plants from those places. Whether minor or major implementations made, the retail space would deepen its connection and meaning to the experience (and product) that it sells. Perceptions would shift of ‘housing stock’ to living and breathing brands, thus making the physical space an experiential destination.

Eight gardens embraced the code of Raising Awareness about people and the challenges that they can face. The gardens either depict metaphorically or provide a place of contemplation and reflection to consider people’s plights. They seek to be inspiring places to drive human determination, ingenuity and resilience further. For example, the Embroidered Gardens explore the effects of epilepsy. The Cherub HIV Garden acts as a metaphor for the journey a young person with HIV may have. The Lemon Tree Trust Show Garden highlights the hidden beauty of a refugee camp in Northern Iraq. The Supershoes Laced with Hope Garden tells a story of a child’s journey of cancer. Out of all the four codes, this perhaps poses the greatest challenge to inform biophilic retail design. The take-out however is not sadness but inspiration. To think of ways that retail space can enhance mental and emotional wellbeing. All things beautiful in nature lift spirits and will make for a more comfortable consumer in-store.

Chelsea depicts four key codes of meaning in gardens: 1) Romantic Escapism, 2) Urban and Environmental Marriage 3) Cultural Curiosities and 4) Raising Awareness.

It is clear at Chelsea that striving for deeper connections with the environment and the gardens that we create is paramount. Botany in-store needs to grow conceptually to enhance a stronger relationship for consumers, so that the retail brand space, can become a people’s place. Accessing the codes from Chelsea into retail design need not convert brand spaces into garden centres but ought to break with current mainstream designs that mainly give tokenistic nods to greenery. It’s time to recognise the value we place on environment A pre-occupation of botanical realism continues to pervade and grow into our lives. Think back to the 1947 Christian Dior’s first collection famously known as ‘women-flowers’, that described the fullness of skirt with accentuated ‘nipped’ in waists. Dior wanted women to feel like they were beautiful flowers; an utterly decadent, sumptuous and ultra-feminine look, following a necessary conservative war era. To this day, collections still illustrate and embrace botany and fashion houses continue to signpost the way of the significant positive relationships that we have with nature. This year, Gucci has unveiled its three-storey Gucci Garden in Florence – a term used endearingly to describe its house and heritage and its pledge to donate two million euros to restoring the city’s Boboli Gardens.

Chelsea depicts four key codes of meaning in gardens: 1) Romantic Escapism, 2) Urban and Environmental Marriage 3) Cultural Curiosities and 4) Raising Awareness.

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

Disorderly Design

Friday, December 1st, 2017

In defence of disorderly design

In a globalized world, chains rule. Much loved brands across the board from McDonalds to Zara look the same, offer the same fare and take great pride in perfect replications across the globe. There are detailed manuals which make sure that even if natives of all descriptions join force they will not be able to hijack a single image, let alone a product and leave their stamp on it. A truly global offering is so standardized that the geography, culture and context of its existence is negated. In fact you will never remember the place where you saw it. It is much like airports; they all look the same, have similar signage and you can navigate it with your eyes closed. Sameness is the hallmark of globalization. It is grown in a lab under controlled conditions.

Control over the natural course of things is the undisputed way of all modernity. Modern cities are clean, organized and orderly. Their citizens follow rules. Sadly, it doesn’t look like India will make it in this race. Singapore is an ideal that is invoked in every conversation where we vociferously chide the administration that somehow even the newest suburb of Gurgaon, which was our most hopeful contestant in the modernity league, hasn’t ended up looking quite like that.

The truth is that we cannot bear to be controlled and we are very comfortable about the natural course of things. Left to themselves things become disorderly, messy and people will give into basic human instincts. That is the truth of life and we are very comfortable with every sign of life. Death, decay, and emotions are up in full public view; as are the by products of life such as garbage, sewage and other such ugly sights. Everything that makes up life lies exposed. The wire that carries electricity, the pipe that carries water, telephone wires and internet cables that carry our conversations and whatsapp pictures, lie demystified and their technology exposed. That is life and that is real and you can’t help having a relationship with it, no matter how troubled.

What does rule is the right to express yourself. On the face of it, this is what wreaks havoc with the orderliness. The uniform façade of an apartment block is rapidly destroyed as each apartment owner will paint it their own favourite color, carefully leaving off where the neighbour’s turf begins. Homes are rarely perfectly arranged. That is what gives a home character and differentiates it from a hotel. That is the difference between the markets and the malls which are part of a chain where a certain brand is given the same location across the chain. Disorienting déjà vu does not make for memorability. The markets and the bazaars are maybe a mess but there is always something to discover and a new disruption or a new irritant to talk about. Mood swings of the local market elicit the kind of emotional engagement that the sophisticated composure of a mall never can.

Orderliness, control and therefore predictability do not make for interesting design. If every element was placed exactly where it was expected, the eyes would just glaze over. A break, a marker or an expression of individuality which cause the eyes to trip over, even if it is ugly and disorderly, just makes it real and full of life. It is something you will always have feelings for.

Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Culture, Fuzzy Sets, Global/Local, Making Sense | No Comments »

Creolised Fashion

Saturday, August 6th, 2016

Creolised fashion: Chanel, ChiChiA, Guinness

I’ve recently become obsessed with gorgeous clothes from a fashion brand remixing African fashion with western elements. ChiChiA presents Tanzanian khanga cloth with an East London edge: rips, tailored and boxy shapes. The clothes are glorious – and their marketing reminded me of Guinness’ 2014 ‘sapeurs’ ad, featuring Congolese men who compete to be the most snappily dressed in smartly tailored suits. ChiChiA’s work made me realise just what worked about Guinness’ ad, and gain insight into the dividing line between cultural homage and cultural appropriation.

The difference between fashion and costume is incomprehensibility, view more to know. If an outfit is full of recognisable signs pointing to a single meaning, it is costume, with a meaning clear enough to take over the wearer and erase her. If its signs clash, it isn’t immediately comprehensible to anyone except the wearer – and it’s fashion.

A full skirt worn with peeptoe heels, a twinset and hairbow is a fifties costume; a full skirt worn with a leather crop-top is fashion.

This dependence on mixed signs is similar to creolisation, in which associations from multiple heritages combine to create a cultural fusion defining itself spatially instead of historically: a country, city, or in the case of fashion, a human body.

Desirable modern personalities are often creolised: either literally, as in the desirability of ethnically mixed bodies in culture (think Rihanna with her green eyes, Chrissy Teigen or African-American albino model Shaun Ross), or in their awareness of many different cultures and aesthetics. A lack of easy comprehensibility forces attention to the person who is the site of creolisation, giving them the authenticity of fashion rather than costume.

Brands often aim to demonstrate creolisation, and land at cultural borrowing. One of the most woeful examples is Chanel, which tried to remix the traditional feathered Native American headdress as a symbol of ‘craftsmanship’ in 2013, and was confronted with near-universal accusations of racism and appropriation. Ultimately, Chanel’s whole show was associated with the ‘basic bitch’, a white girl wearing Native American headdresses to festivals: someone who clings to signs which are both hollow and obviously comprehensible.

This self-presentation lacks cool because it lacks incomprehensibility. The individual basic bitch is not a space where fashion and personality are created, but a wearer of borrowed costume: on a non-Native American, the headdress is a loud failure to be fashion, and a less resilient or smaller brand than Chanel couldn’t have recovered from it.

ChiChiA escapes inauthenticity because its non-western influences come from the designer/founder’s own heritage, in contrast with Chanel’s, but that isn’t all; Guinness’ Irish roots couldn’t be less relevant to the Congo, and their ad was still well-received, seen as expanding rather than devaluing the drink brand. What works is that these brands are reflecting already-creolised cultures: sapeur fashion arises from a long history of cultural crossover, and ChiChiA evokes London’s status as one of the world’s most powerful creolising societies.

In both examples, signs from different cultures are translated by and into each other in fashion, as in creolisation. Elements which resist translation come to signify their own origins, often over and above their original culture-specific meanings.

ChiChiA’s marketing towards creolised cultures, as well as around them, is reflected in its founder’s summary of Tanzanian-heritage women’s reactions to her fashion: ‘You wear a khanga at home to clean the house, not to a party.’ That’s why she doesn’t make khangas: she mixes the khanga cloth with western structures like crop tops, shoulderpads and pencil skirts. Sapeur fashion also mixes classic European tailoring with bright African colours, making the resulting outfit an embodied assertion of creolisation. Creolisation’s ability to give khanga the higher-level sign of Tanzanian-ness, and erase its culture-specific meaning of casualness, is like the three-piece suit’s ability to signify European-ness rather than stuffy formality when worn, in bright colours, in the Congo.

These jostled signs, creolised into incomprehension, are the type of existing cultural interaction that brands can borrow from without accusations of appropriation. Guinness’ sapeur association isn’t a borrowing of an untranslated sign; it’s associating Guinness with creolisation itself.

Black creolisation

For an example of larger-scale marketing towards rather than around creolisation, we can look at Guinness’ post-sapeur Africa campaign, Made Of Black, which figures blackness as creolisation itself.

This definition is common among African-Americans, whose culture is arguably the most successful of the 20^th century. Made Of Black’s flagship ad uses Kanye West’s ‘Black Skinhead’ as soundtrack, a song whose title’s creolisation is so tense that it’s almost an oxymoron, associating a punk movement with strong white supremacist undertones with black power. The song includes lyrics in praise of the main driver of literal creolisation, interracial sex, and is also a valorisation of a culture defined as ‘black’ but in fact creolised; a distinction which becomes more obvious when African-American cultural signs are positioned beside un-American African signs in Guinness’ video.

Guinness positions its ‘blackness’ as necessarily polyphonic, presenting many different African celebrities in the ad. It also includes multiple bright colours on the face of a black model, and mixtures of various African, European and African-American influences – such as breakdancers against a background of north African/ Arabic-inspired prints. This combination invites Africans to identify themselves with the creolisation of African-Americans,positioning such creolisation as desirable: an aim with obvious benefits to a European product trying to become an important element in African cultures.

But Guinness’ blackness is not only ethnic. The ad points to ‘black’ as a ‘mindset’ or ‘attitude’ incorporating diversity, cultural rebellion and the site of fashionable identity mixing, pulling on cultural connotations of black as the colour into which all colour dissolves. This positioning of blackness as a space where many diverse associations meet has been prefigured by rappers playing with the concept of blackness. For instance, in Jay Z’s ‘Run This Town’ video, the “all black everything” lyric and aesthetic refer to clothing as well as ethnicity; to the anarchists using black as a symbol of countercultural freedom and the fashionistas using it as noncommittal catchall chic, as well as the immediate meaning of negritude or black power.

Black as creolised space is a very powerful association. But Guinness’ discussion of blackness is made tense by its uncertain positioning of creolisation. The beer’s blackness is simultaneously portrayed as already creolised, a space where various cultures have found a home; and at the same time, allied to the extremely broad space of Africa and its multiple non-creolised cultures.

This causes uneasiness: is Guinness a site, like ChiChiA, or an element?

And that tension may be the cause of the ad’s mixed reception, as Africans remain unsure who is being ‘made’ in its tagline. Is Guinness paying homage to the role of black or African drinkers in creating its brand, or are they being encouraged to pay homage to its role in their racial/ cultural identity?

Power lines are the faultlines in any society, but especially so in creolised cultures, built at the same time by and in resistance to colonising elements. ChiChiA’s founder can own creolisation as a black woman in a way that is politically problematic for Guinness to use as a European brand. The campaign’s success will test and be tested by the extent to which Guinness is already embedded in the African cultures that ‘Made of Black’ targets.

Posted in Art & Design, Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence, Global/Local, Making Sense | No Comments »

Network: Marc

Wednesday, May 18th, 2016

Your experiences in education – did you encounter semiotics? If not, what difference do you think such an encounter would have made?

Although not taught as semiotics, there used to be huge focus on textual and visual analysis throughout primary and secondary education in my native Bulgaria. Thinking about it now, it feels like it was often a necessity. Each year, the list of mandatory summer reading books was invariably dominated by authors such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose works always inevitably required deeper analysis back in the classroom. The constant nudge to look for the deeper meaning in texts and signs quickly evolved into a favourite pastime. So, when I heard about commercial semiotics as a research methodology, I instantly wanted to know more. Luckily, with the international research I do, I often have the opportunity to use semiotics and those early lessons are certainly coming in useful now.

How does it feel being the first (and currently still only) adopter and main spokesperson for semiotics in a business employing over 100 people? What are your best soundbites for catching colleagues’ attention, encouraging them to get involved in semiotics?

I’m lucky to have a very supportive network of colleagues who are constantly looking for new ways of enhancing our offer and openly welcome new ideas. When I came back from the semiotics training course, I didn’t expect there would be such an appetite for semiotics in the business, but it quickly transpired that a few colleagues had worked with semioticians in the past and their experiences were overwhelmingly positive, so it wasn’t a difficult sell at all. Looking at where we are as a business now and how our offer is evolving, it makes a lot of sense to integrate semiotics and make it a de facto methodology for certain types of projects.

For those colleagues who are less familiar with semiotics, talking about going beyond the obvious, unlocking deeper insight, and gaining an understanding of how their categories are structured symbolically seems to have particular resonance and stopping power. For those working on international projects, the hook is ‘cultural insight’ and help in understanding the subtle nuances that drive different interpretations, attitudes and behaviours across different cultures.

Elevator pitch – what would you tell a prospective client about semiotics?

The way I see semiotics is as a higher-gear research methodology that can help you quickly get to the nub of the matter and harness emerging trends. Particularly useful if you’re looking to solve long-standing puzzles, find the edge in crowded categories and/or scale a brand internationally.

The picture you have chosen to illustrate this interview – your thoughts about it, why did this come to mind?

I came across this print ad from Hut Weber (German hat manufacturer) fairly recently and thought it beautifully summed up in 2 simple images and 3 words what semiotics is all about, i.e. understanding how subtle signs, which our brains process intuitively, work to change our perceptions, attitudes and behaviours.

For me, 3 distinctive elements in this comms piece exemplify what semiotics looks at and why it is such a powerful methodology for unlocking fresh insights:

OBJECT: the presence of a simple object – that of a hat – completely changes who we see and what we associate that image with. The hat changes the image of the man from the evil, sadistic Adolph Hitler to the charming, fun-loving Charlie Chaplin. The echo, in the Hitler image, of the cover of Timur Vermes’s satirical novel Er Ist Wieder Da (translated as Look Who’s Back) adds a reflexive twist to this transformation. Vermes’s Hitler, having woken up in Berlin in 2011, reinvents himself as a TV comedy star.

HISTORY: if this same print ad had aired 100 years ago when both Hitler and Chaplin were 25 years old, but certainly not as well-known as they are today, it wouldn’t have carried the same meaning as it does today.

CULTURAL CONTEXT: looking specifically at how the two images are positioned in relation to each other, we see a positive progression from left to right, which is how the encoder of this message intended us to interpret it knowing that the convention in the Western world is to read from left to right. But this subtlety in interpretation can easily be lost in Arabic or certain Asian cultures for example who don’t read or decode messages in the same way. There’re bound to be some differences and from a research perspective, it’s great to know that this is something semiotics can help with by bringing deep cultural insight to the table.

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

Network: Hannah

Friday, December 18th, 2015

Tell us about your piece that won the Semionaut New Writers award. How did the thought come to you and how did it develop?

I started writing my essay for Semionaut, “Is this heaven? Reflections on Barthes and Facebook,” while trying to craft my BFA thesis statement. My thesis was called “Friendship in the Age of Facebook” and functioned as a social practice exercise that probed into shifting notions of sincerity. I was thus revisiting lots of texts from my Goldsmith’s Visual Culture degree like The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of course Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, and picking my mother’s knowledge banks of Shakespeare plays about mistaken identities like Twelfth Night and Midsummer Night’s Dream. What followed was an unruly 2000 word document that tried to capture absolutely everything all at once. Although it helped inform my BFA statement, it took on a life of its own. Semionaut prompted a massive edit where I focused on a single text. I think it’s about 800 words now.

How did you hear about the award and what was your reaction when you won it?

I was working on said epic document and was writing art criticism but I wanted to branch out and was actively looking for writing opportunities. My grandmother taught me about semiotics when I was quite young and I studied it at Goldsmiths so I just did a Google search for “semiotic writing award” and/or “cultural theory writing award” and literally the only thing that came up was the Semionaut award. I submitted the essay just under deadline a few days after Thanksgiving.

So often you submit to these things and don’t really expect to hear anything back. But I did—first the short list and then the final verdict! I really had no idea what to expect but of course I was thrilled. Barely anyone knew I had applied so I got to explain everything all at once, including the peculiar world of semiotics. The accreditation felt great and connecting with Space Doctors was very exciting.

What has been happening to you since then? Give us some highlights?

Soon after, I started freelancing for Space Doctors doing US cultural insight. My first project was on the symbolism of light in American culture and I got really into it. I continued writing a monthly art review for THE magazine in Santa Fe, wrote for several other national publications, exhibited my own artwork, and traveled a bunch. Now I am at Space Doctors full time.

Would you recommend applied brand semiotics & cultural insight as a career option?

Absolutely! It’s an expanding field with tons of room for growth, creativity, and thoughtful innovation.

What do you foresee for yourself 5 years from now?

Only time will tell. 😉 Hopefully still involved with Space Doctors and living fabulously.

How do you think the world that cultural semioticians are looking at will have changed by then?

Cultural semioticians will be the norm: the leaders of marketing in a continually visual world. “A Sign in Space” from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics is both a harbinger and just the beginning—a very juicy creation story.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Culture, Experts & Agencies, Network, Semiotics | No Comments »

The New Guernica of Glasgee?

Sunday, July 5th, 2015

If only most brand collaborations could be as harmonious: Louis Vuitton and Takeshi Murakami; Adidas and Yohji Yamamoto have got nothing on this. David Shrigley’s deformed, hobbled, malnourished sometimes barely human stick figures are some of the most disturbing characters in British art. Shrigley has been commissioned to create the new crest and mascot for Glasgow based Scottish Premier League team Partick Thistle. It seems to be part of the club’s re-positioning towards ‘not so cuddly anymore’ designed to roll back the perception of Partick Thistle FC as harmless or lacking bite.

The Spanish have the word ‘morbo’ (needle) to sum up the rancorous dialectic between opposition clubs that ranges from antagonism to pure hatred – the rivalry between a Real Madrid and Barcelona for example that partly stems from Castilian hegemony and Catalunian autonomy. The exaltation in the pain of one’s nemesis team (for example being relegated), the schadenfreude of watching teams snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the bitchery on football forums, the exquisite cruelty of football chants. The fact that Crystal Palace fans reveled in the demise of Liverpool two seasons ago because the Heysel stadium disaster had denied them a place in Europe back in 1986! Gary Neville screaming like a pterodactyl at Liverpool fans after a win. I’ll never forget the middle aged female Aston Villa fan – probably delightful outside the footballing context – her face contorted with hateful bile making ‘wanker’ signs as she filed out of White Hart Lane; having been pegged back to 4-4. This all typifies British football.

David Shrigley’s art perfectly complements this ethos. Shrigley’s work is Beavis & Butthead meets Francis Bacon. It is both the adolescent scrawlings in the cubicles of public toilets and the sadistic, existential cruelty of the thwarted adult. A son eviscerating his son for no reason, figures being tortured, barely human creations muddling along in pointless situations, a sort of fake jollity, nonsense creations, logical paradoxes and non sequiturs, as well as just celebrating crapness. David Shrigley, like band Half Man, Half Biscuit in the realm of music (National Shite Day) Shrigley celebrates British (even if not English) cynicism, apathy, bodginess, underachievement and stubborn individualism. This is a cry of anguish from the North – the Guernica of suffering for the long suffering football fan in a custard splodge. This is Millwall’s chant of ‘no-one likes us, we don’t care’ – it is a visual Poznan turning its back on the heraldic propriety of the football club crest.

All that pain and revelling in forever the underdog and the outsider – I can’t think of any image better to represent it. Just as Yoshitomo Nara’s frowning girl represents the disappointed kid in every Japanese salaryman, David Shrigley’s figures represent the grumpy, cynical, snarking, dissenting Brit.

There is something gloriously subversive about this yellow figure and it is a code breaker because it looks intentionally characterful and satirical amongst the faux Disney naffness of football club mascots: shit looking lions, lame dogs, unconvincing roosters; a whole menagerie of plodding, slightly embarrassing, anthropomorphically botched figures that saunter onto the middle of the stadium at half time and half heartedly beckon to the crowd during the game. And there is something genuinely intimidating about the Kingsley figure too which recommends him (if indeed it is a he), for intimidating the opposition perhaps brandishing a huge can of Irn Bru!

So it seems, everyone’s a winner. Shrigley as Partick Thistle fan gets one of his awkward, slightly obnoxious looking creations onto a football field and Partick Thistle benefit from the dark humour, snarkiness and sardonic perspective that sums up British football culture! Except that some PT fans apparently hate the logo. Some, we imagine might now resemble Kingsley!

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

Apple’s Swift Icon

Wednesday, August 13th, 2014

Swift Semiotic Observations on Apple’s Swift Icon

A few days ago, Apple unveiled their new language for Xcode programmers, which is called ‘Swift’ and which comes with the following graphic visualization:

A friend of mine was surprised at the angle of the swift having been well-briefed on the semiotic implications of angle and trajectory in Western culture iconography, e.g. they generally transverse from left to right in accordance with Western reading conventions, and that ‘down’ is usually bad to the same degree that ‘up’ is usually good . . .which generally makes the upper right-hand corner the aspirational destination for most icons and logos.

