Visual Culture Is Different to

¶ … Visual Culture Is Different to Traditional Visual Culture in That it Is Composed of: New technologies of vision An exponential increase in the presence of visual cultural signage 'The empire of signs' has been growing all the time shaped by political, social, and economic events but this 'empire of signs' proliferated in the 20 thcentury obliquely and covertly influencing and persuading. Visual culture was traditionally seen as artistic expression. Today, it is also demagoguery largely, although not exclusively, used for consumerist ends and pasted onto rhetorical and persuasive purposes.

Marketing, for instance, is a field that uses visual culture -- or representation -- to engage consumers and to accomplish its ends (i.e. Of persuading people to buy their advertised articles). Politics uses symbols / representations for its own end, as do many other people-related drives. Representations What are representations? The difference between a sign and an object is the following: a tree is the original object or sign. It stands there; we can see it. It may be interpreted in various ways.

Once the tree is painted or described, this very act of superimposing the tree into a figment of it renders it a 'representation' and the tree, transformed by the imagination of the other, can come to mean various things. Many, if not all, of the signs that persuasive mediums (such as media or marketing professionals) use are representations (i.e. they are re-presented in representations).

These signs are symbols of entities in the world; they are reproduced or produced in different ways so that they come across with different, deliberate meanings. It is in this way that communication is executed between people and communication results in the process of 'information' but this process of 'representation' happens in such a covert and indiscernible way that we are immune to and unaware of it. We have been internalized in this swap of sign-representation from early on.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for us to step outside of it and to critically engage with it. Not all of these representations are deceptive or ominous. Authors use representation too as techniques of prefiguring or indicating a certain event (a 'shadow' for instance may indicate death due to the connections that we have been habituated to make between 'shadow' and threat). Turner's painting the Fighting Temeraire 1838 shows a blazing sunset ass background, symbolic perhaps of the ship's demise or the fury of the battle.

Either way, symbols such as 'shadow' and 'fire' have only received these connotations due to social constructions placed on these symbols that have converted them into representations. 'Shadow' is not literally suffering nor is 'fire' always destruction. A 'flame' can provide warmth and light too. Nonetheless, an author may use shadow to signal an encroaching unhappiness, and Turner used the blaze of sunset to match the blaze of the ship and to convey his intention.

We understand the intention of these artists due to the way that symbols have been internalized into certain meanings in our consciousness. In this way, symbols transform themselves into specific ideas or conventions from the world of ideas and language and these symbols can often change according to society and historical period. Signs therefore signify through the use of code. Sometimes, the sign is obvious. Other times, it has to be decoded. Icons and Symbols Two primary codes are Iconic and Symbolic.

Icons are a literal representation of the object (the referent) - e.g. A painting of a hamburger is meant to represent the original. Symbols, on the other hand, are meant to allude to something such as Turner's sunset, or a traffic sign, flag, or word that points to a meaning behind that. Some representations such as a Coke can be both -- it is both icon and representation of American consumption. Words are a typical symbol. By itself they mean nothing.

The word (or symbol) 'rat' can mean different things in different countries. It is composed of syllables which turned around can mean something else to the one who is privy to that information. We also have a representation known as indexical code which is a symbol that points to the existence of something that may not be evident such as smoke pointing to the possibility of someone else being in the neighbourhood.

Indexical signs also indicate a causal connection between things such as footprints that automatically tell us that someone else has recently (or not so recently) trod there.. An excellent example of the transmutation of representations into symbols comes from the painting, Lazy K. auction house, 2008 produced by the English artist Glen.