plagiarism.

[ in response to the article found at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 ]

I find it interesting how the author mentions that so much literature has been borrowed and plagiarized from other works of literature, because in my Greek/Roman mythology class, the myths are so similar to other stories I've heard before, whether fairy tales or Bible stories. It's hard to determine whether or not something has been plagiarized sometimes because someone can take an idea and twist it or change it a lot, but the origin would still be from the same place. The author talks about music and how music is reworked, which I can identify with because some of the songs I hear from day to day sound so similar to each other even though they may have different lyrics. Lyrics have also become very similar to each other; there's only so many things you can say about some girl/guy you like. Even with my major (graphic design), I feel like it's all been done before and I'm just being uncreative. I also found it interesting when the author talked about public commons. Sometimes there are cultural things that belong to no one -- who gets the credit? The solution lies in the people: everyone takes a part in it and shares in using it, and this way no one can claim ownership, and hopefully there will be no arguments about it. In this society, everyone wants a claim to fame, and people are willing to sacrifice a lot for it, but the author emphasizes that "honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity." If we don't honor the commons, it will all turn to chaos.

film.

I really enjoyed this film actually. It was a bit confusing at first, trying to figure out what was going on with all the different scenes and characters, but towards the middle I began to understand a little of what was happening. I thought it was interesting how inside of this movie, another movie was being made about the Armenian genocide. The concept of history/historical narrative became clearer to me when I realized that everything was connected -- Celia was trying to discover the truth about her father who committed suicide, who married Celia's stepmother Ani, who was an art history professor helping with the movie, which was about the Armenian genocide from Gorky's point of view. In this film, the main code was about the photograph/painting of Gorky and his mother. Ani makes a comment that it is a sacred code telling how they (the Armenians) got there, where they came from. Throughout the whole movie, Celia is trying to figure out her father's suicide, while everyone else is focusing on learning more about Gorky's painting and the meaning behind it. The Armenian genocide is on all the characters' minds, and they are trying to interpret history. Something else I thought was interesting was when Raffi was at customs and he really, truly believed the cans contained film. When he believed it so badly, I wanted to believe it too. Sometimes what seems to be the truth is just what someone makes of it.

the body and the archive.

I thought the part about photography being "assigned a proper role within a new hierarchy of taste" was interesting, because photography affected

stock photography.

I thought it was interesting how this article told how stock photography started, and how it's so intertwined and related to graphic design. I didn't know that it was considered very different from professional photography or art photography, and that it is seen as a way to "make money from photographic leftovers". It's also interesting that there was even an avant-garde reaction to stock photography by Photonica; I wouldn't have expected a counter reaction to stock photography which seems so low-key. It's good that stock photography can be used in so many ways, but then it also generalizes the photo so that it might not be meaningful anymore.

semiotics

[ in response to the article found at http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem08.html ]

It seems that the difference between humans and other creatures (for example, NASA's possible "scientifically educated beings") is the ability to recognize what we know. Our culture, knowledge, and upbringing can all contribute to our interpretation of an image. I think it is interesting that NASA put a picture on a space probe, because even if "scientifically educated beings" existed, they probably wouldn't be able to read or see the same way humans do.
How our mind perceives an image depends on the context the image is in. Our eyes perceive images in such interesting ways, for example, the article mentions Gestalt. We learn to perceive and read images from a very young age, so much so that it seems innate and natural, as the article mentions. I think that oftentimes many things we do over and over seem so natural to us, for example, walking.
It's also very interesting how semiotics, anthropology, and linguistics can combine and be related to one another. Codes must be the factor combining all of them together and forming a relationship between them. Understanding how humans interpret/read codes, signs and images is so interesting, yet we are so complex.

[ in response to the article found at http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/resources/resources/exp_lang/semiotics.html ]

This article basically reiterated what the first article said, with more of a focus on the signifier/signified, and the relationship between semiotics and linguistics. The signifier and signified cannot be separated, and when read together, make up a sign. I thought that it was interesting how a sign is not only an image/word, but also a gesture or sound.

symbols / swastika

[ in response to the hieroglyphics article ]

I thought it was very clever to use the symbols in the article to further push the idea of the isotypes and how they are used. It seems so natural when we see the symbols because we have been so exposed to them, but it is because we have seen them consistently that we know them. Interestingly enough, the article mentions Freud and his views on dreams. I just read Freud's book "Dora" where he interprets a girl's case through her two dreams. The symbols and imagery in the dreams corresponded to objects/ideas in real life, just as this article mentions.

[ in response to the swastika article ]

A symbol which was so tied with the Nazis will have a permanent association with those events and ideas. It is unfortunate that a symbol which once stood for good luck has a permanently bad connotation, but it just shows how powerful and how much impact the symbol carries with it. It is interesting how the symbol's meaning evolved from Hitler's original idea for it to be a symbol of the victory of the Aryan race to its current meaning associated with Nazism. No matter how bad the connotation, the swastika is still a very good example of the power that images and symbols have in our culture and society today.

what is a sign?

[ in response to the article found at http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep2/ep2book/ch02/ep2ch2.htm ]

I thought the three states of mind were very interesting: Feeling, Reaction, and Thinking. Feeling seems to require the least amount of effort, reaction requires a little more, and thinking seems to require the most effort. I really enjoyed the part where Pierce says, "Moreover, this third state of mind, or Thought, is a sense of learning, and learning is the means by which we pass from ignorance to knowledge." I thought this was a very meaningful quote, because it applies to us especially as students. We constantly learn and think everyday; that is our job description for the time being.

From my point of view, Pierce is defining a sign as something that sparks in your mind, bringing up a certain image, idea, thought, etc. According to him, there are three kinds of signs, and although they may sound similar upon first hearing the three kinds, they each have separate identities, which Pierce goes into detail about in the article.