But not this time.

Some semiotic observations on Apple’s icon for the new swift:

1. The downward angle of descent is important: by showing the swift moving to the bottom right, and not straight down, the meaning changes from dropping dead to controlled descent. There’s intent with that angle.

2. What are birds often doing when they’re descending with control at speed? Hunting: through this observation, the image becomes an expression of energy, aggression (strongly mitigated by the colours and the fact that it’s only a bird), confidence, and decisiveness.

3. The downward trajectory is showing the icon literally coming down to earth; perhaps being ‘down to earth’ is a desirable or even aspirational brand attribute for Apple software (especially since it’s not open-source, and it often takes criticism about this in comparison to Android)

4. Consider the opposite angle – if we dip into Greimas’ semiotic square for a moment – which would show the swift going to the upper right corner: while this is typically the direction that all positive, non-tragedy, Western-orientation narratives take, it also carries some uncertainty: by going into the clear open blue sky, where is the swift going? It would have no destination, it would seem aimless, directionless. The open sky is freedom but also chaos and uncertainty. The current downwards direction is grounded, focused, tangible, practical — everything you might look for in programming language. Some narrative systems do better with clearly delineated borders, and my guess is that programming language is one of them (make no mistake: I don’t pretend to know anything about computer programming languages).

5. Orange is cool: it’s fresh, clean, exciting, young, simple, energetic, and positive. It’s quickly becoming the dominant brand colour-de-jour . . .

6. White is also cool, and of course very Apple – they got the chromatology absolutely on-trend, absolutely emergent.

7. Knowing it’s a swift is also key: of all birds, it’s a swift. There’s such a strong, positive association with that word! Swifts are swift: small, nimble, flexible . . . Wikipedia calls them “the most aerial of birds” which is just poetry.

8. And there’s a old-school elegance to ‘swift’ that you can’t find in ‘fast’, and an accessibility of personality that you can’t find in ‘falcon’ (everybody knows falcons are arrogant, but you could sit and have a beer with a swift – if you could keep up).

9. I also feel a degree of decisiveness and accuracy in ‘swift’ that I don’t feel in ‘fast’. For whatever reason, I think of ‘fast’ as courting association with ‘out of control’ (the faster you go, the less control you have?) but ‘swift’ is always in control: there’s almost a Biblical power in the idea of swiftness, a perfectly balanced combination of power, accuracy, determination, and confidence. Control is a desirable connotation for programming language, and from what little I understand of how the Swift language compares to Objective-C (cough), it’s an apt description of how it’s supposed to work.

10. Finally, the swift also connotes lighting-fast reflexes (they eat flying insects while flying at up to 106 miles-per-hour / 169 km/hour: they’re fast). That’s got ‘computer technology’ written all over it.

Nicely played, Apple . . .

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Brand Worlds, Clients & Brands, Emergence, Making Sense, Semiotics, Technology | No Comments »

Network: Ryan

Friday, June 27th, 2014

Where are you and what are you doing?

I’m studying on the Design Futures & Metadesign MA at Goldsmiths, University of London. The keywords that clarify my research focus are sustainability, sociability and technology. I lived in Shanghai for more than 10 years before moving to London. Globalisation and cultural mixing have created significant similarities and highlighted differences between London and Shanghai. I’m intrigued by dynamic changing cultures. After a few years working in advertising agencies, I returned to education – which allows me to step out of the box, to probe my beliefs and values.

Tell us about your DJ Electric Eel project

DJ Electric Eel (DJEE) is a practical project, a part of my MA dissertation which I’m working on currently (summer 2014). The DJEE project involves several different topics, such as biology, music, programming etc. So I tried to use the term “DJ” to embody the complicated project as a comprehensive common sense form.

The project, in general, is constructed by a group of electric sensors, devices and an electric eel which can generate electricity and use electric fields to perceive the outside world.

The electric eel is kept in a glass water tank. Several electromagnetic field (EMF) sensors measure the electric fields generated in water by the electric eel. The data from those sensors are organised and transformed into sounds by software (programs such as Processing and MaxMsp). The data is also transformed into visuals and music that accompany the sounds. The electric eel indirectly changes the pitch and tone of the sounds by emitting unpredictable electric signals.

How are people responding to it? Have you been surprised by any of the reactions?

One of the most interesting things about this project is that there are always many different responses when I talk about it and show some of the video footage to people.

On 6th June 2014, I presented the idea in public for the first time. On that occasion I also showed a single soundtrack of music generated by a small electric eel and an Arduino device prototype.

I got a lot of feedback around Nature – definitions and forms of interaction. Although Nature as a big narrative in my topic, I haven’t clearly defined it yet as a specific concept or content. Meanwhile, I realised that understandings of Nature in terms of epistemology and traditional ideology, between Western and Eastern cultures, are very different.

There were two interesting notes in the feedback to my first presentation of DJ Electric Eel: “My body is nature” and “My body is technology”. They were probably written by the same person but separately and in different colours. It was very interesting for me because the DJEE project, explicitly or implicitly, caused the participant to think about the relationship between him/her, nature and technology. The two comments are a sort of argument or conflict. They raise an interesting point to think about.

You ask people an open question: “In what ways would you like to reconnect with nature if the technology were available?” What would your front of mind answer be to that question right now?

The open question is a sort of prompt to bring audiences into my topic at that moment. For me, the more interesting thing is how to reconnect nature with modern society and changing cultures. As a designer, I’m interesting in using different technological approaches to build up new dialogues between human and nature. The future expectation of the DJEE project will be a live music performance. Hence, it will not only engage with individuals but also a group of people in a social context.

You talk about the uncanny aspects of the electric eel project. How did your interest in the uncanny come about? What were the main steps in its development.

The uncanny causes intense feelings. Everyone has these sorts of experiences more or less. Theoretical research, such as studying Freud and Lacan, brought me towards understanding the power of the uncanny. Actually a lot of art works, films and advertisements take advantage of the uncanny in order to create strong empathies and synaesthesis which can impress the audiences and encourage their self-reflections. I think it also works in the DJEE project. From a human DJ to an electric eel, from rhythmic music to abstract sounds, from looking at creatures in an aquarium to watching and listening to an eel making sounds. The familiar and unfamiliar experiences contribute to an uncanny experience.

Tell us about your experiences in advertising and what draws you to the world of applied cultural and semiotic analysis.

Working in the creative department of an advertising agency, I used to look for stories and topics to connect the targeted audiences and the brand values in creative ways. The brand itself may be essentially meaningless – but advertising renders meanings and stories into brand voices. It’s just like how people create languages – advertising produces new languages and signifiers in order to clearly represent the complexity behind the brand. Furthermore, semiotic analysis helps us to better empathize with our targeted groups and potential audiences.

Where would you like to be and what would you like to be doing in 5 years from now?

I’m quite an active person with a lot of expectations. One year of study made a lot of difference. Now, I’m planning to get back to work, and I’ll slightly shift my career focus if that’s possible. However, there are a lot of fascinating areas I want to explore in the academic context. Many things will have happened in 5 years, but learning and reflection will be deeply infused into my future life.

One year of living in London has had great significance to me. I love the city. London has a wonderful bio-environment for designers. I really want to continue my studies and discovery of the diverse cultures in London in the future.

Tell us about the pictures you have chosen to illustrate this interview.

figure 1 : the effect picture and the principle of the device

figure 2 : the relationship between these four elements will be discovered in the future

More information about the DJ Electric Eel project:

http://djelectriceel.tumblr.com/

Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Emergence, Europe, Fuzzy Sets, Global Vectors, Semiotics | No Comments »

Short List – Celeny

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

THE LAYERED GAZE OF THE MEGALOPOLIS

To identify a space is a challenging undertaking filled with problematic notions of graphing, naming and containing a territory. Yet to identify a memory or moment created within a space is a more plausible endeavor. One of the powers of physical space is its unyielding ability to create a temporary and temperamental place. But it is the inhabitants that give birth to the settlement itself. Cities, on the one hand, often make one feel small or insignificant, while on the other, they also make one feel enlarged and intoxicated by its growing space. In this short paper, I will use China based photographer Jasper James’s photographs of cities through the silhouettes of people to explain how these images that combine cityscape, portraits, and one’s individual existence metamorphosis into one; how they become an invitation to see the world differently.

With humble and distant observation, James’s “City Silhouettes” series is taken in Beijing, China, one of the most populated megalopolises in the world. The density and immense traffic of human encounters on the daily basis is here staggering. However, these images give the viewer a chance to have a singular moment with one person in the foreground while simultaneously seeing the habitat of over 20 million residents in the background. The silhouettes function as a portal between the mind and the moment (of seeing), the occupant and the occupancy, the organic person and the inorganic structure of linear city architecture, and so on. Using three superimposed layers to make the photographs, James emphasizes the person, the city, and the sky and in each image declares the illusion of chaotic solitude or the multiple nature of each individual.

Figure 1.© Jasper James

In Figure 1., we see a woman looking down upon the city with a nurturing and pensive yet determined tone. A major color spectrum can be identified: from the darkest black to the palest white. The lighting seems similar to the sky when reaching dawn and the fading of the layers causes the building structures to blend in displaying a hue of softness, a misunderstood lightness and overall vulnerability. Perhaps this is the woman’s perspective of the municipality, of her lived experience, and simultaneously her moment of genuine experience of the city. But the more general question that arises is this one: How does this images relate to any urban person’s lived experience? Simply put, we all see reality through our own eyes. The magnitude of any city can never camouflage the magnitude of the self. Moreover, the identification of each silhouette is vague enough to allow anyone with a vivid imagination to slip inside its shadows and fill in the void. James has concurrently revealed, first, how small we are as humans in a metropolis and, second, how big we are as individuals in a metropolis. He questions the viewer to decide for herself or himself which of the two unveilings to scale at that particular moment of seeing.

Figure 2.© Jasper James

In Figure 2. James’ image of the urban child is a muddled message to decipher, with conflicting tonalities between a lost child pleading for help and a curious child enamored with its concrete fortress. Is this surrender or praise? Is the city a welcoming haven for a child or brutal fast lane? This particular moment captured by the image suggests both polarities of experience. In addition, the sides of the image are blurred which in turn gives the outline of the child a highlighted contrast and sharpness. If this is the child’s perspective, is it steered within parameters? Are there limitations to what the child can see? Or else, what can the viewer see through the child? Is the child enchanted by the colossal constructions or just forgotten among monuments of business world? James’s use of contrast gives way to interpreting the shapes of emotion within the physical layouts, where the only way to go is up. The buildings rise as the child rises too, and the movement is not only captured but also suggested as limitless..

Each photograph thus has a variety of colors from the full spectrum allowing for layered and multiple interpretations to emerge. If the colors were pastel, the images would seem lighter in tone and expression; if the images were in monochrome, the messages would lack certain depth. The use of color and fading with the white to black spectrum gives them a realistic documentarian tone. The city then also becomes multi-layered space and a multiplicity in itself. Some people allow for a city to drive them: drive them mad, drive them to success, drive them away, while others remain as they were and become interiors of the city. James portrays the insight of the separate: the endless particles of the mass that form megalopolis. In a city like Beijing, with limited spacing capacities, the photographer has achieved a way to represent individualism using just light and angle. As a creative resistance to territorial assault, James manages to make the viewer briefly experience the dizzying inertia of a city; a moment in which a viewer, that is, human figure, can for a second exceed the scale of a megalopolis. I think that James’s photographs operate as superior ads for the city, providing a fresh image of Beijing, one where art perfectly folds into superior marketing.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Asia, Culture, Making Sense | No Comments »

Day-Glo Love RIP

Friday, January 17th, 2014

I’M NOT SHOUTING AT YOU, IT’S JUST THAT THE ANTIPODES ARE EMERGING FROM SOMETHING OF A FLUORESCENCE FEST; a cavorting carnival of day-glo where, around every corner, something harmfully orange or green lies in wait to colourfully mug you. But, scratching beneath the surface, this brash urban grammar is semiotically rich. Ramrodded into a semiotic square, it might look something like this:

OFFLINE NOTORIETY: With the likes of Tumblr elevating fashions and personalities out of obscurity, fluoro is the offline equivalent. Just as night athletes and workmen leverage fluorescent strips to achieve high vis standout, and a highlighter pen is used to illuminate valuable text, fluorescent fashion and goods yield instant personal notoriety in a culture that is saturated with aesthetic noise. A little bit loud, a little bit lary. This power of saliency was recently exploited by Australian Aboriginal artist, Reko Rennie, who covered the façade of a prominent Sydney building with the traditional geometric markings of the Gadigal people. Using a strikingly fluorescent colour palette he defiantly foregrounded the issue of Aboriginal land rights and more broadly re-illuminated the ongoing suppression of Australia’s first people. Widespread embrace of fluoro by youth may also reflect a generational chink in the armour of Antipodean Tall Poppy culture. A recognition in youth circles that individualism, entrepreneurialism or overt displays of success no longer contravene the right to belong. Here fluoro codes a kind of collective individualism.

MANIFESTO: The conspicuous absence of fluorescence from classical art (to be fair, fluorescent paint was only conceived in the 1930s), and its growing incorporation into the contemporary scene (e.g. Archibald prize winner, Adam Cullen’s controversial work) highlights the power of day-glo to disrupt convention and to earmark acts of transgression. This is rooted in a historical association between fluoro and rebellion: 90s rave party glow sticks, the death-head lunatics in Batman Forever and the anarchic punk of Rubella Ballet, all delivering fat doses of day-glo and inciting us to rise up in the urban malaise. In this light, fluoro is a handy visual mantra for youth agitators, serving as muse, catalyst and weapon. In rude health, an orange fluoro blouse phatically arrests the gaze of innocent bystanders and, on a good day, conatively precipitates protest (averting the eyes, mental scorn, polite tutting, wild sarcasm …). This consolidates the wearer’s role as outlaw and plots them in opposition to conservative aesthetes, critics and would be oppressors.

IRREPRESSIBLE VIBRANCY & A MATURING RELATIONSHIP WITH REALNESS: The sheer visual physicality of fluorescence – its uncompromising capacity to excite the eye – can also lend brands and consumers brutal cut through in an era where bland Apple minimalism and the dull, earthy tones of the organic and real food movements dominate the aesthetic register. Shopping for natural or healthier alternatives in the supermarket, we’ve been bogged in a pious quagmire of squalid browns, reproachfully scratchy cardboards and the wiry evil of burlap (a hair shirt for your sins?). However, brands like Kiehl’s and Nudie successfully leverage fluorescence as an index (and icon) of the vitality of nature, transmuting some of its raw photosynthetic power or feel-good emotional vibrancy. Emitting radiation (light) at a higher frequency (energy) than that absorbed, fluoro packs literally bombard the eye whilst promising to wake us up with a natural burst of energy. In the wake of brands like these, the discourse of natural emergently shifts from atonement, renunciation and miserliness to exuberance, vitality and abundance. Fluoro packaging has a semiotic field day, symbolising rebellion against the worthy brown dogma, whilst channelling its alternative via mimicry and direct action.

PRO-ACTIVITY & BLINDING OPTIMISM: The earlier onset of fluoro culture in New Zealand relative to Australia mirrors the economic gap between the two nations. Hit harder by the latest wave of economic turmoil, New Zealand youth appropriated fluorescence en masse as a symbol of counter-cultural optimism and proactivity in a climate of fiscal nay saying. Fluorescent goods helped them to summon the playfulness, excess and abandon of 80s day-glo fashion or the gay naivety of fluoro kids toys, carving out an emotional solace beneath dark economic clouds. Merchants also got in on the act by daubing shop fronts and interiors with day-glo paint, unwittingly evoking corporate neon signage that blazes from the high rises of urban power centres; a message of economic might to quell consumer jitters.

CHROMO SOLIDARITY: Social media has undeniably fractured the consumer landscape, empowering a degree of personal experimentation that was hitherto inaccessible to the herd. An infinity of digital blogs feed a kaleidoscope of hyper-personalised pursuits: from tea ceremony to dogging. But fluorescence entered this heavily splintered world and brought a lick of agreement. Appropriated by legions of youth, fluoro fast became a signifier of tribal solidarity, not dissimilar perhaps to the visual language of bioluminescent jellyfish. Summoning a heady mix of optimism, transgression and unabashed playfulness, day-glo love united a generation coming of age.

Posted in Art & Design, Australasia, Consumer Culture, Culture, Fuzzy Sets, Making Sense | No Comments »

Semionaut Award

Tuesday, July 16th, 2013

The editorial team is pleased to announce the Semionaut Award for new writing in the area of culture, communication, semiotics and branding.

The winner will receive a prize, sponsored by UK based marketing semiotics consultancy Space Doctors, of $1000 USD – plus the opportunity to work on one or more applied semiotics projects for commercial clients and benefit from collaboration with experienced professionals in this field. The prize will be awarded to the winner of a short essay contest (600 to maximum 1500 words), in the Semionaut genre embodied by the pieces on the site, with deadline for entrants of 30th November 2013.

All candidates shortlisted will, like the winner, have their work published by Semionaut and receive detailed feedback from experienced analysts plus guidance on next steps in terms of Semionaut network contacts and possible career development.

The contest is open to students and fresh graduates world wide. It will be judged by a panel comprising representatives from Semionaut editorial and Space Doctors along with one of the best know names in academic semiotics internationally. The award will be based on the quality of insight, analysis and creative flair displayed in the 600-1500 word essay submitted by the successful candidate. This may, if appropriate, be supported by a larger body of work showing evidence of the skills we are looking to showcase. All material submitted should be written in English.

Key criteria in reaching the final decision will be the accessibility of the analysis and writing, with potential appeal to a non-specialist non-academic readership, and what people in the marketing and market research world call actionability – work which embodies the usefulness of this type of analysis and the things that can be done with it, in terms of brand strategy, public policy, or advancing a cause.

If you are a potential candidate for the Semionaut Award please email awards@semionaut.net for the rules and registration.

Posted in Art & Design, Consumer Culture, Culture, Experts & Agencies, Network, Semiotics | No Comments »

Beauty Serums

Saturday, July 6th, 2013

Serums have become the new elixir of beauty. Almost every brand has a serum product and they seem to be the staple of many a beauty regime. The semiotics of serums reveals a very skilful blend of semantic, packaging and product formulation codes. Serums tend to retail for over £30 for a tiny bottle, so how do the manufacturers justify the high price point? I would argue that it is a combination of factors.

First the semantics of the word serum itself is replete with positive connotations. It is a word that sounds smooth, it is onomatopoeic in the way that vindicates Jacobson’s critique of Saussure’s contention that all language is arbitrary. The sibilant ‘se’ leads into the cossetting cosiness of the ‘rum’, sumptuous to pronounce and to countenance.

Secondly, serums play upon the two sides to the beauty industry. On the one hand there is the perpetuation, and petrification of good looks. On the other side there is the fight against the onslaught of attrition, derma-abrasion and of course anno domini too.

So the positioning of the serum is essentially Janus faced. It promises to immortalize your beauty via the alchemy of the mythical elixir on the one hand. The clues are in the brand names of Elixir, Immortelle, Forever Young and Ageless. The truth of this proposition is reinforced by the idea of a truth serum, something that forces us to be sincere and the connotative links between beauty and truth traced back to Platonism and notions of Platonic forms – serums, it is insinuated help you access this deep ontology of truth.

On the other hand, serums are also a form of vaccine, or an anti-serum used for inoculation. In the case of serums on the market they are inoculating against the disease of decay and entropy. These underlying discourses are reinforced by the packaging codes in the sector. Serum packs tend to emphasize the preciousness and daintiness of the products as beauty unguents but also stress the concentrated nature of the contents, as if nutritional value had been crammed in with geological force. Serums are the royal jelly or caviar of the beauty world and packaging cues this in spades.

Analysis of serums packaging is as indebted to design thinking as to semiotic thinking. Serum packs draw upon such tricks as symmetry, golden ratio, contour bias and emotional design in order to attract customers and to buttress the high price point. There is also a subliminal link between miniaturization and premium technological efficiency that is coded through designs. As research pioneer Louis Cheskin discovered, customers tend to transfer the forms and meanings they encounter in packs to expectations of the contents. This is more important as ever more time poor consumers ruthlessly scan shelves for brands that catch their attention.

There is much to admire in serum packaging Just in terms of outward sculptural form serum product packs brands inflect category codes in a plethora of ways, some borrow from the perfume, food or technology categories or mimic objets d’arts. If you are a ‘pack rat’ (as they say in the US) or just fetishize packaging, then you’ll want to feast your eyes on some of these examples above. These packs are not prototypical of the category norm but I think do represent the variety and the imagination placed within this category. They are also a good showcase of why the siren call of beauty serums has been answered to such lucrative effect.©

Chris Arning 2013

Posted in Art & Design, Categories, Consumer Culture, Europe, Making Sense, Socioeconomics | No Comments »

Prologue to Semiofest

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

Editor's Note. Clear concise communication of what benefits semiotics can offer potential clients in the context of market research has long been a key challenge for commercial suppliers of applied semiotic and cultural analysis. Looking back on London's Semiofest 2012, the first annual gathering of commercial and academic practitioners, and looking forward to the imminent second Semiofest in Barcelona in May/June 2013, this article explores a number of questions still calling out for answers in terms that can be immediately convincing and persuasive for the non-specialist. This piece is much longer than anything we normally accept for publication (our essays average 600 words or so) but its timeliness and wide-ranging character make this an irresistible Semionaut proposition as stimulus for thought. One of the keynote presentations at this year's Semiofest is entitled "Making Semiotics Useful". That's also, implicitly, the challenge of this paper: how do we persuade people that this stuff, in all its varieties, is actually useful, comprehensible, good for something? A challenge which must, surely, speak ultimately not just to the commercial applied semiotician but also to the academic trying to persuade students of the value of semiotics-based studies and justifying research funding.

