/

/

/

The power to be an author and how they can be an author is a topic that is discussed in cultural and political practices. An author can be defined as someone that write things, paint things, make things and so on. There is often argument over whether the designer and writer or the user and the reader is the actual author over interaction.

The 'If' poem by Rudyard Kipling from 1895, showed positive thinking and brave, man speaking. It questions the idea of whether or not we are the authors to the poem or Kipling is. He brings across the idea of, who has the power to allocate meaning to the words in the text.

I was asked to fix a title to this photo based on what I see from it. I named this photo 'Mass Popularity Animal Circus'. This photo was polysemus (photos that can have many meanings), as everyone in the class had different interpretations and titles to this photo at the end of this task. By having us name it, we are fixing the photo to one specific meaning. We become the author of the photo, as the viewer would follow my interpretations from the text, to look at this image.

Structuralism

* Philosophy Movement - Europe - Late 1800's-1960's
* Focuses on society as a system
* Differential relations are the key to understand culture & society
* Focus on material practices as points for analysis

Structuralists:
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
- Linguistics The Structure of Language Semiotics
Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009)
- Anthropology - Kinship Structures
(family structures in societies, where people have different experiences)
Vladimir Propp (1895-1970)
- 31 Functions in Russian folk tales Story-Telling; Narratives Forms Genres Patterns

Sign = Signifier + Signified

eg. 'The cat sat on the mat'
Signifier - The marks or sounds made. In this case C.A.T.
Signified - The meaning made. In this case, a four legged animal for cat.

*Signifier and Signified aren't fixed, as same words can be said and will sound differently in different languages, but the meaning of the word will still be the same. This shows how flexible language can be, whilst keeping it's original structures and meaning.

Another example could be:
Watching 6 or 7 different romance movies and the typical structure of the story would still be, the guy meets the girl, they fall in love or get together, but then has to split up and gets back together in the end.

Graphic Design - Modernism

*Can we see the same ideas being explored in graphic design practices?

'Grid Systems in Graphic Design' (1968) by Josef Muller-Brockmann (1914-1996)

- Mathematical thinking
- Working with grid systems.
- Finding universal structure by using grids.

'Great War 1914-18' by Otto Neurath (1882-1945) and Gerd Arntz (1900-1988)

- Language
- We write in lines, so images put in lines as well to show connection
- 'Words divide, images unite' O.N 1973

Herbert Bayer (1900-1985)

- Simple type
- just a holder, don't add fancy text

Post-Structuralism

* Move from uncovering and investigating the system to looking at how the audience and users of the systems utilise, impact on and interact with these systems.

Post-Structuralists:

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
- Moving and Shifting of language
('The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author')
- How culture deals with empire + loyalty
- Need to actively participate in deconstructing images makes you feel involved

Michael Foucault (1926-1984)
- Prisons - Madness power
Power of Vision and being observed makes him feel powerful
'What is an Author?' (1969) - Consistent change in meaning

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
- Gaps in between the letters + words are more important
- Speech (singing etc.) or writing (guarantee) is more important?
- Language is same, but speaking/writing has authorship

Designer as 'Auteur'

Auteur - Control over work

- Wolfgang Weingart 1941
Can still understand it even if it's not in a straight line

- Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller
Form & Content

- Tomato
How far they can push these communications

- Michel Rock 'The Designer as Author' (1996)
Audience more important than the author
Available from:

_____________