Purpose

After having attended Semiofest 2012 in London, the first global conference on applied semiotics, we have some confidence that we, as semioticians, are in a position to evaluate the global practice of semiotics in a marketing context. We are in a position also to define a range of practices and better define the term such that all applications fit within.

As semioticians, the barrier to our future success depends on our ability to simply articulate the definition of semiotics and the value it offers in business context. In order for it to be simple to understand, we must describe it without using words like synchronic, diachronic, discursive, etc. This document is an attempt to define the state of the practice to us and to the larger arena of marketing, branding and product development. The benefits of which is that we might manage perceptions of semiotics, take advantage of the opportunities as well as sell semiotics more effectively.

Background

The creators and organisers of Semiofest are clearly on a mission to unify the global semiotics community, encourage the sharing of ideas, and increase the commercial value. To date, semiotics has been difficult to promote. It has been hard to define and package nicely into a digestible proposition that all marketers can comprehend. There is just enough information out there to make it both intriguing and confusing. The promise of having a sound methodology for uncovering the meaning of signs appeals to many, but has caused its traditional definition and application to be altered, adapted and fastened onto other insights gathering disciplines (such as neuro-design, brand strategy, design strategy and traditional marketing research).

Definition and clarity about semiotics was also a challenge for the global audience of practitioners and academics at Semiofest 2012. During the event, we as a community were unable to articulate it in such a way that it served people for the variety of disciplines that find its usage meaningful. But failure to better articulate and manage the perception and relevance is a liability to all that seek to make a living from applying the ‘science of signs’ in marketing, branding and design.

A Definition of Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of decoding and recoding meaning by understanding the signs and codes manifested in culture and absorbed or expressed by each human being. The identification and interpretation of signs and codes allows us to understand the meaning and relevance of concepts and objects without the problematic task of asking people directly what matters to them. Rather, those signs and codes are confirmable by a process of deductive pattern recognition as well as use of the semiotic square for proving dichotomies between patterns that align with a common denominator of meaning. If the dichotomies do not make sense, then the quality of insights will be held in question.

It appears as though the application of semiotics can be matrixed from the decoding in insight gathering to recoding of signs in product and brand development and from the psychological analysis of human perception of the sign to the anthropological analysis of sign meaning in culture.

Schools of Semiotic Thought

We are a signifying species and we project meaning onto the objects around us. Those that follow the logic of Charles Sanders Peirce believe signs are universal and that everything is a sign. Whereas those that follow the logic of Ferdinand De Saussure believe that the meaning of a sign has purely to do with its relevance within a culture.

The Peircian approach lends itself best to an understanding of those instantaneous assessments (unconsciously or consciously) we make of objects in our world. Signs, according to Peirce, can be anything — a hand gesture, a facial expression, the painting of the Mona Lisa, the steam that comes off a hot pot, or the crucifix. The meanings of signs then, include cultural effects but also are perceived in a way that precedes culture, impacting us all the way down to the neurological and animal level. Sign interpretation reflects our self-perception, triggers unconscious emotions and stimulates our salivary glands. With this point of view, Peircians tend to focus on perception and the immediate impact and amplitude of the sign on us psychologically. The dominant themes in culture are compelling to Peircians, because they appear to confirm universal truths (or at least points of view that seem to be revealingly widespread and consistent across cultures) about the nature of perception in all human beings.

According to Ferdinand De Saussure, the sign is a symbol — already an abstraction deriving its meaning from the broader cultural signification system — the world exists because we determine it. It appears Saussure did not concern himself with questions about the nature of perception and the deeper unconscious in his definition of semiotics. Therefore semioticians following Saussure function more as anthropologists studying the communications, traditions and relationships exclusively in culture. They focus not on the immediate impacts of the sign, but rather on longer-term impacts of signs on culture. Commercial semioticians inspired by Saussure tend to see dominant themes as all too common and ultimately inclined to lose their appeal and saliency for people, triggering a creative challenging to produce ever more innovative brand communication.

For all semioticians, branding is a comfortable fit for professional application because branding is really a process of attaching meaning to a product. If a brand is successful in attaching meaning to the product and branding persuades people to buy, then they consume the sign and its meaning by consuming the product. However, due to these foundational differences in semiotic theory, Peircian and Saussurian semioticians have drifted apart, to separate hemispheres of the brand development process. The implication of this basic difference has a tremendous impact on the marketability of semiotics and the confusion about its usefulness within the industry. If we can articulate how and why each is practiced distinctly as well as identify areas for greater integration, the coherence of the offering will improve.

Peircian semiotics leads naturally to its application in synthesis phases of brand development (bringing the brand to life). Peircian semiotics and brand design share something in common. They both tend to favor the perceptual experience and immediate reaction of the consumer to the brand and product. The focus tends to be on the make-up and appearance of the physical object or artifact. Merely the idea of making design beautiful implies that there has been special attention given to the composition of elements that make up meaning. Therefore, Peircian semioticians often act as consultants in the optimization of design such that the composition of signs immediately triggers the intended response. The response may have to do with amplifying cultural relevance. But it may also have just to do with amplifying such immediate and primitive responses as salivation or emotions like anger or joy.

Saussurian semiotics leads naturally to its application in analysis and insights gathering phases of brand development. It could be due in part to semiotics staying true to its roots in abstract areas (linguistics and cultural anthropology). Saussurian semiotics tends to be used for the purposes of brand meaning or product benefit innovation. Saussurian semiotics has become applied in business application as a detection system where, through the identification of residual, dominant and emergent themes, it tracks the movement of an ideology. Saussurians thus tend to be somewhat removed from brand expression phases, because there is less focus on the nature of perception of discrete signs —the focus in more on abstract themes and codes. Semioticians that lead by cultural analysis – that is of the abstract symbolism and language – will naturally produce output that must be handed off to someone else for design translation.

Developing an integrated practice

At best, when we are uncovering insights that pay dividends, semiotics would be used end-to-end to decode meaning in culture and recode meaning to create meaningful, persuasive brands. Therefore, integrating what is best of Peirce and Saussure, promises that holistic solution.

If we are addressing the longevity of a brand that, in theory, should transcend cultural shifts, then we have to look at more universal truths. Also, if we are developing a brand in which the needs of the consumers are less about the reflection of identity and more about the resolution of deep visceral and emotional needs (such as in pharmaceuticals), then using Peircian semiotics to find universal signs that communicate the way the product or brand will resolve those needs is critical. It’s less about how one identifies with the product and more about what that product will do to rescue that individual. Perhaps the best semiotic insights will integrate both schools of thought to address both the primitive, deep unconscious and the more superficial collective unconscious – in effect, a semiotic square that integrates the psychological component and the cultural component.

Likewise, Peircian semioticians who have traditionally worked on brand expression should consider Saussure and exploration of cultural ideological shifts so they too can be involved more upstream during brand meaning and product benefit innovation projects. Spending as much uncovering cultural ideology shifts as in the nature of perception will enable Peircians to develop signs and code that fascinate consumers versus just giving them the assurance that the brand is fulfilling their needs.

What is a Commercial Semiotician?

A commercially applied semiotician is often not a singular occupation. It is a sub-occupation of an individual who is delivering to market an offering in which semiotics adds value. These are perhaps those trained in an array of qualitative and quantitative consumer research techniques that have extended their practice into cultural analysis. These might be design strategist who has recognized the value semiotics brings to demystifying the design making process and in providing logic for converting brand meaning into strategically codified design. Those that are classically educated semioticians might argue that those who stake claim are not true semioticians and part of the cause of the proliferation and dilution of its credibility and reputation. In truth however, those who do practice semiotics commercially, but thoughtfully and dutifully, who are molding and adapting the science to support their work are doing so, partially out of a desire to make a living in a burgeoning field they feel passionate about.

Being a discerning fundamentalist may be a luxury in which the semiotician is a devoted academic and not necessarily compelled to make the discipline marketable. So to many the commercial application of semiotics that originates in the European (Saussurean) academic heritage may appear to be an exclusive right as well as a premium offering reserved for the minority who are recruited by businesses with the forethought, patience and financial resources to afford to explore cultural context broadly and map out opportunity spaces for product and brand meaning innovation.

So is semiotics a methodology that can be adopted wherein rigor is maintained by adopting certain frameworks and procedures or does the semiotician require some formal training and verification?

The Barriers of Semiotic Pedigree to Marketing Application

At Semiofest 2012, one of the few top marketing experts with experience on the client side stressed how important it is for semioticians to use more common language and make the practice more accessible.

The legacy of semiotics has traditionally been academic. While it is the substance of its worthy esteem, it can be a liability if the sophistication of the offering disillusions prospective clients. The challenge then is how to keep the intellectual engine running strong, but silently ‘under the hood’ so the client can eventually take the wheel and drive forward with greater vision and clarity. If the client cannot convert the insights into more compelling brands and products, then the mainstream, commercial value of semiotics shall remain in question. Our ability to make it attractive requires that we very simply define it applicability and the benefits as well as where they fit within current conventional practices of building brands. Certainly there will be some compromises to be made in order for it adoption to increase.

Many of those who understand the power of semiotics perceive it as a premium offering for those with the luxury of spending time and money, beyond reacting to current demands from consumers and threats from competitors, exploring emergent themes to proactively insure the future relevance of their brand and products.

But expanding the market for semiotics has begun to take shape. In the U.S.A. semiotics is being used to improve the coherence and desirability of brands in their current state. Middle marketers and business unit directors value semiotics for its ability to fix brands with fragmented meaning and whose stewards have lost their way. In contrast to its luxury version, the desirability of semiotics has to do with enabling brands to deepen bonds by way of the gravity of dominant cultural themes. In fact, the emergent, intriguing cultural theme might be perceived as a somewhat risky — an untested territory of meaning. For better or for worse, dominant themes appeal to brands seeking to increase their market share in the now and who are unwilling to jeopardize their share of the category in its current state.

If appealing to the mass market is the prize, what then is the added value in rigorously decoding meaning and looking for patterns? The answer to this question requires a shift in perception and an expanded role of semiotics. In addition to operating as only an outside consultant, contracted as an analyst who informs meaning, the semiotician can further add value as a synthesist who curates meaning. In this form, the semiotician is not an outside consultant. The semiotician is rather an internal steward, insuring that the deployment of brand codes and signs are precisely meaningful and resoundingly desirable…despite the revolving door of and distance between brand stakeholders.

In fact, the ability to do so has been the pain point of many business unit directors and global brand managers seeking to build brands with the utmost care but then unsure about how well those insight will be interpreted by different agencies or others responsible for bring the brand to life in a meaningful way.

Design and Semiotics

In partnership with the designer, the semiotician can make inroads into brand expression and activation both as manifestations of brand meaning and purpose. Deeper integration of semiotics and design will enable the semiotician to become an expert in the deployment of brand design-encoded meaning that also carries with it the important cultural and consumer insights.

In general, however, semiotics for business application has been leveraged in pre-design phases and more upstream business and brand strategy planning. The challenge with this approach is that, because it connected with linguistic semiotics, there has historically been less of a clear and obvious link to recoding brand expression and design.

If this is true, then the designer is the semiotician’s ticket to greater prosperity in the business context, especially where semioticians benefit from insuring that coded meaning finds its way to the street to reflect back on to consumers what they initially found meaningful and sensorially captivating. The semiotician needs the designer to fulfill their proposition and ensure the semiotician’s insights pay dividends. Part of the promise of success in marketing application has to do with the ability to recode and see to it that meaning is re-engineered for brands. The creation of precisely meaningful design is the best semiotics can do to start to visibly demonstrate ROI as well as expand the practice into other levels of the marketing community. In order for the business application of semiotics to expand, the designer must play a larger role because they are intrinsically more connected with the brand delivery machine and the day-to-day design projects required to bring semiotic insights to life.

Conversely, semiotics offers the designer something in return — to legitimize and give structure and voice to the previously quiet and unconscious process of the designer (who might just be the most marvelously equipped to decode meaningful signs as subtle as those that show up in typography and letterform structure). With meaning decoded, the integrated team has the potential to elegantly orchestrate precisely meaningful design solutions.

The ability of the designer to function in this different, strategic capacity (distinct from the designer who is craftsman) requires they have a unique identifier – design semiotician. To earn this definition, the designer will have many added responsibilities. They have to become, as Tim Brown from IDEO describes, T-shaped – vertically integrated, with the creative gifts of a craftsman and horizontally integrated with the ability to recode semiotic insights (and business objectives) into desirable, meaningful design.

Before going forward, we must clearly articulate the differences between the design semiotician and a traditional semiotician, although the functions of the two often overlap. Any time a traditional semiotician is decoding an advertisement and looking for patterns in relation to other ads, they are behaving as a design semiotician – although the design semiotician will often be treated as a specialist, deconstructing such an advertisement to understand the meaning in details such as letterforms and photography style.

The design semiotician is both decoding visual language and recoding design solutions. The design semiotician is as different from the traditional semiotician as an archaeologist is from an anthropologist — regarding physical artifacts as crystallizations of consumer culture, such as competitive pressures and consumer desires. If life were a movie, the design semiotician is watching that movie with the sound turned off — the component of language is not a leading consideration. The design semiotician is paying more attention to immediate perceptions and emotional appraisals of signs and codes. Whereas the traditional semiotician is paying more attention to the way signs and codes reflect broader culture relevance and ideology. The design semiotician is a specialist, well suited to evaluating the quality of persuasive marketing, paying particular attention to the amplitude and theatricality of designer-choreographed signs and codes. While the traditional semiotician is paying particular attention to the context of signs and codes in culture, the design semiotician is considering that same context in addition to the context within category in which those signs and codes solicit.

In the United States, design semiotics has emerged as companies have recognized the importance of controlling the expression of brand meaning across a vast field of global brand stakeholders. Semiotics has become the backbone of the design strategist who is tasked with insuring that design expression born out of business strategy and consumer insights is as true to life as can be – and that there is someone who can create a master plan for understanding how to deploy the use of signifiers and codes.

Despite the benefits of deeper partnership and integration between semiotics and design, there remains the challenge of how to insert this expertise within the well-established, conventional chain of strategic brand communications. Those who traditionally function at the translation point between brand strategy and brand expression (the brand strategist on one side and the creative director on the other) may not be so willing to share the space. Yet there has heretofore existed a blind spot between wherein the insights are recoded and deployed in such a way that thoroughly informs the creative director as well as any other brand stakeholder responsible for managing the expression of brand meaning.

Perhaps a larger challenge to the adoption of design semiotics has to do with the unease designers feel about the demystification of the design making process. Historically, the designer has been entrusted to use their artistry to create products and brands that sell. But as the stakes rise in categories, the mysticism must be replaced by measurable and manageable design. Semiotics (decoding and recoding) has generally been well received as a form of verification and valuation of design’s efficacy.

If we can surpass the challenges stated above, design integration could create unforeseen opportunities for semiotics to add a discipline about the strategic deployment of signs and codes in the marketplace. For example, one of those opportunities has to do with capturing the interest of the shopper. Especially since the design semiotician can be to the traditional semiotician, what the marketplace is to culture. The design semiotician, (as one who has experience addressing the immediacy and amplitude of impact of signs and codes) can provide an expert point of view on the optimization of designs that rise above the noise and chaos of the store.

To do so, the semioticians must understand the rules of engagements in the store, the tactics of the competition as well as how to manage perceptions of the brand portfolio at the shelf through a visual strategy. Semioticians must also understand the conventions about how particular product and brand benefits are communicated through design—How is authenticity communicated, how is luxury communicated and how much do brands have permission to deviate, differentiate and still communicate coherently?

On The Quality of Semiotic Insights

Making semiotics more credible and worthy of the confidence of skeptical marketers was a pattern of its own at Semiofest 2012. Several semioticians, in one form or another, presented methods of making the quality of semiotic insights more measurable and parameters for pattern recognition more autonomic and controlled. There were attempts to truly capture consumer self-disclosures (without the consumer’s awareness that they are being watched) from an N the size of total population of consumers the end product intends to serve.

Thus far, the perception of relevance and truth of semiotic insights depends on the quality of demonstrable pattern recognition and deductive logic. To this point, semiotic insights based on the analysis of a single advertisements is largely debatable. Historically, semioticians have also relied upon a framework of dichotomies (the semiotic square) as a logical proof. If the dichotomies fit, then the range of meaning is presumed to be true. But there is still risk of some subjectivity. The challenge for semiotics is in creating a stronger reason to believe by providing greater evidence and proof that the decoding of meaning is logical and scientific.

Semioticians are also trying to harness and deconstruct the mechanics of sign significance shift so that we may ultimately become better at forecasting emergent themes and innovation opportunities.

There are also attempts to quantify the results with software that scans images, thereby providing proof of consistency in evaluation and scanning methods and removing subjectivity.

ROI of Semiotics

During Semiofest 2012, there was an effort not only to understand how to measure the quality of semiotics, but also to discuss the perception of reward the client perceives it to offer.

In order for return in investment to be insured there is, at best, some physical manifestation of semiotic insights that creates interest and sales. Traditional commercially applied semioticians are doing the immensely important job of understanding what is the kernel of meaning. But they are somewhat handicapped in terms of being able to evaluate the ROI if they are handing off their findings to the client. But often times, the brand development team, for whatever reason, fails to deliver on those insights. The traditional semioticians often work with creative teams to insure insights are translated effectively. But there is a limit to what can be supervised. The best these semioticians can do is inspire and empower creative teams to carry semiotic insights through to all brand communications. They are not prescribing specific element but rather outlining what elements within a range are ‘on code’.

To earn semioticians entrance into all phases of the product or brand development process requires that they cut their teeth in the broader milieu of the marketing organizational culture, using familiar marketing language and sharing in day-to-day brand deployment challenges. Semioticians have to be somewhat flexible, willing to adapt and simplify their methods to serve the needs of clients. Semioticians have to explore the category almost as much as they explore culture. They have to understand how the shopper is different from the consumer in culture. And they have to understand how to strategically deploy brands, balancing the use of culturally meaningful signs and codes with brand equities and visual signs of competitive gamesmanship.

Semiotics versus Traditional Consumer Insights

Over the past ten years there has been an increasing amount of research addressing the shortcomings of consumer insight gathering by asking the consumer directly about their unmet needs and feelings.

If there is a gradually increasing skepticism about self-report based consumer insights, then perhaps this explains the apparent appeal and attractiveness of semiotics. The promise of semiotics might be that the sign is regarded as an undeniable manifestation of those things that are meaningful to people and can be decoded and analyzed to uncover consumer values, while side-stepping the risks associated with asking the consumer directly about what they want us to believe matters to them.

While the ability to collect thorough consumer self-reports may enable brands to offer the consumer a degree of satisfaction or fulfilment, such insight does not enable these same brands to use this insight to guide them toward defining new ideological spaces that will fascinate the consumer and truly differentiate from competitors. In theory, if all brand meaning were created around fulfillment, then brands and categories would actually begin to converge in meaning around the commonly held motivations that bring people into the category – rather than differentiating from each other, to which brands commonly aspire. By using semiotics to understand human behavior and manifestations of cultural ideology, there is an opportunity for brands to identify opportunities for social disruption and finding true white space.

Another important theme in this area of semiotics versus traditional qualitative research is that self-reports do not always reflect purchase behavior. There has been a growing tide of thought-leaders who have warned us about this. Most of human experience of the world and appraisal of surroundings is processed at an unconscious level. For example, if a consumer has negative feelings about body image or financial status, we draw upon those when seeking that miracle product, yet we do not bring to the store shelf, the full weight of those emotions. On the contrary, we find ourselves delighted and intrigued by the proposition as well as taken by rational consideration about the choices. If this is true, then the best way to determine meaning is not to ask what the consumer feels. If we aren’t to ask the consumer directly, our options are either to use neuroscience to get inside the black box of the human brain to track down the powerful origin of purchase decision processing (a venture which has not yet been perfected or embraced) or we can evaluate the way that meaning and identity have been reflected in culture, precipitated in the signs and codes that resiliently withstand the test of time.

Semioticians would like you to believe that, unconscious or not, the intent and desire of people can be interpreted in aggregate through the analysis of culture and the identification of patterns of meaning decoded from human artifacts. Part of the risk of direct interface with consumers is that we can only assume the relevance of meaning to the culture or likely users. The attractiveness of semiotics to marketers likely has to do with the ability to uncover consumer insights about meaning and desire with an N so large, it undoubtedly reflects the full span of the bell-curve of the target audience. Uncovering meaning in culture promises sales volume.

Traditional consumer insight methods (i.e., ethnographies and focus groups, where consumer are asked what they need and want) can make a claim that semiotics cannot — providing marketers with the assurance of knowing that the insight came directly from the consumer’s mouth (however well that insight reflects purchase decision). Also, referring to semiotics as a true science is debatable. Absolutely, there is rigorous deductive logic, but we can never 100% guarantee that our analysis is without some subjective bias or perceptual fixation. We can never be absolutely sure that a process of uncovering every rock along the evolutionary path to contemporary relevance confirms the historical context of meaning we may have identified. Adding rigour, process and transparency constitutes one more key challenge and opportunity among the many currently facing commercially applied semiotics.

Continuing the conversation

There is no conclusion, as such, to this piece. With the second Semiofest imminent this summation of the state of play right now is deliberately inconclusive, spontaneous, open-ended. One of the keynote speeches for the up and coming 2013 fest, as the editor's note prefacing this piece indicates, is “Making semiotics useful”. Maybe that’s a key dialogue we ned to engage with right now. In the spirit of making that undeniable usefulness for clients a reality please join the conversation. Starting with short responses in the dialogue boxes to this current piece – or further essays submitted to editorial@semionaut.net picking on some of the points raised here for discussion.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Experts & Agencies, Fuzzy Sets, Making Sense, Semiotics | 1 Comment »

Vodka’s Enfant Terrible

Saturday, April 13th, 2013

A new interpretation

For a long time, Absolut Vodka dominated the vodka category. Eventually Grey Goose found a gap for innovation. Analysis of the vodka category enables definition of the following Residual, Dominant, and Emergent visual codes:

To keep this analysis concise only the leader of each category is shown below:

Originally, the vodka category drew on Russian and East European dynastic aesthetics and cultural cues to convey tradition and massivity/bulkiness (the Residual codes of vodka). There was then a period where Absolut focused on purity, which was symbolically prominent (the Dominant code). Grey Goose signalled a rupture by opening up the vodka category to a characterful interpretation (the Emergent code).

Tradition versus Character

Sobiesky (Residual) and Absolut (Dominant) packaging can be organised according to their signs into two main poles. On one side is the pole of tradition, which claims vodka as a national treasure, and on the other side is the pole of purity, which stresses vodka freshness and transparency.

Whilst textual codes, the Slavic writing on the Sobiesky bottle and the long text of Absolut, characterise the traditional category, Grey Goose subverted this by using image-based signification: a vivid interpretation of Frenchness communicated through the Tricolor colour coding and a drawn illustration of flying geese above a moving sea (the grey geese of foie gras and the nationally typical coastal/ maritime associations).

As such, the move from emphasis on textual to more arresting visual codes enables Grey Goose to keep the codes of purity – the use of the blue, the fresh air of the sea – whilst freeing it from the traditional cultural cues in order to create a characterful interpretation. Relieved from vodka’s historic heritage, the bottle shape moves from the established sense of the massive and substantial to a more refined wine bottle shape.

Purity versus Craftsmanship

Purity is a current cliché of the vodka category and the key feature of Absolut’s brand differentiation. Yet Absolut’s purity is of a particular type, an intrinsic one. The bottle’s connotations of chemistry symbolize the concentration of an extremely sanitary liquid. In contrasting with this intrinsic purity, Grey Goose cues an extrinsic, ‘crafted’ purity. Drawing on a sophisticated version of the codes of purity, Grey Goose displays a refined artistic graphic, a delicate alliance of blue and grey tones, and the aforementioned elegance of the wine bottle.

As a result, Grey Goose brand differentiation could be summed up by the semiotic square below:

Some thoughts on further innovation…

The theme of purity could be revisited through the use of raw material culturally encoded as ‘noble and pure’, such as organic white roses, to create an ‘ultra pure’ vodka and step even further away from the Absolut chemical purity.

Cueing on the precedent of Lady Gaga’s first-ever black perfume, the purity of vodka could also be distorted into innovative dark vodka.

Powerful, the theme of craftsmanship is opening the way for more global interpretations. One might imagine a Brazilian vodka made from Amazonian fruit.

Posted in Art & Design, Categories, Consumer Culture, Emergence, Europe, Semiotics | 1 Comment »

Chocolate Vietnam

Friday, November 9th, 2012

This Vietnamese chocolate pack is a perfect juxtaposition of globalized visual culture and the extraction of semiotic cues of local influence. As ethnographer Arjun Appadurai wrote: “The central problem of today's global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization… What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way…” (p. 6; Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy, Public Culture). This dialectic drives branding and design codes.

The excellent paper by Thurlow and Aiello (National pride, global capital: a social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry Crispin Thurlow and Georgia Aiello, Journal of Visual Communication, 2007) on aircraft tailfins showed how global kinetic motion vector motifs can be hybridized with local avian mythology to create national airline brands that also successfully conform to an international design idiom. A similar thing is happening here. Chocolate has for a while been becoming much less a sweet confectionary and being seen as a gourmet foodstuff. The cocoa bean usually rendered in faux naïf illustrator (as if straight off a Linaeus etching) style has become a staple image in the brave new world of bean to bar new chocolatiers. The Marou pack cleverly combines this with subtle cultural cues. The brand descriptor and historicist font used for the title is a contrivance of Gallic savoir faire. The title Faiseurs de Chocolat – is ‘made up’ French (it should be fabricants) and the square cartouche reference vaguely fin de siècle France luxury goods.

To the uneducated observer (which I still consider myself to be after only a two week stint), the main design influences in Vietnam are Vietnamese re-creations of broadly Chinese design and a re-imagined colonial France. This stunning chocolate packaging from Marou subtly references both of these traditions whilst arguably forging a delightfully charming Vietnamese confection. The building that houses the Museum of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Minh City would probably be a good example of this type of hybrid form. It is a pleasing mix of Chinese and French influences with the splayed eaves and roofing characteristic of pagodas, engraved calligraphic panels, and the cloud and transom patterns in balustrades, but with the shutters, balconies and neo classical influences of French architecture. This 1937 building, is an example of forging something distinctively Vietnamese out of semiotic resources available.

Museum of Fine Art, Ho Chi Minh City

The colouring of the pack is interesting too. The ochre yellow is ubiquitous in Hanoi and in the South. This stucco seems to be used on all the old French colonial houses. Significant now of faded grandeur, it is arguably used to re-orientalize Vietnamese products for the Viet Kieu, South Vietnamese exiles who crave romanticized views of Vietnam they had to leave behind in painful circumstances in the 1970s and because they do not now recognize their country.

Vietnam is a country still quite divided between North and South living in the shadow and the trauma of two bitterly fought colonial struggles. The North via photography and other elements martially commemorate their struggle and eventual triumph against massive odds. The South who lost the war – but appear to be winning the peace – are nostalgic about remembering what was interrupted and purged in 1976. Being publicly nostalgic has only quite recently become a possible trope in Vietnam. As cultural anthropologist Christophe Robert comments: “Indulging in nostalgia is akin to dilettantism and bourgeois loafing…After independence and reunification of the country had been achieved. Nostalgia for the bad old days was inappropriate. In political terms, and especially in Saigon and southern Vietnam, nostalgia could potentially open the door to revisionist accounts calling into question the brutal means- and the authoritarian governance of the Communist Party.” (Robert, p. 408)

When it comes to the luxury goods there is a demand from more discerning old money in both Hanoi and Saigon for nostalgia in art, interior design and packaging. It seems that the two Frenchmen who set up this brand wittingly or unwittingly tap into this vein whilst also auto-orientalizing Vietnam for foreign visitors. I picked this item up in the Sofitel in Ho Chi Minh –; at 131,000 dong, (about $5) it is definitely a chi chi item you wouldn’t find it in a normal supermarket. My cultural anthropologist colleague Christophe Robert believes that this pack would appeal only to the very pinnacle of the social hierarchy in Vietnam, those with both money and symbolic education to be able to appreciate the references. Aside from being beautifully and artfully put together, this pack seems to be a semiotic text that shrewdly pushes the right buttons both with overseas Viet Kieu diaspora, nostalgia craving rich Vietnamese and easily impressed, time pressed foreigners like me looking for swift souvenirs.

References

Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Public Culture (1990)

Robert, Christophe ‘The Return of the Repressed: Uncanny Spaces of Nostalgia and Loss in Trâ`n Anh Hùng’s Cyclo’ Positions 20:1 (2012)

Thurlow, Crispin and Georgia Aeillo, ‘National pride, global capital: a social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry’, Journal of Visual Communication, (2007)

Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Categories, Clients & Brands, Emergence, Global/Local, Making Sense | No Comments »

Two Types of Garishness (3)

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Revisiting the analyses of the Russian and London Ambassadorial interpretations of garishness from a triumphant summer now dwindling into damp autumn there follows a brief methodological retrospective on our articulation of the sartorial codes. Roman Jacobson’s communicative functions are a most useful way quickly and effectively to audit the different thrusts within the uniforms discussed. This analysis will also reveal in more rigorous terms how and why there are two types of garish that are actually quite diametrically opposite in their rationale and efficacy but that both work quite successfully.

Jacobson wrote that there were six elements in each communication situation and six functions that accounted for them. Let’s look at the two sets of uniforms individually in the light of this model. With ratings out of 10 for utilisation intensity of specific functions.

LONDON AMBASSADORS UNIFORM

ADDRESSER (EMOTIVE) – 2 low use of this function since there seems to be little celebrating London in the design, this seems subordinate to the phatic and referential

ADDRESSEE (CONATIVE) – 5 medium probably not designed to communicate any particular messages aside from friendliness, this is where the design most falls down

MESSAGE (POETIC) – 2 low use of this function, any protrusion of signs purely incidental and due to their cack handed nature rather than any purposeful intention

CONTEXT (REFERENTIAL) -7 high use of this function, referring to the Olympics context, the 2012 livery, intersecting lines and wayfinding colours

CODE (METALINGUISTIC) – N/A

CHANNEL (PHATIC) – 8 high use of this – making eye contact with the visitor to London to attract their attention

RUSSIAN FEDERATION UNIFORM

ADDRESSER (EMOTIVE) – 8 high use of this function since it seems to be a very proud effusion of Russian visual culture though difficult to decode by foreigners

ADDRESSEE (CONATIVE) – 5 medium function, probably designed to show the forcefulness and richness of Russian culture though not the Asiatic genealogy

MESSAGE (POETIC) – 9 very high use of this function because patterning is not so common in Olympic track suits and with the white sash very palpable use of signs

CONTEXT (REFERENTIAL) – 5 medium use of this – does not refer to the Olympics as much as a casual celebration of Russian culture regardless of the setting

CODE (METALINGUISTIC) – N/A

CHANNEL (PHATIC) – 8 relatively high use of this – the eye-catching contact is part of the poetic appeal

Hopefully this short analysis shows the power of semiotics in revealing nuance and savvy underlying what looks like mindless cacophony in two types of Olympic garish.

Interestingly, these versions of garish work in almost diametrically opposite ways. The London Ambassadors’ uniform has a low emotive (does not communicate London in any way) and poetic function (hotch potch of signs) while the Russian Federation uniform scores very highly on both emotive and poetic functions. Both of the uniforms privilege the phatic but the former stresses unthreatening bonhomie to addressees whereas the latter plays a subtle gambit for Russian power to assert itself in a multi-polar world.

So, in conclusion, we saw these two types of garishness at London 2012. Both were designed to project soft power but one did so (perhaps unwittingly) through the lack of design in its composition but with a universal recipient in mind. The other seems like the result of emotive nationalism, is highly indigenous and poetic in composition, was created to make an aesthetic statement flying in the face of international pundits.

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

Two Types of Garishness (2)

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

This comparison of two types of garishness at London 2012 started with the official Russian Federation Olympic uniform by Bosco. Now let us turn to the delightful confection of the Team London Ambassador’s uniform. This has been described as looking like a cross between Percy the Pig and Butlins (classic British popular holiday camp) on acid. Ambassadors were London volunteers who greeted Olympic visitors.

Even Boris Johnson felt the need to apologize for the uniforms on their unveiling in 2011. 'It's quite striking, isn't it? I hope you don't feel too ridiculous. We need to overcome our natural British reserve and be a little bit more like the Australians!’ ‘Whoever designed it needs a prize. It's positive. It's optimistic.' As usual, Johnson’s facetious, bumbling obfuscation and bluff sophistry just managed to mollify critics.

Where I think even he went too far is when he proclaimed. 'It's in extremely good taste and style, and typical of London.' Er Boris, Mary Quant, Vivienne Westwood, Paul Smith, Oswald Boateng perhaps; M Solutions based in Enfield, not so much.

So to some sort of an analysis. Firstly the colour matches that chosen for the logo, pink and magenta, to match the visual identity of London 2012 chosen for venue décor, wayfinding signage, and used for the bunting festooning London. The 70,000 Games Makers volunteers manning the stadia and ferrying around the delegations wore purple and dark orange styled by Adidas. London Ambassadors uniforms in contrast were magenta and pink. So what does pink mean today? Well, as I wrote in a piece earlier in the year the colour pink is probably more freighted now with connotations than almost any other colour. In a vibrant, chromophile’s world it has come to mean: injunction to enjoy, to consume and the capitalistic progression. There is nothing to symbolize London on the uniforms, but pink could be construed as representative of Britain: signifying casualization of labour and moral permissiveness eroding the redoubtable empire red that used to characterize the UK.

As for the magenta, the other colour, Darius Monsef in his book Colour Inspiration writes of two stripes in a rainbow flag that “a magenta (pink) stripe at the top of the flag represents sexual attraction to one’s own sex… Lavender (purple) represents sexual attraction to both sexes”. Although the Ambassador’s uniform appeared in a different context the combination of ambiguous pink and coquettish magenta served to make these Ambassadors seem non-threatening, scripting them as jaunty helpers.

There was nowhere near as much attention to detail as in the Russian Federation uniform, which for all its apparent garishness was exquisitely patterned. The ambassador’s uniform, in contrast, was sloppily put together.

The criss-crossed lines sewn into the chest reflect the energy lines emblazoned on Olympic venues, podiums and medals. On the Ambassadors shirt, however, they are an ugly scrum of rectilinearity, dividing colours. They make the uniform look harlequinesque without any of the knavish charm of that aesthetic. The i badge information set in an awkward off set blotch standing on the breast again looks obscenely clumsy. The gratuituous looking badge on the left shoulder with the Team London lettering on it.

With so much criticism directed at budget overruns at the Olympics, the Mayor’s Office may have intended to produce a cheap and cheerful uniform to deflect criticism. In the event the visibility of the uniforms brightened up the streets and created a festive atmosphere. It has been reported by Visit Britain that some overseas visitors were put off coming to the UK by stereotypes about the English being stand-offish/unfriendly. Certainly the costumes would have served to combat these impressions by deliberately placing the London Ambassadors in a subordinate, entertainment function through the over the top uniform. This was a garishness designed to disarm and to charm.

The third part of this analysis will contain summary conclusions and a methodological filtering of the two uniforms and their styles of garishness through Roman Jacobson’s communication functions model.

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

Semiotics as Art: Ryan

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Paul Ryan, “Threeing & the relational circuit” (1970’s – ongoing).

In the first ‘Semiotics as Art’ Kosuth said: “Works of art are analytic propositions”. So what of an art practice that’s all about investigating & formalizing “positional instead of propositional relationships”?

Paul Ryan (1943) is a New York based video artist and associate professor of Media Studies at the New School. Once assistant to media-guru Marshall McLuhan, full blown C.S. Peirce & Gregory Bateson adept, his work on Threeing & the relational circuit, for me, is quite spectacular as it does something I’ve not witnessed elsewhere: it lets you experience, feel Peirce’s first, second & thirdness. As semioticians we tend to think about those categories, we try to envisage them, work with them … but have you ever tried sensing their affective power?

3D Relational Circuit © Paul Ryan

The relational circuit & Threeing.

The diagram below was taken from the paper “The sign of itself” by Paul Ryan as a 2-D rendering of the 3-D relational circuit shown above.

There are six positions: a position of firstness, one of secondness, one of thirdness and three in between positions. What it does is create a continuous topological circuit in which a change of position changes the relationship. In his book “The Three Person Solution” Ryan states: “Orientation means assigned direction. In the Relational Circuit, the six positions relate to each other without the need to assign direction, that is, no up or down, left or right, front or back”. No hierarchy but heterarchy. A formal figure that once enlarged & put on the floor allows the actual practice of Threeing:

“Threeing is a way of being with two others. A formal collaborative process in which two against one dynamics are precluded. A yoga of relationships for three people where participants take turns playing three roles: initiator, respondent and mediator. The initiator works in firstness, being such as she/he is regardless of any other. The respondent works in secondness, reacting to the initiator without rhyme or reason. The mediator works in thirdness, finding patterns that mediate the interaction between the initiator and the respondent.”

The idea is that people use the relational circuit outline to move into the space it automatically creates and change positions via the continuous paths, with only one single person allowed per position and no predefined rotation, start or finish. The person which takes the position of firstness will become the initiator and so on. Ryan developed both a verbal and nonverbal practice of Threeing as well as a way to create the relational circuit alone through the use of video. The application of the practice is legion. It has already been used by public school teachers learning about sustainability, engineers searching for new jobs, professionals addressing climate change & those are but a few of the examples Paul Ryan & co. have already worked on. Conflict resolution, team building & so many other applications come to mind.

Of course there’s no circuit around Kosuth’s statement. Paul Ryan’s work currently on show at dOCUMENTA(13) – one of the biggest European art exhibitions held only every 5 years in Kassel (Germany) – cannot escape the propositional nature of art. But I doubt he’s trying to. When asked “What are you working on now?” Ryan answered “I'm trying to imagine what it would be like if every member of the human species knew how to three.” (from his artist’s notebook “Two is not a number” published for the exhibition,)

John Updike said: “What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit”. Ryan does just that & more. The work is difficult to categorize, hence the interest! Art that has practical applications is quite unique – so is using semiotic theory as the guiding principle of a relational Yoga.

For those who would like to read up on Paul Ryan’s work & writings:

On his website you'll find workshops for threeing, with positional diagrams explaining how it all works as well as his paper “The sign of itself” and his revised paper on “The Relational Circuit”. He’s been published in semiotica “Gender and Threeing , Ecology and Cyberspace”, in the American Semiotic Society Journal “Bateson , Peirce and the Three –person solution ” et al. For those that have the time there’s an hour-long interview from 1995 on youtube where Ryan tells some brilliant anecdotes about McLuhan, Bateson and others here.

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

Ugly duckling grows up

Monday, August 20th, 2012

Charles Peirce the forefather of semiotics once wrote: “Symbols grow… They come into development out of other signs, particularly from icons… A symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience its meaning grows.”(From C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, published in Danesi and Perron, 2003, p. 64)

Peirce identified an icon as a sign “which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not” (ibid, p.52). This is actually an uncannily accurate description of the 2012 logo prior to the Olympic Games. When it was launched it was a sketchy emoticon or empty cipher, voided of significance, and only negative meanings were viciously stuffed into it by cruel commentators. It became a proxy for sloppy failure in a soon to be Broken Britain. It is fair to say that circumstances have somewhat changed and this botched gestalt has grown into more gracious acclaim.

A true symbol in the Peircean sense involves meaning becoming engendered in a general mind or community of enquirers over time through habit. In one revealing passage, Peirce talks about a symbol as “the making of a contract or convention… that is, a signal agreed upon…because it serves as a badge or shibboleth”. This is particularly true of branded logos as they are condensations of meaning that need to communicate to a massive constituency. I believe this has been the case with the 2012 Olympic emblem. I would argue significantly rehabilitated in those two fateful weeks in July / August 2012. So what has changed the contract about this sign?

What changed of course is that we have just had 2 weeks of a soft power injection into the UK through the good natured competition in London – and a whole host of meanings and images have become associated with the Games which Jacques Rogge declared as ‘glorious’. Whatever you may say about the substance of the signs, this Olympics was exceedingly well branded. The emblem formed the back drop to swimming medal ceremonies, was on the scoring screens in the Excel Arena in the centre of Basketball arenas and boxing rings, on the floor of the gymnastics mat and even on the protective girdles of Taekwondo fighters. Everywhere athletes struggled, triumphed, choked, celebrated, commiserated it said, this is London 2012. Most impressively, it really came to life in material form. It was engraved on the side of the Olympic torch and the cauldron at Tower Bridge, embossed on medal podiums during victory ceremonies and in bevelled splendour on the back of the medals too.

Back in 2007 I wrote a piece in Admap to the effect that the 2012 logo was a brave departure from previous Olympic logos in terms of using metaphor rather than cultural chauvinism, but the vague motif of jaggedness and electricity had no context in which to live and grow in people’s minds. It was slated. London Design Museum founder and pundit Stephen Bayley described it as 'a puerile mess, an artistic flop, and commercial scandal'. Others compared it to Lisa Simpson performing fellatio. Then there was a scandal with Iran accusing the logo of spelling Zion, threatening a boycott. It was roundly ridiculed online and became the logo all people loved to hate.

I wrote: “To many the logo feels maladroit and sloppily put together. It is certainly true that the lurid colours made it an easy target for criticism”. The response of London and LOCOG was measured. Ken Livingstone indeed predicted it would ‘grow on us’.

Now that there is some substance to London’s stewardship of the Olympic flame (a very well organized Games, with no negative incidents, mostly packed stadia and some World Records), what looked cack-handed, cheap and tenuous back in 2006 now looks positively transgressive, highly differentiated, a token of British eccentricity.

The 4 Ms logos from the modern era: Mexico 1968, Munich 1972, Montreal 1976, and Moscow 1980 may look more polished, but London 2012 is joyfully idiosyncratic. Its design peculiarties (foregrounding the Olympiad year and making it the primary motif engulfing the Olympic rings within, using an urban design idiom rather than indigenous folk art) are now more forgivable. The emblem also seems to mesh quite nicely with the spirit of the Games: from the way LOCOG cheekily tweaked IOC protocols and deployed self-effacing humour both in the opening and closing ceremonies, Thomas Heatherwick’s inventive flame, through the festive bonhomie of the volunteers, the carnival atmosphere during events and the use of chivvying music in interludes. The Games of the XXXth Olympiad in London have had a fun, exuberant feel to them. The rambunctious defiance of the logo seems somehow fitting; and not unworthy as a mnemonic of this Games that defied skepticism with phlegmatic unfussiness. Even if it is a somewhat arbitrary sign it now captures those memories. The Team GB Lion has superseded it in populism but that's another story.

It is true that the logo did not make an appearance in the ceremonies as it has done in many previous ceremonies. One would have thought that the technical capability of diode effects available in the Olympic stadium would have been sufficient to bring the logo alive. Danny Boyle clearly found it surplus to the story he was telling and LOCOG did not insist. However, it has found its presence into the Olympic spirit in other ways. You could see it scrawled on restaurant boards and on walls as well as on merchandise of all types that people were sporting with pride. It has been adopted affectionately almost in spite of itself as an awkward emblem because it has come to represent verve and a successful cultural moment. Lampooned and satirized it may still be but it never represent failure of vision, sloppiness or seen as lacking originality.

If there is something I do admire about being British it is about being a good sport and not taking oneself too seriously. This plucky, unpromising logo now basks in the reflected glory of the last fortnight of British success and international plaudits and it has accreted connotations to match. A true example of how signs can outgrow even unpromising beginnings through cultural re-appraisal. I wonder if Peirce would like it?

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Network: Jonathan

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

Where are you, what are you doing?

I am based in the city of Nottingham, where I completed my PhD in Art and Design in 2008. I currently have an eclectic mix of work, which includes Nottingham University Bookshop, public art projects, professional research and writing in art and design practice, publications, teaching and conference papers, including Unmapping the City (2008), and a paper for an Art and Politics conference at the University of Nottingham in May of this year. I also do commercial projects for Create Research (most of my recent publications are on the site), a collaborative platform for investigating the cultural dynamics between research, learning, knowledge and networks [Please add your comments to the current material on the site, which in a nutshell is designed to evolve into a creative ecology or assemblage via the connections and interactions between all four platforms]

Freeze (2006)

What attracted you to semiotics and why did you move on?

The attraction of semiotics was its capacity to analyse, diagnose and above all create meaning(s) through different cultural registers, something which I first encountered, albeit briefly, at Semiotic Solutions in 1998, when I was asked to identify emergent codes with the potential for overcoming strong resistance in 18 – 25 year olds to investing in pensions, the problem being that there was a high level of distrust in financial institutions due to media coverage of bad practice in selling pension products (sounds all too familiar). The experience of Semiotic Solutions was to expose me to the potential of creativity per se, which subsequently led to a move into more overtly material forms of practice in art and design, and by 2002 I was embarking on my MA in Contemporary Art. As my visual practice evolved I became interested in what is problematic in representation and resistant to definition. The dynamism of Deleuze's 'materialist semiotic' offers a 'new image of thought', which for me opened up the possibilities of the sign's materiality as event – things made a come back so to speak, and the non-discursive field of practices, actions, materials and techniques came to the fore.

Why should semioticians read Deleuze and what should they start with?

I would be reluctant to say should, and with Deleuze it's more a case of do, hence his appeal to artists who aim to critique rational systems in and through their practice. I would say that Deleuze is worth reading if you are a semiotician who is open to the possibility that there might be a different kind of mind independent sign, that is, the material expressions of things themselves. In this respect, Deleuze connects expression to firstness in Peirce, and proposes that affects have a real and autonomous existence. What this requires us to do is encounter the sign as event, a lighting strike, a peacock's feathers, a sunrise, a movement from one state to another, hence Deleuze's recourse to experimental cinema as a technology for expressing the affectivity of the non-human perspective. Try A Shock to Thought; Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (2002), or Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (2006) by way of an introduction.

What are you currently working on?

An essay for the Wellcome Trust, which develops an art historical and cultural context for the artist John Newling's Moringa Trees project (commonly known as Miracle Trees). The essay will deploy an early translation of miracle as semeion 'sign' in the bible, as a basis for situating the materiality of the tree as a thing with a life of its own. Arboreal thinking lies at the root of representation of course.

Materiality, Objects, Stuff; describe your current involvement to someone who didn't know anything about philosophy?

It's about not thinking too much, get in touch with things, pick them up, feel them, experience texture, sensation, weight. Take up cooking, I used to work in a patisserie and still bake cakes every week, and sometimes to order for friends weddings and the like. Go for a walk but make yourself look in unusual directions, or simply write more often with a pen or pencil, make marks and forget about their meaning. Call me old fashioned but I am weary of information overload and find reassurance in the immediacy of things (maybe it's because I just turned 40). The more I encounter the world of stuff the more I edit out the virtual detritus of everyday life, and in turn I appreciate computer time as a higher quality of experience. If all else fails read The Craftsman by Richard Sennett, it's full of meaningful work, and semiotics doesn't get a mention.

Final thoughts?

Technology is an overused word and often overrated and yet why do we hear so little about the application of technology to non-technical things? A problem we face as a culture is a severe lack soul technology. Or maybe we should not be making the distinction between the traditional or emotional and the technical. What gets lost in a means to end culture, especially one fixated on consumption, is the ethical constitution of aesthetics, that is, the time honoured philosophical question of 'How to live?' There is a certain craft involved in approaching this question, a technique perhaps, one which entails the re-combination of all that was fragmented by the shift toward a modern, industrial society but in radically different As Marx once said 'We erect our structure in imagination before we erect in reality'. Could a materialist semiotics have an important role to play in reverse engineering the established dialogue between reality and imagination? In other words, given the infinite possibilities for creation, why is there so much stability of form?

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

Celebrating a Paradoxical Semantic Union

Saturday, July 21st, 2012

Vicky Bullen,CEO of Coley Porter Bell wrote an interesting piece on the Union Jack where she looked at its use in branding and a poll on how consumers feel about it.

Refreshingly, she focused not on the cultural meanings (xenophobia, patriotism) in the flag but on the visual signs that make it up. She writes:

“In pure design terms much of its power derives from an optical illusion… this has created a dynamic, multi-layered design which draws the eye in to the intersection of the three crosses and rewards it with all sorts of interesting shapes and angles”

If you look at international flags there are some rudimentary schema through which they are arranged. For instance, many flags follow France with a tricolore schema with three equal vertical strips, others with three horizontal bands. Some flags have a central unifying area to which the eye is drawn – Japan, Korea and Brazil would be prime examples. Other flags create schema that compartmentalize information like the Stars and Stripes. Some flags have a central line and an isosceles triangle off left, South Africa, for example – there is an off-kilter messiness to these which is not really compensated for by visual complexity and involvement. I hope I do not come across as a chauvinist but the Union Jack does complexity and dynamism in spades.

What the Union Jack does brilliantly is to simultaneously combine symmetry, or at least balance, with an interesting tension. Involving a series of intersecting lines, it has both a centrifugal and a centripetal force to it. It forms a rough schematic and is segmented into four sections but at the same time these are cohesive. This connotes both segmentation and a central axis of unity.

In a sense this is visual metaphor for the reality of the Act of Union, an uneasy co-existence of identity shards. A comedian recently said that it is a country no-one really wants to be part of. The English are phlegmatic, the Welsh simmering with resentment and the Scots positively contemptuous. Only half of Northern Ireland cares about the Union and that is only really to piss off the Irish Republicans in their midst.

The Union Jack is one of the few flags that seems to disrupt its own bounds. It aspires to break through its borders and even out of the 2D flat plane, creating a sense of outward protrusion and impact. It is brilliantly centrifugal and this combines with depth of field because the diagonals are layered underneath the cross to make it a much more engrossing semiotic phenomenon than most other flags – those, for example, which direct your eye to a single symbol, divide the plane up into three equal orthogonal segments or are partitioned into stripes and carve out a special corner zone.

All of this means that the Union Jack (or Union Flag, to give it its proper title before I vex vexillologists out there and you start to correct me) has high semantic density.

“The semantic density of something is the measure of how much information it conveys in relation to its size or duration. The higher the semantic density, or the more semantically dense something is, the more information it packs into the given space or time.” (Andy Bradbury, Neurolinguistic Programming). I always like to give the examples of an average Indian street sensorially – semantically dense – also I like to think that Japanese culture is probably the most semantically dense on Earth. If you were to download the whole of Japanese culture into a digital file (with Tokyo’s dizzying annual output of magazines, films, music and books) it would be very heavy!

Without wanting to get too technical, there are different types of semantic density, pertaining to the way meaning pools on, say, a 2D frame. The litmus test is what will distort the meaning. Sometimes meaning is condensed in a cultural symbol, (symbolic density) sometimes distributed in the schema, as with the tessellations of Islamic architecture – schematic density. Sometimes meaning is distributed through the entire visual field. Where some flags have one density type, the Union Jack seems to be finely poised between density types, keeping the eye busy flipping between them.

The flag hints at schematic density via indexes of the diagonals pointing like arrows whilst also imbuing the flag with transgression through breaking framing of the flag (a mereological density), through spilling over the cordon which most flags respect.

It is also a flag brilliant suited to inflection, which brands have only just started to see the potential of. Both Innocent and Sainsbury’s have seen the explosive potential of the Union Jack to render their messages more dynamic and seemingly youthful in their thrust. To be fair, this sense of explosive potential has always lurked latent in the Union Jack and is definitely one of the reasons it has become both a counter-cultural and a xenophobic symbol. At the same time brands like Ryvita can, in this fetching limited edition pack, exploit the wrapping, ribbon-like qualities of the flag.

The closest parallel to this uptake of the national flag is that of the humble Canadian maple leaf – which becomes much less humble in the hockey team logo context! The Union Jack has almost gone the reverse route – becoming more homely as required. Bullen notes the flexibility of the Union Jack (whichever fraction of the flag used it is instantly recognizable) and its iconic density – it is a flag easily inflected and sampled from, which is also true of the Maple Leaf. As a nation we’re not as comfortable with the flag yet as Canadians are with their flag. There is antipathy towards some of the Union Jacks’ anachronistic connotations while the Maple Leaf was crowd sourced in a national competition so is more indigenous. Even so, it is worth exulting in the Union Jack’s inventive design if nothing else.

Posted in Art & Design, Clients & Brands, Culture, Europe, Fuzzy Sets, Making Sense, Semiotics | 1 Comment »

Semiotics as Art: Kosuth

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

Joseph Kosuth, “one and three chairs” (1965)

The relationship between semiotics and art has always fascinated me. Talk to a museum director about the semiotics of art and there’s a chance you might get a sneer. Too eager to reach for the gun of “meaning”: “Art isn’t always about what it means”. Talk to a semiotician about the art of semiotics and there’s a chance you’ll get a sneer again. “it’s more science than it’s art, there’s a methodological approach”. Don’t get me wrong. The museum director has an interest in semiotics and has read up on it. The semiotician has an even more pronounced interest in art, having found that nearly all semiotic thinkers (s)he studied, at some point, tackled the ‘semiotics of art’. So there’s already that: the preposition used already conjures up a judgement of perspective. Semiotics in art, of art. What fascinates me even more though is semiotics as art. Numerous artists have done it. The best known in both spheres, as far as I can tell, is Joseph Kosuth. American conceptual artist, thinker & writer who brought us ‘One and three chairs’ in 1965. He was just 20 at the time. I’m quite certain you know it, have seen pictures of it or perhaps seen it live. The work presents itself in a threefold, with a life-size photograph of a chair, the actual chair in the same spot as it was photographed in and a blown-up photograph of a dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’. Admittedly I’m guilty of having used it in the past to explain what semiotics is all about. There are worse examples to explain signifié/signifiant/ référent with, but is there more to it?

Well, for one: it makes me smile.

It makes me smile every time I see it. Which is quite something in itself. It also makes me think about both art & semiotics, every time I see it. Apart from the numerous reproductions, I finally saw it for the first time live @ the London Frieze Art Fair in 2010. It didn’t have the chair from the photograph used here, but it was the same work. The actual work exists as a piece of paper with instructions how to install it and a copy of the dictionary definition ‘chair’ signed by J. Kosuth. It’s up to the curator or gallery owner to set up the work. In Kosuth’s own words:"It meant you could have an art work which was that idea of an art work, and its formal components weren't important." (1) Together with Marcel Duchamp, Kosuth is one of the godfathers of conceptual art, nay, of art as we know it today. The reason being their profound questioning of the relation between presentation, concept, idea, meaning. ‘One and three chairs’ became a seminal piece after Kosuth published “Art after philosophy” (you can read it on ubuweb here)

“Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context – as art – they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art.”(2)

Kosuth investigates what it means to make art, to experience art, to think about art, to see it as a global model for language and culture. If you substitute the word ‘art’ in most of his writings by ‘sign’ you’ll find yourself reading a text on semiotics. Which for semioticians might not be such a revelation, but remember stating the obvious is always a retrospective action.

“If one wanted to make a work of art devoid of meaning, it would be impossible because we’ve already given meaning to the work by indicating that it’s a work of art” (3)

At the time, Kosuth’s work raised a lot of questions and he got his fair share of criticism too, but that was what he was after. Raising questions. Using text as art was already questionable, using photography just as much, let alone using both in the set up discussed here. There’s a great focus in Kosuth’s work & writing on the ‘agency of the artist’ where the work of art is dependent upon the art context and the denomination as art by the artist. For me that’s semiosis, pure. A sign dependent on the context and its identification by the user, with the user as its relational agent. Where Kosuth quotes Wittgenstein in ‘Art after philosphy’: “The meaning is the use” I just read Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio in ‘Semiotics unbound’: the meaning of a sign is a response. (4)

For me, Kosuth is the perfect answer to any museum director that wants to deny the meaning or function of art, even if the latter does it in jest. And, although, I’ve not come across a quote or text where Kosuth refers to his practice as a semiotic one I cannot see any difference in his investigations. Can you?

If you want to read more about Kosuth this is a nice start: Moma – Kosuth

(Another article, Semiotics As Art: Paul Ryan’s relational circuit & Threeing will follow in the near future).

(1) Siegel, Jeanne: Artwords. Discourse on the 60s and 20s. (Ann Arbour/Michigan 1985)

(2) Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” in Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1960–1990 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991)

(3) Joseph Kosuth, “Introduction” in Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1960–1990 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991)

(4) Introduction of Semiotics Unbounded, interpretive routes through the open network of signs (UTP, 2005)

Posted in Art & Design, Europe, Fuzzy Sets, Semiotics | 2 Comments »

Semiotics and the interface

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

The fields of semiotics, human-computer interaction (HCI), and user experience have flourished in the past years, mostly exclusively of one another. Each has evolved into fields of study for both business professionals and academics–semiotics from academic roots, user experience from business, and HCI from a mix of both. Many thinkers have tackled the subject of semiotics and the digital experience with impressive rigor, but few have applied their insights to a strategic business setting. As user experience and interface designers focus on delivering comprehensive documentation to their clients, there is a disconnect between business objectives and how the proposed design speaks through its interface.

For the purposes of this discussion, we can define “interface” as anything that filters information and re-presents it in a meaningful way. The implications of such a broad definition are that the interface is something that both provides access and mediates information. As such, this interface is an active force and influential factor in the relationship between objects and their representations.

In the results-focused world of user experience and interface design, it is easy to forget the nuances of meaning amidst interface and experience. The end goals of user experience and interface design are to create a means by which users of software can access information in a way that is meaningful, intuitive, and serves the objectives of the software creators (or a brand). In certain cases, these two objectives can conflict with one anther.

Take for example a financial services company whose audience includes a segment with particular interest in travel. They are older, retired people with the leisure time and money to take vacations around the world. The brand’s website is focused mostly on product offerings, which are of fleeting importance if they are not linked to core audience interests. There is a conflict between the business, which wants to sell products, and this audience segment, who want to know how best to allocate funds to leisure activities. The company needs a way to communicate with its audience in a way that is meaningful for them, within the context of their interests. This is a semiotic challenge, but brands seldom think about business problems in terms of meaning production.

The company might go about solving the problem by adding some travel information on their website, writing a couple blog posts on popular travel destinations, and starting to talk about travel on Facebook. This approach is short-sighted, specifically because it does not consider is the entirety of the digital experience. It changes the interface at a few touch points but fails to positively affect the more wide-ranging brand interaction in a way that an approach informed by semiotics might. Perhaps a better approach would be to reframe certain products within the context of travel and leisure, without specific attention to a particular channel. The difference is that the second approach is integrated into all the brand’s interfaces; it’s a systemic change rather than a manipulation of limited touch points.

I see the main benefits semiotics can provide in a business setting residing in this idea of contextual manipulation. Business and design problems are rarely so singular and isolated to warrant limited solutions; however, at the same time, companies are hesitant to entertain systemic changes because of budgetary reasons or the anxiety caused by thinking about their brand as a constantly evolving entity. Professionals who are influenced by semiotics should work to better establish a theoretical framework that makes sense to clients and can be executed in a business setting. They should elucidate how their colleagues are actually semioticians, even if they don’t articulate it or even know it. The first step toward incorporating semiotics into a business setting is to strip away its esoteric qualities.

This topic will be explored further in a forthcoming essay.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Clients & Brands, Emergence, Experts & Agencies, Semiotics, Technology | No Comments »

Shinkansen & the Myth of Progress

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

What travels with the stealth of a Lexus and at Formula 1 speed and has a hospitality trolley? The Shinkansen, literally meaning “new trunk line” but very quickly dubbed bullet train by Western pundits, is an important semiotic property in Japan. The Super Express is a talisman that keeps Japan moving literally and mythically.

According to Wikipedia: “The Tōkaidō Shinkansen is the world's busiest high-speed rail line. Carrying 151 million passengers a year (March 2008),^[4] it has transported more passengers (over 4 billion, network over 6 billion)^[5] than any other high speed line in the world” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen.

These sleek trains were inaugurated in 1964 – a blue riband year for the Japanese in that it, very much like the 2008 Beijing Olympics, seemed to set the seal on the Japanese post war resurgence. Travelling at over 210km per hour, it was by far the fastest rail transport then available and must have impressed travelling visitors as to how far Japan had come. Whilst no longer on its own as the fastest train in the world (the French TGV is faster and China have a Maglev which travels at 420kmph, though the Japanese still hold the record for the fastest ever maglev), the Shinkansen is still a paragon of silent speed and service, with spotless safety record.

Japan has a fleet of over 1500 Shinkansen trains that criss cross Japan every day taking Japanese businessmen from Tokyo to Osaka or reuniting families over the Golden Week or Obon holidays. The speed and perfect punctuality of the Shinkansen certainly seem to the outside observer as a reminder of the robust infrastructure underpinning Japan despite the long term recession and the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear radiation leak. It is the most palpable sign of technological prowess in a country that has lost some of its reputation for being vanguardist and visionary. It almost seems as if the Shinkansen train functions as an eternal rebuke to these doubts. It says something that the names of these trains depending on how often they stop on the trunk line, NOZOMI (meaning hope), HIKARI (meaning light) and SAKURA (cherry blossom) represent positive and galvanizing messages to the Japanese passenger and the public at large. The Shinkensen is a project that subject to continual renewal – the trunk line has just been extended into Kyushu and there are plans to build and extension to the most Northern island of Hokkaido as well as to upgrade the Tohoku line to faster speeds.

As goes the Shinkansen line so goes progress in Japan.

What is most noticeable about the representation of the Shinkansen is the idea of forward progress through sleekness and contemporaneity of its plastic design profile.

From the needle like fierceness of the grey and blue 500 series to through the latest pantograph platypus billed 500 series to the outrageous, exaggerated nose cone of the E5, the design of Shinkansens, despite owing partly to aerodynamic logic is becoming increasingly aggressive; each design seeming to outdo its predecessor. The E5 being advertised as “Made from Dream” is actually positioned as more like a transatlantic or private airliner than a train – the seats will be lavishly upholstered and service to match – it is true that Shink travel has the best of flight without the hassles.

Advertising by JR lingers languidly on the flaring and scalloped flanks of the train nose cones. The new 700 series and the coming E5 have become the centerpiece of promotional work that focuses not on where you’d want to travel but simply on riding this train. A pamphlet for a season ticket shows in aerial shot the immensity of the front section – like a sperm whale’s head with the sly concision of the canopy hood set off against the albumen like fuselage looking like something out of Star Wars.

Another JR poster shows two E5s gracefully passing each other against a black background almost like two automated swans gliding on the tracks. Grace and functionality: two underlying values that are most prized in Japanese aesthetics.

The thorax of the beast is very rarely shown. A semiotic perspective would suggest this is because the sinewy, muscular design of the Shinkansen seems totemic of the notion of forward propulsion. Shinkansen is an index for the future or at least a very strong metaphor for forward progress and a belief that the future is bright. On the pamphlet showing the E5 the arrows, pure indexes (as Peirce said, the sign that signifies not be convention but by blind compulsion), relate to the idea of speed but also to the idea of a smart card being a progressive idea for the new generation.

My recent trip shows that the Japanese government and local tourist centres are assiduously promoting domestic tourism. Shinkansen ads in 2012 carry a new slogan that say (Nihon ni Tsunagou – “let’s join up Japan”) and on the flank of a Joetsu line Shinkansen was a message of hope to stricken prefectures of the Tohoku region. though Japan already perhaps the most comprehensive train coverage in the world.

There is clearly a lot of goodwill towards the Shinkansen in popular culture. You can buy Shinkansen chocolates in long tubes at station shops, there is also a book and DVD made for children that goes through the chronology of the Shinkansen, the successive series and how they are assembled with a cockpit view. There is even a Shinkansen museum, I believe in Nagoya, where you can see the original 0 series snub nosed 1964 trains and learn about the background and the original blueprints.

Whilst there has been some disruption to services and may be some trouble on the line ahead, nation Japan does not seem to be hitting the buffers quite yet and the Shinkansen – a bullet (train) that tapers at both ends – is a powerful semiotic force that acts as both persistent proof of this and as a motivating impetus into the future.

Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Emergence, Making Sense, Semiotics, Socioeconomics, Technology | No Comments »

Vehicle body art

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

Vehicles on Indian roads talk. Almost every vehicle is embellished either with images on the body or with accessories within. There is general disapproval for the plain vanilla factory made look. It is a rather inviting tabula rasa on which story of one’s identity must be etched. After all, buying a car is a milestone and historically it does mark the class transition from belonging to the plebian crowds who access public transport to becoming somebody who can afford their own private means. The nature of the images and the embellishment do tell you many stories. Stories about the life journey of the owner; how they got there and what they feel about it. How space is shared or rather grabbed on the road can be read as a mini snapshot of the class dynamics of this society.

I will pick up two sets of vehicles and two popular images and embellishments typical to them. Privately owned cabs which are leased out to the driver and the mid range sedan which are favored by those who have recently risen above the harried middle class.

Privately owned cabs for all practical purposes belong to the driver who works them hard so that he can have money left over after paying the daily lease sum and the fuel & maintenance costs. While on the face of it he can pull off a certain amount of status & posturing within his community about practically being the owner, the joy runs a bit shallow. He finds himself working harder & harder to beat the terms of the lease and save himself a respectable income. This pseudo ownership is nothing but a cuckold. The vehicle being experienced as a cheating girlfriend rings true at many levels. In a society where ‘ownership’ of a heavily bedecked woman lends status gives further credence to this parallel. Each cab is lovingly decorated with colorful tinselly frills and the stickers with sad romantic couplets complete the story of the driver being the jilted lover – all because he spends such long hours on the road. A pair of heavily made up blue eyes painted at the rear of the vehicle is significant at many levels. It is blue signifying the much desired white woman fantasy complete with all its loose morality associations. It is placed at the rear where it is looking on at the vehicle behind – at the ‘other’. The eyes seem to guard the rear alluding somewhere to the vulnerability experienced on the road. Is it the vulnerability of the pretender?

In contrast the theme of embellishment of the sedan alludes to the sense of snug security of those who have just arrived. The car is a protected cocoon, sealed off with its rolled up windows & tinted glasses warding off unwanted eyes looking in. Comforting softness of this world is further accentuated by velvet cushions and soft toys placed on the parcel tray, looking out at the world through the rear windscreen as though mocking the sweat, dust and grime of the road. It mimics the untouched innocence and hyperbolic snugness of the nursery.

When these worlds come together, predictably there is mayhem which is known as Indian road traffic; also known as the most dangerous sport in the world! [Apparently it is drawing visitors from round the world as an extreme sport.] When the soft, pink cushioned world of the sedan mocks the violated fantasy of class transition, testosterone is bound to flow. The rash and aggressive driving of the overworked cabs in turn mocks the fragility of the cushion & soft toy brigade. And the troubled co existence of the classes and masses that have been denied transition continues.

Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Consumer Culture, Culture, Making Sense, Socioeconomics | No Comments »

Escape the Map

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

There's always been something slightly sinister to Google Street View and it isn't just the surveillance aspect. Perhaps it is the perpetually sunny sky (Street View vehicles cannot operate in the rain) or maybe the navigation commands that never quite feel intuitive. Google Street View makes no effort to replicate the motion of how we typically experience the city — on foot or by car. A mouse click to the arrows on the ground jerks you forward at a distance far longer than the average stride. With a gravity of its own, impossible weather, and a population of spectral faceless beings — blurred to protect their identities — it is not a world anyone would ever like to live inside.

Maybe your image exists in Google Street View already: blurred and frozen in time. "We call them echoes," says the mysterious woman in Escape the Map, the interactive video produced by Mercedes-Benz. She warns that "time works differently here" — you might find an image of yourself from four days or four years ago… but "relax."

In the film, you are navigating a vehicle through a representation of Hong Kong on Google Street View. The woman — Marie — has just removed a mask that disguised her to look like the other blurry-face people outside. Now she sits in the passenger seat, offering instructions to "escape the map." You risk getting captured by the camera, which will turn you into one of the hopeless blurred people on the streets — faceless and trapped in motion like the victims of Pompeii. Google Street View is never named, but director Carl Erik Rinsch (soon to make his feature film debut with 47 Ronin) exploits all its familiar quirks. A character appears badly rendered and you instructed to "put him together" to advance. Giant red pins that look like Google Map markers come crashing from the sky.

Google Street View could be a geospatial corollary to the Uncanny Valley hypothesis (which suggests that as artificial life grows more lifelike, it also seems eerier, more "uncanny"). In the Mercedes-Benz making-of video, the team explains how they mimicked Street View's aggressive navigation and used green screens to replicate its world. Interestingly, they point out the final touch was to "recreate the harsh midday light of the application." How ironic that advanced technology was employed to create the appearance of sunshine in Google Street View. It is unreality presented on a computer screen as the world outside our window.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Brand Worlds, Consumer Culture, Header Navigation, Lateral Navigation, Making Sense, Technology | No Comments »

Blue: the grown-up face of green concerns

Monday, January 16th, 2012

How best to banish those January blues? By tackling the problem head-on, perhaps, with a brief note on the semiotics of colour.

A recent article in The Economist makes a pertinent observation about the motor industry’s colour of choice when communicating its green credentials – isn’t it interesting that it’s not, well, green? Fiat, Mercedes-Benz and (most notably in the UK at least) Volkswagen all favour blue when it comes to matters environmental.

The colour blue has about as many direct and associative meanings as it has shades, but in the commercial world at least, one thing is clear – when it comes to corporate identity, blue is a safe bet. Among other things, it lends gravitas and austerity to Barclays and a slew of financial services brands; it connotes cool, clear thinking at IBM; and it has become the de facto colour of social networking thanks to its adoption by Facebook and Twitter. In combination, these codes help elevate the colour blue to a potent signifier of collaborative professionalism – what organisation would not want to project that about itself?

A recent brand renaming exercise at a previous agency saw a client spend tens of thousands of pounds over several rounds of research, only to pull the plug, resolving instead to “just stick the existing name in blue”. Blue, it seems, was the only thing that everyone could agree on – when making the right decision seems hard, choosing blue at least mitigates against making the wrong one. Or, to put it another way, nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, and neither did the guy who chose to write the logo in blue.

Here in the UK, boardroom scenes in the TV series The Apprentice are colour graded to enhance blueness, presumably in the hope of encouraging audiences to take more seriously ‘Captain of Industry’ Lord Sugar and his pageant of hapless wannabes. Watching the show won’t teach you much about making your way in the workplace, but it will leave you in little doubt that Blue Is The Colour Of Business.

When powerful commercial codes of blueness are yoked to the elemental associations of pale blue with the life-giving forces of water and sky, it is clear why blue should become an irresistible choice for organisations keen to demonstrate that they are serious about getting green. Perhaps the shift to blue is also a belated sign of a cultural change that has been underway for many years. The green movement is growing up: no longer the reserve of a niche of dedicated ‘cabbage patch’ activists, it is now big business, with major organisations increasingly embracing it as a core element in sustainable strategy.

Source: http://thinkblue.volkswagen.com/blue_projects/blue_symphony

Posted in Art & Design, Clients & Brands, Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence, Europe, Making Sense, Semiotics | 1 Comment »

6 Theses on Pinkification

Saturday, January 14th, 2012

Don't know if you’ve noticed but pink is everywhere in the semiosphere at the moment. There is a glut of lurid slap on every merchandising surface. It hides in typography with grey blue tints and appears as blocks of background colour.

Here are 6 theses on pink:

1. Pink is the new orange. If the 1990s heralded Orange as the colour of the growth decade and a shorthand for progressive premium quality, is pink the more knowing and complicated hue for an era of sluggish consumption, a less optimistic more jaded shade of the future? Are we following Japan where pink has been the colour of kawaii in a country in hock to saccharine tweeness and where femininity combines the soft mothering and sexualized within broadly the same colour palette?

2. Pink is the new solicitude. The colour has become a lazy shorthand for cordiality and attunement to customers. It says: ’We are clued in and brand-conscious’. Interesting for me in this context is the dramatic shift from red to bright pink in “For sale” signs in Central London for the post Christmas sales, almost as if the frequency with which struggling retailers place items on discount makes the less shrill and aggressive pink more apt. Pink, shorn of purely girly connotations, is in a very strong position as a default colour; it has arrogated to itself a whole range of communicative contexts. If we use the Roman Jacobson communicative functions framework, currently pink seems to have a footprint that covers the referential (to all the pink connotations of femininity), the conative (hedonistic prodding) and the emotive (the desire to be playful on the part of the communicating entity). It is also very phatic (gregarious contact with the viewer) holding the attention.

3. Pink is infinitely adaptable. Pink bends the communication context to its corrosive will. It is the dominant colour for the 2012 Olympics where it is used as a neon substitute to signify the electrifying, youthful energy. It is used in other government communications where it would have been frowned upon in previous years, notably in Community Alcohol Partnership, Business Birmingham. It seems to have become the hue of young, consumerist exuberance hue alongside bright yellow for music media titles such as We Love Pop to Viva but is also the colour of choice for magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan. Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall uses the same yellow pink colour scheme for his new vegetarian cookbook. Brands such as HMV and T-Mobile use it as their signature colour but it is also becoming more acceptable for luxury brands to use with marques such as Swarovski and Storm using it prominently in recent print advertising Professional services have also fallen for the lure of pink with even upstanding legal firms such as Maitland Walker opting for the colour. Pink seems to be all the rage at the moment – the ultimate backlash against all types of chromophobia.

4. Pink is becoming more variegated and nuanced in its sub codings for femininity. There is the lurid bright pink of Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga and Jordan. In this context, pink is the burlesque of knowing, self-parodying play with an alibi and self-empowerment to the earnest livid red of the Mae West striptease. It has become the colour of giddy hedonism. An event called Ultimate Girls’ Day Out, a jamboree of fashion, giggles and make overs – a sort of hen do in a marquee – uses the colour on its website. Then there is the rose coloured pink of vulnerable matronly femininity of such as sanitary towels, pregnancy tests and pessaries. In the UK, Superdrug seems to use pink to position itself as the more girly and accessible alternative to Boots through use of pink. This is pink as squeamish and vulnerable. Then there is the lavender of purple shades of more mature womanhood such as used in the film poster for the Iron Lady. This is pink as imperious, sagacious womanhood, Laura Ashley without the chintz. Again, this is not all startlingly new but as pink becomes more prominent coding of meaning becomes more explicit.

5. Pink is both the sign of soft, emotionally intelligent masculinity as much as it is aggressive femininity. In terms of the latter, pink has become the testosterone wash of emasculation in a culture of ‘misandry’. In Katie Price’s TV show, one scene showed her forcing male contestants to strip down to lurid pink briefs. The loud, pink office shirt has long been a sartorial signifier of what could be called ‘brave intimacy’. An emergent male quality. Interesting in this connection is the recent emergence of pink as sports strips. Everton FC now have a pink away strip. The Juventus away kit and Stade Français’s rugby team’s shorts are also pink. Does this indicate that pink is on the one hand becoming the new grey and not worthy of notice, on the other a sign of strength?

6. Pink is contentious and ambivalent in the context of feminism and femininity. It is both the cladding of the new Amazonian media monstrosities mentioned above and the wry, scurrilous spray paint of their detractors. A range of recent books decrying the state of womanhood all use pink – presumably ironically – in the cover art. Living Dolls by Natasha Waters, The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy all use pink either as the typeface colour, background or as an accenting colour in their paperback editions. Is pink double coded, or even polysemous or are these authors thwarted by their desire to position their books as current and funky? I fear they’d be upset by the insinuation. There is certainly great ambivalence towards the colour. PinkStinks.org.uk has been set up to expose and excoriate the prissiness, princess culture. Recently on Facebook, there is a popular video showing a little girl astutely decrying the marketing of pink to girls.

Posted in Art & Design, Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence, Europe, Making Sense, Semiotics | 2 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).

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Just Radical Enough

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

Banca Cívica is a recently created Spanish bank, originally an offshoot of the semi-public regional savings bank, Caja Navarra (CAN), which itself became well-known through its policy of allowing its customers to choose which charity would benefit from the interest accrued on their money (a first in Spain). However, while remaining linked to its mother institution, Banca Cívica has become a self-standing bank, which suggests that CAN is trying to expand beyond the limits imposed by its regional identity.

This (below), I believe, is a representative sample of Banca Cívica’s introductory campaign.

The campaign is mostly text-based, using messages in a typography and colours that imitate urban graffiti – so convincingly, in fact, that many people have taken them for actual graffiti. It should be however noted that this is ‘tasteful’ graffiti – words are correctly spelt, and the colours are Banca Cívica’s corporate colours – pink and purple, remarkable in themselves given their feminine connotations, quite unusual in the banking industry. This feminine connotation is no doubt connected to the way in which Banca Cívica defines itself as an organisation that is ‘different from other banks’ in its social concerns and its transparency.

In addition, the typography used to imitate graffiti does not resemble any forms usually employed by graffiti artists, but rather is partially reminiscent of the typographies created by Spanish avant-garde designer, David Delfín, and ultimately of the source from which many Spanish designers have drawn, directly or indirectly: Javier Mariscal, well known for his thick traits and naive, child-like visual style.

Obviously, Banca Cívica’s target audience is not the graffiti artist demographic. But its target audience – 30 to 40-year-old urban upper-middle class – can aesthetically identify with a softer, more chic and palatable version of graffiti. Likewise, Banca Cívica provides a ‘non-radical’ version of solidarity and cooperation with which middle-class professionals can feel comfortable: the message being that capitalism is not incompatible with social concerns (in fact, this is the idea at the core of the entire notion of Corporate Social Responsibility).

An index of this ‘capitalistic’ conception of cooperation is the emphasis placed by the campaign on the first person singular: “I should be able to decide which charity”, “They should tell me how much they make from MY dough”. This is a trait which Banca Cívica inherited from CAN’s breakthrough strategy of allowing its customers to decide exactly which charities to sponsor. And again in Banca Cívica this trait signals a considerable difference both with respect to other banks and with respect to other organisations dealing with social problems, such as NGOs. The idea seems to be that the same individualistic, self-interested and demanding attitude that a bank’s customers have with regard to their own money can be applied to a bank’s social action: that transparency and customer choice also apply to charity. Banca Cívica’s campaign is meant to visually encode this idea by means of an aesthetic which can be described as alternative but not too much so – (relatively) innovative but not in a radical (i.e. threatening) way.

Posted in Art & Design, Categories, Clients & Brands, Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence, Europe, Making Sense, Semiotics | No Comments »

For the love of lycra

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

Superheroes, cyclists and Trekkies all have one thing in common. Spandex. An inconspicuous anagram of ‘expands’ (though rightly so, since the fibre can reportedly stretch – prepare yourself – up to six hundred percent!!), spandex was invented by a man called Joe Shriver at DuPont in 1959. In the UK, it is almost generically referred to as Lycra. But the assumption superheroes wear spandex isn’t quite right. And that’s not because Batman, these days, wears Kevlar.

The earliest superhero comics (such as Superman in 1938) actually pre-date the invention of spandex by two decades. Dupont did, however, have a nice line in nylon stockings round about that time. Captain America’s patriotic array (1941) perhaps owes more to the tradition of hosiery than even he’s been told. Along with super-heroes and heroines, glam metal bands (Queen, Van Halen, Bon Jovi) and travelling contortionists have all helped stretch and sling spandex and its (usually aggressively trademarked) sibling incarnations off the historical trajectory and out towards the wastepaper basket of clothing history.

Except they haven’t. Not nearly. The re-birth of the contemporary Flandrien (or so s/he’d like to think) and its brutal alter-ego the ‘lycra lout’ has anorak-flashed spandex into the eyeballs of an unsuspecting British public once again. What maddens so many people – cyclists and non-cyclists alike – about this trend is the ludicrous aroma of accomplishment that somehow wafts from inside a vacuum-packed bicycle tight out on public parade. Men in Lycra will limb around art galleries and buy sandwiches ‘to stay’ and fetch kittens from trees and they’ll do it all wearing groinal cling-film that manages off-puttingly to show precisely nothing and absolutely everything at exactly the same time. It’s hard to launch a complaint against that kind of contradiction.

But the world of spandex is a wonderful and diverse place. Spandex also lies at the apex of contemporary culture’s anxious compounding of sex and idiocy (Diesel and American Apparel ad campaigns are a case in point), and the normalisation of the fetish that underlies the strange success of Zentai (full-body, skin tight garments that will help you look like Morph from Take Hart without the eyes). There’s a video out there that shows a pitch-invader in an all-green Lycra bodysuit outrunning six lunging security guards and escaping through a small panel at the side of the park held open for him by – wait for it – a compatriot dressed in an all-yellow Lycra bodysuit! I don’t advise you look it up, but I expect you will anyway.

The most interesting examples of contemporary spandexification, though, are those where the material breaks free of its functional imperative and holds its easy-on-easy-off knickers up to the wind. Spandex (or something like it) overlaps with art and architecture in Ernesto Neto’s colourful, tensile installations and Agata Olek’s crocheted fibre-art. Jean Nouvelle’s Serpentine Pavilion (2010) ended up as a sort of three dimensional awning, and solar canopies have an important role to play in the future of squeaky green dwelling. There’s Richard Serra’s wafer-thin boundary installations, too.

So we’re in for a stretchy future, and I for one am bloody excited. Not that I want city folk on their way to the office to carry on dressing like Alberic Schotte. I think they’ve met their match in the Zentai warriors anyway. The Zentai don’t take themselves too seriously, always seem to have anonymous pals around the corner, and are surprisingly sneaky considering how conspicuous they really ought to be. Practically the opposite, then, of Mr Specialized Allez. I’d call for a public ruckus, but a skirmish with so little friction would be too unsettling to properly enjoy.

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Some Futures for the Logo

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

Having recently written a paper on semiotics and digital for a conference, i have started to consider the future development of the logotype. Logos are neat condensations of meaning, that have always been of interest to me. Even if you go to this website or anything about a brand, a logo is the first brand identity. Sad that there is a curious paucity of good books on the subject. Coffee table compendiums packed with examples abound but little analysis of meaning. Marks of Excellence by Per Mollerup is the exception and it contains a good dose of semiotic theory. In it he writes: “identification, description and the creation of value are just some of the possible functions of a trademark”. It is my contention that creation of value will increasingly play a greater part in logo futures as they become a more active currency in the digital economy of signs. One reason for this is that the original identification function of logos may be rendered superfluous by a policy aware web in which digital authentication widgets, designed to cut out impostors and spam, do it for us.

So, what possible future scenarios can be imagined for logos? Well, looking at present trends, corporations are already commissioning redesigned collateral to cultivate more biddable, agile, responsive and less monolithic identities.

It seems that logos are gradually becoming more metaphorical and less metonymic (a radical aspect of the London 2012 Olympic logo, for all its sins).

This has meant evolving logos that are both more diffuse and more multi-faceted. Witness the diaphanous new Mastercard logo and the recent re-branding of Tassimo with faded petals. These are rudimentary harbingers of less condensed and more diffuse logos, dispersed across space and lattice strut. An extreme version of this is the MIT Media logo that features 3 intersecting spotlights which can be arranged into 40,000 potential permutations with 12 colour combinations. This is a facet of de-materialization – from the Marxian perspective it parallels the more fungible, quicksilver nature of financial capital and electronic flows. Many logos still hark back to their origins as either heraldic emblems where the shield motif symbolically circumscribed meanings or to monogram signatures that were often cryptic and occluding. Condensation may be discarded in favour of tessellated brand motifs that ubiquitously mark branding; running through it like a stick of rock.

Personalization may be another driver, as per the book the Filter Bubble which shows how each of us is already enveloped in a unique digital habitus that insidiously determines the cocktail of news and content they are exposed to. As digital communication feeds off a flow of real time data supplied by RFID and other sensors that pick up consumer signatures, a logo could inflect corporate identity in a more fluid way such that it could both embrace the milieu in which it appears and address prospects appropriately. I believe that logos may become interpretative actors in their own light, interacting with other digital entities around them in ways that create edutainment and more ebullience. This may mean that logos will function far beyond their originally remit of identification and more active avatars. As artificial intelligence progresses apace logos may become ingratiating envoys for digital brands.

Scott Brinker has argued that as data becomes more semantic and meaningful ‘data branding’ or the making available of proprietary company data under creative commons protocols will be employed as a competitive advantage. This is because they will be amenable to being useful mash-ups.

In this scenario it is possible to imagine the logo as pulsating with bits of data pulled from the data cloud and morphing as the data stream oscillates. This ides of real time data modeling, for instance correlating sales and trend data has already been dubbed ‘nowcasting’ in a 2009 Google white paper. The most apt application I believe would be for the logo to reflect the real time fortunes of the brand. Some formula for symbolic investment, perhaps a Semiotic Value Index metric can be implanted into the code for logos, allowing them to wax and wane in concert with the stock price, sentiment online and other basketed indices? This would be in tune with the passion for infographics, make logos more dynamic and allow for greater transparency – one for the big brave brands. Finally, another evolution for the logo might eventually be total evanescence into an invisible meme or force field that leaves engrams in the minds of prospects helping them recall brands. This would mean logos would have come full circle – literally leaving a neural mark.

Whilst all this may seem like science fiction I believe that these visions are not so far fetched because they are merely extrapolations and combinations of drivers already afoot: digital de-materialization, continuing acquiescence vs privacy intrusions, personalization of brands (Nike ID) content consumption mediated via social graphs and the filter bubble with the semantic web and cleverer data and augmented space to come, bringing a coterminous desire for cute infographics and real time dashboards to represent data patterns.

One thing is for sure, logos will be both fleeter on their feet and semiotically more active than at present. They will make today’s logos look like stodgy and archaic ciphers that petrify meanings in mute monologues. So much for my visions for the future of the logo. At any rate, I predict that logos will be active agents traversing the seething domains of the semiosphere and will start to play a role in ecologies of augmented space replete with semiotic information of all types. As Peirce said, signs have a tendency to grow or even to perfuse.

Posted in Art & Design, Consumer Culture, Emergence, Europe, Semiotics | 1 Comment »

Network: Sam

Sunday, June 5th, 2011

Where are you and what are you doing? If you look around you what can you see?

I’m at home procrastinating, my flat is messy and the walls are covered with drawings i’ve made. Its a Sunday and a tough time to concentrate with a week of work only just behind me and another one ahead ready for a dizzying ascent. My internet browser is filled with tabs with different bikes on; I have recently become a convert to the cycling faith and am falling fast and deep into an entire new world of knowledge and discernment that is available to confuse and amuse me – seemingly endlessly.

What's your first memory of an interest in semiotics being triggered in you – even if you didn't know the word at the time?

Many of my family are artists; whether full time or in the corners of their lives (as I am). My father was a painter and his vast abstract expressionist (ish) canvases were a real visual trap for a small boy. However I always remember being troubled by their abstractness, always desperate to garner some sort of meaning from them. I remember one particular painting that hung in our living room that was probably four feet wide by 3 feet tall I remember staring at it intently seeking patterns and figures in its intricate layers of brush marks and spatters.

Describe the courses of academic study that brought you to point where you could consider working professionally in applied semiotics?

My undergraduate degree was in religious studies at Edinburgh where I focussed on South Asian religions and anthropological method. My Undergraduate dissertation used popular culture as a source to explore the way that the nation is figured as feminine. In my interview for Added Value I wasn’t particularly excelling before i got all excited trying to relate of Indira Gandhi’s last speeches in which she said “Every drop of my blood… will contribute to the growth of this nation” and the goddess Cinnamasta (worth googling).

What practical advice would you give anyone who would like to earn a living doing what you do?

Don’t be a snob, don’t be partisan when it comes to the world around you; for me working in Cultural Insight at AV is as much about being a fan of Barthes or Judith Williamson as being curious about the way that Grazia is organised, or genuinely interested about the way that yoghurt is advertised. I once tried half seriously to let my boss tell a client that Muller Corner was a Brechtian Yoghurt – she wouldn’t let me. But all I mean to say is that the game of Semiotics is about absorbing and interrogating as much as you can from as many sources as you can.

Tell us about your current academic project.

I’m working on my M.A in material and visual culture course at UCL (definitely worth checking out the course if you don’t know it already). I’m working on a dissertation about commercial semiotics. I’m interested in the way that a discipline that had its origins in deconstruction has become a tool for the construction of meaning. The transition from a discipline that often dealt in ideology, to a commercial discipline that deals with practice. In doing this I’m looking from both a historical perspective, tracing the growth of the industry, and ethnography and interviews to explore the current ways that we relate to theory. I’m interested in the strategies that we use day to day to represent our ‘science’ of representation. What is academic theory for us and clients; is it magic, is it technology, is it pure pragmatism and common sense? If anyone would like to offer their opinions or find out more do get in touch with me, I’d be very grateful to hear what you have to say.

Tell us about the picture you chose for this interview.

It’s Ernest Hemingway. I’m new to Hemingway, shamefully. I’m reading A Moveable Feast at the moment as in a month and a half I move to Added Value Paris for a year. Here he is kicking back in Cuba, he’s probably tired from a day of game fishing. I just read him recall saying to a young upstart who was interrupting his concentration whilst writing in a cafe in Paris “At home they’d server you and then break the glass”. I’m not sure I’ll ever achieve that level of misanthropy. One of my favourite things about him was that his wife lost an entire suitcase of his manuscripts and carbon copies. Hard work never to be seen again.

What would you like to be doing in 10 years time? How will semiotics feature in your life by then?

Truthfully I’d like for excellence in commercial semiotics not to be the sum achievement of the next ten years of my life. I’d like to have gotten to Z in the alphabetical publication that I run (www.orsomethingorsomething.co.uk) and I’d like to have had some of my writing published, I’m 24, I have a moustache – of course I want to be a novelist.

Image from: http://matthewasprey.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/ernest_hemingway1.jpg

Posted in Art & Design, Consumer Culture, Culture, Europe, Experts & Agencies, Network, Semiotics | 1 Comment »

Network: Tim

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

Where are you and what are you doing?

At my command console; the Panopticon, remotely directing global operations. I transmit codes via satellite network, which get picked up by semiotic agents. Really though, I'm tidying my desk. Its covered in everyone else's rubbish, as usual.

How did you first become interested in semiotics?

Every design course comes with a semiotics primer. Then I worked for Paul Smith as a designer after college. I was at the bottom of a chain of command, so I began exploring the landscape to see where the constant need for creative production stemmed from. I worked in brand consultancies and advertising agencies and travelled up the ladder of job titles to creative director, before jumping off.

I was always a combination of creative, strategic and theory. My best work could never be printed in a portfolio. My best work is presented verbally. Visual things date quickly, relevance and potency get bleached. I was always looking for ways to work with ideas instead of shapes. Just recently I found my way into a semiotics lead environment.

Describe a working day as a visual culture analyst in commercial semiotics

My favourite day is when project teams work verbally on the raw ingredients of a project, moulding thoughts and insights into meaningful, well-rooted opportunities.

Has semiotics triggered any changes in how you as a practitioner think about or implement design?

No, but it galvanised my theory that design delivers a rigid solution down a pipeline. It locks down more than it opens up.

Semiotics offers multiple lines of enquiry. It reveals how different strings of cultural significance influence everything. Things are constantly shifting when you look at those influences at work.

The creative imperative I set out to find springs from this unstable cultural landscape. Change needs to be observed, understood, and put to work. Semiotics is the way in which we harness the evolving landscape.

Tell us about the image you've chosen…

Franklin Chang-Diaz. Franklin: a mix of feudal middle-English, Anglo-Norman and French-Germanic root syllables. Chang: Chinese, one of the most ancient hereditary surnames in the world. Diaz: Hebraic origins, thoroughly Hispanic.

He’s a Costa Rican-American physicist, the first Hispanic NASA astronaut, and record holder for the most spaceflights.

Diverse ancestral threads, intertwined to create a unique man. Some might argue his ancestry has nothing to do with his achievements. Others might suggest he represents the perfect cocktail of cultural imperatives that enable a person to become the most frequently travelled astronaut in history.

Where can you see applied semiotics evolving in future?

We are already seeing semiotic thinking influencing social and political situations. I think there are pressing global concerns that require a radical new angle of approach. Semiotics could have some answers. We’ll need a semiotics superhero. Lets not forget Superman ‘wikileaked’ the KKK in the 1940's via a weekly radio show.

http://www.worldhistoryblog.com/2005/12/stetson-kennedy-and-superman-beat-kkk.html

Is it true you used to be the drummer for Black Sabbath?

No, but I once played electro-sax on a T'Pau single.

Posted in Art & Design, Europe, Experts & Agencies, Making Sense, Network, Semiotics | 1 Comment »

Human or Humanoid?

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

Technology as we know it is, and will always be, lifeless. Whether it’s a household appliance or a particle accelerator there is no soul, no beating heart. It’s unlikely that technology will act as if it had a mind of its own, expanding and contracting like dendrites in the brain. Our bodies are truly remarkable. Our skin has the elasticity and resilience to conform to our changing bodies. It can heal itself when its get injured. It can acclimate to changing external temperatures by activating sweat glands or increasing heart rate.

The idea behind the Vibram Five Fingers shoe is that it enables the foot to perform better than any shoe that came before it, no matter what gel or air cushion technology any previous shoe delivered. The five toe shoe does so simply as a second skin molding to the feet and enabling the foot to flex and respond with sensory and kinesthetic awareness. It does what shoes where originally intended to do – protect. But in this case to protect without inhibiting or undermining the action of the human feet. We place our feet down on the ground differently when we go barefoot versus when we stride in shoes – because, when we wear shoes, our foot is adjusting to the shoe, not to the ground. In a way, we truly are the technology.

On the other hand, maybe we’re not the technology.

The challenge with the Vibram Five Fingers ads and the website is that the human characters appear to be inhuman. The impression is contrary to the overture of the campaign. You’d expect that standing naked, bodies scarred for the world to ogle, would leave one feeling humiliated for life. Yet their expression and gesture indicates that they have no shame. Embarrassed humans immediately respond with downcast head and eyes. In a prolonged state of shame and embarrassment, a blank stare would result–a neurotic attempt to emotionally escape.

The decision to purchase any shoe is motivated by shame. This negative emotion is the primary motivation for willing our bodies forward and taking care. Shame allows us to evaluate our mortality and ourselves. It’s the emotion responsible for compelling us to look in the mirror and decide what steps have to be taken next. Shame is the emotion of self-improvement and dignity. It’s the emotion that tells us we need better shoes.

What separates the humanoid from the human is a light that shines brightly behind the eyes. In these characters there is no such indicator. As the ad suggests, ‘we are the technology’ – a lifeless, shameless instrument for advertising and web interactivity.

Make sure to checkout the website! youarethetechnology.com

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Clients & Brands, Emergence, Making Sense, Technology | 2 Comments »

Reading the Stars

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

In an attempt to undo perceptions of its self-isolation and abstraction, science discourse has begun borrowing symbols and metaphors from supposedly ‘softer’ or more ‘subjective’ languages, such as mythology, poetry or spirituality (as in Brian Cox’s BBC TV series Wonders of the Solar System, in which the science is peppered with mythological or religious contextualisation, and expressions of lyrical wonder).

By borrowing codes from beyond its historic repertoire, science is engaging in a form of semiotic mea culpa, apologising for years, if not centuries, of perceived coldness, aloofness and pretend objectivity.

The ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaii offers a prime example of the scientific mea culpa in action. Sacred for its mythological meanings, Hawaii’s 13,000 feet-high volcano Maunakea has become just as loaded with value for scientists – for whom it’s one of the world’s unequalled locations for astronomical observation. The volcano’s summit is now home to 13 global observatories, as well as continuing to represent a sacred bridge between earth and sky to Hawaiians.

These two discourses – the scientific and the mythological – might seem tricky to reconcile. But, at the ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaii (the public face of Maunakea astronomy), they’re embracing each other with all the affection of long-parted twins. Everywhere you turn, the centre proposes a new parallel between ancient mythology and legend, on the one hand, and modern astronomy, on the other. For instance, while ancient Hawaiians chanted their Song of Origins, modern astronomers look into space to learn about the birth of the universe. Centuries ago, Polynesian explorers found their way to Hawaii guided by the stars; now, scientists look through their giant telescopes to guide humanity on its journey into the future.

The ‘Imiloa logo provides a clear example of this attempt to re-humanise science.

The abstract, non-human dimension – mountains and sun/moon – doubles up as a stick figure, with this graphic itself subsumed under the anthropomorphic sign of the eye. The lesson: those strange-looking observatories, which have brought the abstraction of global science to the sacred particularity of Hawaiian myth, aren’t to be feared. They’re just prosthetic eyes: McLuhan-esque extensions of the human body itself. And all they’re doing is a technologically-enhanced version of what Polynesian navigators did to reach Hawaii in 300 AD: looking at the stars.

The agendas underpinning this attempt to marry science and myth are worth looking into – as they affect science discourse beyond the specificities of Hawaii’s ideological challenges. Generally, in the current cultural context, science has to borrow from softer, more particularised and more ‘human’ languages to present an acceptable image of itself. Previous scientific fantasies of neutrality, abstraction and universality are now seen as threatening and dishonest (a cover for suspect agendas).

But what if the very attempt to recast science as seamlessly continuous with the sacred and the mythological weren’t in itself another form of alibi? If he’d visited the ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center, Baudrillard would have seen it as an instance of the Enlightenment’s unstoppable mission to reduce otherness to sameness. From being an untranslatable and irreducible symbolic language, Hawaiian mythology has become a semiotic twin of modern astronomy. And, conversely, the strange dishes and spheres of the observatories have become assimilated to naturalised extensions of the human eye, their many mediations and alienations – infra-red, sub-millimeter, x-ray – denied.

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

Brazil Mash-Up: Colombia

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Although, perceptions of a place change with the speed of news, events and economy, there are some elements of Brazilian culture that remain embedded in the Colombian social imaginaries of Brazil.

Colombia and Brazil are very close, very similar and very different. Colombians have a great affinity with the positive aspects of Brazilian-ness – freedom, enjoyment, desire, gambling and, of course, football.

Residual codes

Hyper-hyper tropical, hyper urban and hyper green. Brazil as a synonym of excess – excess of freedom, happiness, sex, forests, and cities.

Screen fantasies, stories and dreams that connected to the Colombian reality. Brazilian soap operas (Telenovelas) are still embedded in the minds of older Colombians.

Brazil seen as a geography of desire, where sexual licentiousness and the erotic have been consciously embraced. An extreme cult to the body.

Modernism connected to urban development – Neimeyer & Brasilia, Capanema & modernist curves, extremes of wealth and poverty.

Brazil perceived as feminine. Warm, desirable and beautiful women.

Dominant codes

The land of green indexes, vast green forests, pure green colours, and oxygen (green). All this contrasted with media about deforestation, and questionable commitment where green issues are concerned.

Brazil is moving away from the female stereotypes. Masculine expressions are becoming popular in the collective Colombian imaginaries. Cult and deep connection to the body through exercise – especially capoeira. Brazil is more masculine, younger, and more connected to future generations.

“City of God” brought a perception of Brazil as a geography of violence and fear. Favelas and mafias as icons for internal violence, extreme social deprivation, exclusion, and violent death. Very different to Colombian violence.

Land of paradoxes, high industrial and technological development contrasted with poverty and social inequality.

Big contrast between local /global, urban /rural. A cosmopolitan country full of festive cities, big metropolises with an outstanding human quality. Modernity in relation to migration from Europe and Japan. Urban settings, graffiti culture, hip-hop, and fusion to the extreme.

Localness in relation to the native and aboriginal – connected to indigenous communities in the Amazon, mulattos and Afro descendent populations.

Colombians tend to relate to the animosity, freedom and enjoyment of Brazilian football, although not so much to technical aspects of it.

Land of sound and carnival culture. Samba, brega, forró, axe and paoge, garotos & garotas, batucadas – all pursuing happiness.

Saudade and its intrinsic connections with sound and relationships. The voices of Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, and Rita Ribeiro are still played in Colombian “Brazilian” bars.

A culture of enjoyment, good people and uncomplicated manners. Pleasure also connotes beach, caipirinhas and sugar cane.

A religious geography, ranging across Santeria, priests and Corcovado.

Culture and education as part of government agendas, Gilberto Gil, the bossa-nova precursor, was during Lula’s government Minister of Culture, supporting workshops for children and teenagers, creating a new space for social & cultural involvement and economic development. (Similar discourse was used during last Colombian elections). It seems that in Brazil politics and culture work in synergy. Brazil is seen as a paradise in which to cultivate political and cultural dreams.

Brazil seen as the South American paradise for production and consumption of fakes. It is sometimes called the South American “China” butbetter quality.

Research and Innovation niche. Major government commitment to education. Colombians’ main source of scholarships and economic support, especially in the technical field. Florianopolis as a land of innovation and education.

Aesthetic freedom related to arts, carnival, music, and folklore. Cannibalising western cultures helped Brazil to produce more and more in music, cinema, and arts.

Emergent codes

Brazil image will evolve to an urban+ concept. Urban+ as it will retain the richness of its locality. Emergence of local/urban typographies used in global contexts.

Recent political and economic changes helped Brazilian creative Industries to be recognised, especially in the areas of film and design. Big influence in other South American countries.

Artistic fusion – Portuguese, Spanish & English. Collaboration among local & foreign artists and musicians.

Spiritual connection to the land, the Amazon, and earthy Brazilian elements. Development of new products (non-esoteric).

A haven for higher education, for both native and foreign populations.

Rapid progress of technological advance, especially in the areas of bioengineering and thermoplastic production.

Colombians seem to regard Brazil as the main player in the region. A big player in democracy, economic and social change in the world.

2014 World Cup – connecting Brazil and South America with the rest of the world.

Some key points in conclusion:

Brazil was and still is regarded as the land of big contrasts.

Brazil is moving away from the female stereotypes and bringing elements that are more masculine and younger. Design and street art will play a bigger role in culture and will influence other South American countries.

Brazil is the mirror in which all Latin America’s desires are projected with maximum intensity and to their limit.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Culture, Global/Local, Making Sense, Socioeconomics, Technology | No Comments »

Network: Arlene

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Artist, toy maker and University of Tartu Semiotics Masters student Arlene Tucker talks to Semionaut

Where are you and what are you doing?
I moved to Helsinki at the beginning of this year. It’s my last semester of school at Tartu University in Estonia so I decided to take classes as an exchange student at Aalto University School of Art and Design (Helsinki) in the New Media and Game Design and Production Department.

How did you first become interested in semiotics?
Almost ten years ago, I saw Umberto Eco’s book sitting on a stool at my friend’s place in Savannah, Georgia. The strong blocky red, white, and black cover of A Theory of Semiotics immediately caught my attention. Adam’s description of semiotics being about signs, symbols, and how we communicate glued to my membranes and ever since semiotics seems to circle itself back to me. It can’t run away from me and I can’t run away from myself.

How does it feel to be one of the 2 native English speakers on the first year of the English language MA in Semiotics at Tartu?
Almost embarrassing because everybody is so talented with how well they can express themselves in English, especially because it is their second or third or fourth tongue! I wish I could say that for myself. Mostly, I learn so much from them.

How did you hear about the course and how are you adapting to academic life in Estonia?
Internet searches and a bit of luck led me to the call of applications for studies in Estonia. I knew I wanted to study semiotics and I knew that I wanted to again live in Europe so that combination Googled me to goodness. Actually, I think I reached out to Katre Väli, at the Semiotics Department in Tartu for information on the Masters one year prior to the program being ready. She asked me to wait and patience won me over. For my BFA I went to the Savannah College of Art and Design so being in a classical academic school such as Tartu University was a challenge in every way. Academic writing was totally new and making presentations without becoming a stuttering mess was a steep mountain climb, but you get used to it. Tartu is probably the polar opposite of New York City, but that extreme change was what I wanted. Now I like chopping wood for fun.

What do you personally find most interesting about the MA study and what area are you planning to specialise in?
I need to work with my hands so even though the MA program is very theoretical it gives a foundation for new thoughts to arise and space to create. You learn about how the disciplines of semiotics spider leg to ecosemiotics, semiotics of art, zoosemiotics, etc. One of the first classes we started with was Biosemiotics. Even though I hadn’t taken biology class since I was probably thirteen years old the concept of Umwelt by Jakob von Uexküll made such an impression on me. It gave me a path for understanding perception in a natural way. Every organism perceives things from their own respective cubbyhole with their own unique set of perceptor tools. Umwelt and Juri Lotman’s notion of semiosphere are the two main theories I think of when I start building an idea.

How can you see your studies in semiotics affecting your professional life from here on in?
I feel like I’m a volcano about to bust from all the information I’ve just learned. As I see it- semiotics is applicable to anything because it’s about understanding perspective and being aware. I’ve been working for a children’s toy company for the past few years and enjoy most making things for people. I figured if I know how people communicate then I can better make things for them, which was the motivation for me to further studying semiotics. In short, semiotics suggests to us that we look at objects contextually and be mindful. As best I can, I’m trying to use semiotics to keep on with my art installation projects and toy innovations. One of them is called Translation is Dialogue, which runs along with the inevitable happenings of continuous transformations and interpretations. Really, the main point of the project was to create a space for people to do and not think so much. That was great to work on because there were so many contributors and in every medium possible. Below is a picture of one interpretation, which was a dance performance, titled Ajakaja created and performed by Kristino Rav, Alejandra Pineda Silva, and Raul Taremaa. (Kristino and Alejandra are my coursemates!) Now I’m working on an interactive sort-of-gamey installation, which will accompany the written and theoretical portion of my master thesis topic, Play Motivation from Zoosemiotics Perspective. I believe that understanding non-human play can be a source of inspiration for allowing us to develop playful situations in our human world. We are animals! I’m not sure what I’ll do or where I’ll be after I graduate, but I feel like I have a clearer approach to innovation, problem solving, and communicating through boundaries and borders. Whoa. Photo of Taremaa and Silva in Akaja taken by Anastasiia Sidielnik

To learn more about Translation is Dialogue…or, better yet, make a translation yourself please go to http://arlene.edicypages.com/translation-is-dialogue. The next showings will most likely be in Estonia and in New York City. To learn more about the English language Masters in Semiotics at the University of Tartu please go to http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/studies/master.html Photo of Arlene taken by Alexander Dobrovodský.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Europe, Semiotics | 1 Comment »

What it means to be human

Monday, January 24th, 2011

Ours is a culture in crisis where we’re struggling to figure out what it means to be human. We are deeply fixated in the virtual world and enviously in chase of the latest technology. At the same time we are experiencing an anxiety over the liquidation of self in a fluid, constantly innovating world.

Once we have logged and given away our noteworthy moments on Facebook and Twitter, we cease to retain them as a testament to our own heritage. As we prove our progress we appear just as much in need of a way to define ourselves in reverse— away from the oppressive filtration of ourselves into digitized experiences that can be uploaded and streamed instantly across time and space.

The proof of this conflict has been confirmed by the popularization of two opposing types of codes. On the one hand, there are those symbols that demonstrate our ideals about advancement into the promising future. Tech logos, for example, are as slippery and fluid in line quality and shape as our transient, efficient lives — void of details or adornments which might refer specifically to time period or place. As reassuring as they are of our relevance, we are equally comforted by signifiers of uninhibited, amateurish self-expression. They are awkwardly analog, irregular and imperfect in line quality and shape. The two stills from Microsoft's TV spots "People Ready" illustrate this well. This humble, bumbling style has emerged in an effort to monumentalize our real selves …free to live outside, mainstream expectations and the compulsion to move ahead feverishly.

Interestingly, these signifers frequently appear in advertisement for these same tech companies. Perhaps that have become the latest and most important trust marks of authenticity and heritage—the company’s silent promise that our humanity will not be lost in the adoption of the innovative product they’re offering.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Categories, Making Sense, Semiotics, Technology | No Comments »

Cross-Cultural Design FAIL

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

Cross-cultural collaboration is a trend that continues to spread and open new pathways. A wonderful example is the latest trend in world music: Afro-Cuban music. "AfroCubism" (Nonesuch, November 2010) is an album that grew out of a project aiming to find a cultural synergy between Africa and Latin America. The transnational collaboration between Malian and Cuban musicians was intended to demonstrate that music has no linguistic barriers. Alas, political barriers got in the way: a problem with Malian passports and Cuban visas meant that the collaboration was delayed for fourteen years. In the meantime, "Buena Vista Social Club" — a collaboration between Cuban and American musicians — became a global success.

Historically, Cuban music was built on the foundations of African immigration, and West African music was hugely influenced by Cuban music. It is not strange to hear stories of people in Mali dancing and singing to the rhythms of Cuban songs in the Sixties. Cuban music was heard more in the African continent than the other way round, but the connection between the two cultures was always there.

Musically, "AfroCubism" demonstrates the project's collaborative spirit and reveals the cultural synergy between Mali and Cuba. Unfortunately, the cover design entirely fails to connect with the project's original idea. Unless you are versed in the history of Modern and African art, the primary associations derived from the design are disengaged from the emotional narrative built behind AfroCubism — i.e., the historical synergy between Mali and Cuba. The concept behind the graphic design seems intended to attract the European public, which contradicts the spirit of the project.

The semiotic genesis of this particular design — geometric shapes, modern colour schemes, clear drawings of bodies deconstructed with instruments moving around — shouts "Cubism." Although the association with Cubism can provide a multiple and constantly shifting viewpoint that could be applied to a collaborative, cross-cultural project, such association seems to be just a linguistic excuse to portray the Cuban part of AfroCubism. The immediate associations of Cubism are far removed from Cuba-ness, creating a cultural distance effect with regards to the basic associations of AfroCubism. The relationship between West African masks and their influence on Picasso’s work is clear and it helps the connection with the Afro part of the title, but where is the primary association of Picasso and Cuba?

I'm not judging the aesthetic value of the cover, nor the dexterity of its well-known designer (whose work I admire). However, the "AfroCubism" cover is a good example of the importance of design and semiotics in the portrayal of cultural identities and experiences. Graphic designers and semioticians are central in the execution of many ideas that are consumed around the globe; therefore, they are actors in the quest of the authentic. Though their background work is invisible to the public, the results of their work help to construct new cultural experiences and connect to individuals at a deeper level. The responsibility for the creation of designs that connect with people and cultural realities is high and will be higher in years to come, especially if we take seriously the spirit of collaboration.

Posted in Africa, Art & Design, Consumer Culture, Culture, Global Vectors, Global/Local | 1 Comment »

Utopia in Movement? Or Dystopia?

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

In 2010, dance achieved unprecedented status as a cultural signifier in the UK. TV ballroom dance show Strictly Come Dancing continued to transfix viewers, StreetDance 3D came out in cinemas, while US musical-based show Glee also won millions of fans.

This new status was fully consecrated when dance was chosen as the theme of retailer Marks and Spencer’s Christmas ad — the launch of which is a major cultural landmark in the British festive calendar.

This is no longer a self-conscious postmodern idea of subjectivity as performance. Instead, it’s a utopian fantasy of unity, dance providing images of togetherness that bypass the constantly misfiring agon of language.

London choreographer Yael Loewenstein says that “mass dance scenes in advertising often offer up the dream that we're on the brink of a massive paradigm shift — something positive, something powerful, something we do together, with this phase being our warm-up!”

Nonetheless, the M&S ad offers a vision of togetherness that’s as tightly choreographed as a drill, ending with the menacing line ‘Don’t put a foot wrong this Christmas’.

Suddenly the performance looks more like a military parade, showing that glitzy dance forms may be more than escapist fun for countries at war. Is it possible that the precision of the military drill is encoded into the very homogeneity of the chorus line?

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

Phone Box, RIP

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

One of British street artist Banksy's most notorious pieces shows a red phone box prone — dumped in a side street, bent as if it were the twisted corpse of a road accident victim hit at high speed. The phone box has a pick-axe through its dorsal area and its windows are smeared by its own blood and viscera. The awkward angle signifies the squalid nature of its death — as if it were running away from its assailant and halfway round a corner when it ran out of time.

In the context of the gradual privatizing of Britain this is poignant visual commentary indeed — one of several semiotic warning signs showing how far along this process is. The growth of non-spaces signify the warping of the public realm; phone boxes are a victim of this warping.

In his book Multimodality, author Gunther Kress writes about social semiotics: "It is the social which generates the 'cultural' and, in that the 'semiotic'." He goes on to write: "In advanced capitalist conditions, the market actively fosters social fragmentation as a means of maximizing the potential of niche markets… The subjectivity preferred by the market is that of 'consumer'." Like the post box and Post Office, red phone boxes used to be seen as signs of the public polity, as a public good. A call for 10p piece and the small queues you sometimes saw outside even sparked some public discourse. Alas, red phone boxes have taken a beating. First they lost their red coats and became ugly glass vitrines. Then, through the 1990s, as mobile phone penetration robbed them of their utility, they lost their clientele. It was good to talk (said Bob Hoskins in a famous British Telecom ad), but now it is good to text.

Phone boxes have become relics: crass and unsightly ciphers of the materialism of 2010-era Britain. They stand as pointless sentinels on the street ignored by all but the homeless and reckless. They are invariably empty, with the phone either disconnected or the receiver hanging forlornly by its cord. Banner advertising (10th anniversary of Spearmint Rhino anybody?) wrapped on the outside often obscures what is inside. Invariably this will be the calling cards of the sex industry — a gallery of scopophilia. 'Busty brunettes', 'Oriental honeys' and other flotsam thrown up by the latest wave of sex trafficking direct their blandishments at the passerby. The smiles and burnished curves belie the emptiness of a transaction that costs much more than a 10p phone call. Inside they define the word insalubrious, usually smell of urine, and someone has scrawled a slanderous sexual accusations onto the phone console with a key.

Sordid, dilapidated, empty — but selling sex. The phone box is a signifier of the cheapening of life in Britain, hollowing out of public spaces, outsourcing of public services and the vacuum of a Tory cabinet bereft of ideas. It's a proxy for the triumph of consumerism over communication.

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

The Sociability of Colour

Friday, November 26th, 2010

The way colour theory is taught is rapidly evolving. I remember the long and lonely nights I spent, years ago while studying graphic design, painting hundreds of colour wheels. My professors believed that the only way to learn the basic principles of colour theory was by doing such paintings until you got all the colours right. These practices are long gone, thanks to the emergence of online applications that not only discuss and analyse basic notions and expressions in colour theory, but also fledgling designers learn, create and apply colour principles to real projects.

One of the applications that is changing the way we engage with colour is Kuler, a free web-hosted programme designed by Adobe, which is all about integration of colour theory and its application to individual projects. Kuler is designed for experimenting, creating and sharing colour palettes based on predefined colour parameters by using an interactive colour wheel. Some might argue that similar applications have been around for quite a while, but Kuler is unique in its aim to popularize the mechanics of colour, by clearly visualising how it works and adding social features that allow users browse and rate other people’s palettes. It is like iTunes or Flickr but with colour. The user-friendly interface makes colour accessible to non-design experts, which helps to build a more sociable use of colour. Without a doubt, learning and applying colour theories via Kuler is a far more inviting and sociable experience than drawing innumerable colour palettes by hand.

The idea of a community based around colour is nothing new. ColourLovers was one of the first communities to be built around the idea of colour and pattern sharing. What differentiates Kuler from such communities is the way in which it puts the individual at the centre of a social experience. Kuler's interface and language — “my Kuler”, “my value” — invites active involvement, by creating a sense of belonging via personal contribution to the colour community. Kuler is also getting into the trends space, not only by the multiple associations suggested by its name but by adding simple interactive features that help users visualise what is going on globally with colour. When you get non-experts experimenting and socialising with colour, the potential for following and spreading colour trends across the world becomes a real transformation in how we engage with colour. Kuler’s interface makes invisible cultural dynamics of meaning and representation of colour visible, by opening up the ability to track colour trends, building a more precise point of view about design now, and bringing insights for future designs.

What attracts me to Kuler is not only what it does as a tool, but the thinking behind what people are doing with it, what people are getting from it, how people interact with it, and most importantly, what matters to people who use it. Kuler is opening new discussions around the theorisation and application of colour, exploring the visualisation of how people are expressing themselves through colour, and making colour schemes social. This application is opening a new path in the creation of contemporary politics of mapping and visualisation of colour experiences in a globalized world.

If Kuler wants to take the concept of community a step further, it might need to face the visual challenges of dealing with ambiguity, otherness and multi-dimensionality of the colour experience. Until then, Kuler is pioneering new paradigms in visual culture representation, and bringing the world of design and appreciation of colour closer to the non-experts.

Posted in Art & Design, Emergence, Europe, Experts & Agencies | 2 Comments »

Whiskey & Wabi-Sabi

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

One of the by-products of the so called 'wa boom' in Japan is a climate that is amenable to a Nipponification of products that would previously have been considered prototypically Western. Even coffee, once ham-fistedly advertised by Arnold Schwarzenegger — is being given a Japanese twist. Coffee drinking has been considered a Western affectation since the 1920s Taisho era in Japan when it was the preserve of flapper girls sipping from Art Deco crockery. A more subtle Japanese appreciation is taking over from the tired European epicurean codes and bringing coffee closer to tea in tonality.

Now whisky is the beverage to undergo a ‘wa’ makeover. An FT article last month on Japanese whiskies trumpeted the recent triumph of Japanese brands in global tasting competitions. What most piqued my interest as a semiotician — beyond perfunctory references to the Bill Murray scene in Lost in Translation — is the bottle design of Japanese whiskies. Whiskey in Japan is shedding its regalia and going native. I was most taken by the Suntory Hibiki bottle (the name means resonance which is quite clever for a whiskey as it references not only the echoing through the distillation process, the empathy of conversations during the consumption moment, but also the many flavours that resonate like notes on the palate). The semiotics of the label on pack are masterfully simple and seem more at home on a sake bottle than on whiskey.

The centerpiece of the bottle is a worn patch of Japanese parchment typically used for calligraphy or that you might find hanging up in the tokonoma alcove of a Japanese home. Even though flecked with gold leaf (typically used in decorative poetic letters or on lacquerware boxes) the patch is humble — apparently roughly excised from a roll with the fluff and miniscule filaments of the paper visible on the border.

The deeply weathered and threadbare-looking ochre hue of the paper give an impression of craft but also of muted temperance to the packaging. The effect of the parchment and of slightly scratchy calligraphy (done in informal sosho or ‘grass’ script which is also making a comeback in Japan) communicates a meekness that countervails the elegant squatness of the beveled decanter.

The patch on the bottle could be said to tap into codes of wabi-sabi. The book Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers by Leonard Koren (Imperfect Publishing, 2008) sets out the principles of this design style as including the following: soft vague edges, ostensible crudity, a tolerance of ambiguity, and acceptance of the inevitable. Hibiki may be just a little too immaculate for this. Nevertheless, it seems fitting that in a Japan where the so-called Golden Recession has engendered a real crisis in masculinity and where geopolitical power shifts have triggered a period of introspection, Japanese whiskey should reflect this change with Suntory, one of the most design-literate companies (along with Shiseido, an FMCG company all graphic designers in Japan want to work for), at the vanguard.

Tags: alcohol, whiskey
Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Clients & Brands, Consumer Culture, Europe, Global Vectors, Semiotics | No Comments »

iLOHAS

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

Linking the iEverything phenomenon to LOHAS (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) here's a packaging innovation already adopted by Coca Cola in Japan. This is said to use 40% less plastic than other PET bottles. The iLOHAS bottle, brought to us by japantrends.com

Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Clients & Brands, Consumer Culture, Emergence, Global/Local, Technology | 1 Comment »

Grafitti and the Grapheme

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Amble through Shoreditch or down Old Street in east London and you’d be hard-pressed not to run into one of Ben ‘EINE’ Flynn’s colourfully decorated shop-shutters. Since 2006 Flynn has been spray-painting solitary, emboldened, harlequin capitals across the rippling steel frontage of any jewellers or hardware store that will grant him permission. Middlesex Street now exhibits the entire (English) alphabet in one long back-to-back shop-front circuit. As the day’s trade winds to a close, the place starts to take on the surreally genial atmosphere of a primary school classroom. Somewhere along the line, the monadic alphabetic character has re-emerged as a significant cultural signifier.

The 2007 paperback edition of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections features a striking piece of cover art. The silhouetted hull of a cruise ship prowls towards us. A powderblue sunset sinks low in the background. You can perceive a lone figure standing at the deck’s edge. He could be admiring the view. He could well be about to jump. Title, author and statutory critical praise are printed in vivid whites and reds inside an oily black bubble of smoke gushing from the ship’s chimney. Even by industry standards (which are generally high), it’s a tight piece of production.

Why, then, have the publishers of the 2010 edition (released in anticipation of Franzen’s new novel Freedom) done away with it altogether? What we get instead bears a conspicuous resemblance to one of EINE’s east London shutter works. A huge purple ‘C’ all but blots out the smoky white backdrop. A thumbnail image on the back cover suggests Freedom is set to reproduce this. We see a block black ‘F’, the title stomping in white capitals down the character’s backbone. The aesthete might think this retrogressive. And yet it feels right.

The study of the relationship between the ‘part’ and the ‘whole’ (or meronymic relations) has well-trodden roots in Euclidian geometry, Aristotle’s urban organicism and Nietzsche’s political thought. Aristotle, for example, understood the relationship between the individual and the city as a part-whole interaction. For him, the city was a natural organism. The relationship between the component parts (the Grecian subject) and the urban entirety was essentially the same as that which holds between the parts of a natural organism and the organism itself.

Returning to the present, EINE’s experiment in meronymy makes a clear and certain sense in the context of London’s own endless splicing and congealment. Likewise, Franzen’s novels deal with that other restless organism: the all-American family. An emergent interest in the grapheme – the boldly isolated character – feasibly fits into an emergent cultural exploration around this question of parts and wholes. J.S. Mill – another philosopher who has written on this tangled relationship – outlined the idea of ‘emergence’: complex part-whole systems always retain the potential to generate fresh structures. In a typographic context such as this, that might mean new alphabets, new characters, and new ways of communicating through writing.

Posted in Art & Design, Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence, Europe, Making Sense, Socioeconomics | 3 Comments »

Chinese Bottled Water

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Effective packaging design is essential for bottled water. Codes such as mountains, lakes, human-like figures, splashes of colour, as well as shapes and lines, can all be seen on water bottle packaging. Using semiotics, the packs can be organized according to their signs into two main poles. On one side is the pole of nature which claims that the water is from a natural source, and on the other side is the pole of industry which stresses that water has to be controlled and transformed to be untainted and healthy.

The pole of nature contains two visions of water: wild water and preserved water. In China, the category of “wild water” includes products like Pepsi-owned Enchant’s (莹纯, yíngchún) purified water, whose blue package has coloured splashes to showcase wild water in movement as a manifestation of life and freedom. The message it conveys through its sign is strength, vitality, and the human being’s fusion with nature.

The category of preserved water is well represented by Aquarius’ (正广和, zhèng guǎng hé) natural mineral water with its mountain and static lines. It represents a nature to contemplate – a source of peace and quietness, a preserved nature, untouched.

In the pole of industry, the two visions of water are controlled water and tamed water.

In the” controlled water” category, shapes and lines are geometric and clean. Wahaha and Masterkong’s mineral waters, have simple blue or red colored geometric figures and lines on their packages. Their industrial-feeling design suggests that their controlled waters are totally safe and clean.

The tamed water category suggests water is adapted for consumer benefit. Nestlé’s Pure Life, for instance, uses more dynamic shapes and human figures to demonstrate its tamed water’s message of happiness, liveliness, and cooperation.

At first glance, it looks like actors exist on all possible dimensions in the bottled water market. You might think that there is no space remaining for product innovation. Yet, we can find empty territory surrounding the concepts of what we call “absolute water” and “harmony water”.

Absolute water is in a league of its own, and uses neither nature-themed nor industry-themed signs. Currently, there are only two players that convey the concept of absolute water in China – Uni-President’s Alkaqua mineral water and the distilled water made by Watson’s. The designs of the bottles are revolutionary and futuristic. Their beyond-nature and beyond-human appearance suggest that their water is extremely pure and transcendent.

Moreover, the big players in the bottled water market have yet to invent a way to combine the nature-theme and the industry-theme together to introduce the harmony between humans, nature and industry to the market.

Based on this analysis, the next steps could include product development around the two concepts: “harmony water” and “absolute water”.

Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Categories, Clients & Brands, Global Vectors | No Comments »

The Peace Symbol

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Anti-Nuclear or Peace Sign. Designed in 1958 and based on the semaphore signals for letters N & D. Created by Harvard Physics and History of Science professor Gerald Holton it first appeared at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) march from Aldermaston to London in February 1958. It then spread to the U.S. when an American student who was on the March took a bag of the badges back home. Blogspot from 2008 celebrating 50th birthday.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Culture, Europe, Global Vectors, Making Sense | 2 Comments »

Snake in hand

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

X-ray and infra-red technology revealed, beneath roses held by Queen Elizabeth I in anonymous sixteenth-century painting displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2010 for the first time in 90 years, an earlier depiction of her right hand clutching what appears to be a black snake with blue-green highlights. ;What’s going on here we wonder. Artistic subversion of royal iconography? A Tudor Dan Brown moment of some kind? Clearly an enigma to set the popular semiotics machine in motion.

Some possible explanations:

• Historian David Starkey identified the serpent as being a symbol of wisdom at that time, and an apparent favourite of Elizabeth’s from the evidence of a discrete green serpents on an orange taffeta dress in another portrait.

• Why then the revision and painting out? The posy replacing the snake may have expressed second thoughts, at the time or later, around the serpent being an ambiguous image also strongly associated in Christian iconography with evil and original sin.

• Roses, in contrast, would have been an unproblematic icon of the Tudor dynasty, as well as the posy being a conventional female prop in portraiture.

With Freud and by now a decade or two of graphic online porn between us and the occluded serpent it’s hard to overlook the phallic connotation noted by art history blogs and press coverage of a snake “coiled suggestively around her right hand” (Arifa Akbar in The Independent). But donning our semiotic hats and trying to look at all human beings (including us in our own times and places) as aliens it can be salutary to look at the hand and snake trying to think ‘wisdom’ or ‘evil’ rather than the sense that might strike us first as obvious, natural and universal.

Imagine a future time when the cultural orthodoxy shares with Jorge Luis Borges this view of our psychoanalytic received wisdom today: “I have read Jung with great interest but with no conviction. At best he was an imaginative, exploratory writer. More than one can say for Freud: such rubbish!” Then we would look at the symbol interpreted as a phallic suggestively uncoiling snake and, with Foucault responding to the classification of animals in Borges’s Chinese Encyclopaedia, wonder at “the exotic charm of another system of thought” and “the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

NOTES
Arifa Akbar, “The Virgin Queen, the serpent and the doctored portrait”, The Independent, 5 March 2010, p.3

Posted in Art & Design, Culture, Europe, Fuzzy Sets, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

Chinese Medication Pack

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

Bái jiāhēi 白加黑 is a popular over-the-counter cold medication in China, and its success can at least partially be attributed to its effective use of codes both on the cultural level and within its product category. The brand name itself means “white plus black”. The brand slogan is translated as “White pill for day, not sleepy; black pill for night, sound sleep.” Both the packaging and the pill colors utilize powerful and intuitive codes to communicate with consumers- white symbolizing day and black symbolizing night. Together they give a sense of a holistic treatment aligned with the natural cycle of one day. Balance and harmony with nature are important concepts in Chinese culture, as is symbolized by yin and yang. This cultural appeal most likely enhanced the effectiveness of the black and white codes as opposed to other colours such as yellow and blue.

Bái jiāhēi ‘s choice of codes, furthermore, differentiated the brand within the product category of over the counter (OTC) cold medications in China. Although there were competitors with similar offers, some even using the same concept of day time and night time relief with colour-coded pills, Bái jiāhēi emerged as the market leader.

Posted in Art & Design, Asia, Categories, Clients & Brands, Global Vectors | 1 Comment »

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