Abstract:
We are immersed in a landscape of visual messages. An ecology of signs, these images and image-texts speak to us as pictures informed by cultural consciousness and memory. The German word for picture is “bild” which shares its origins with “build.” We understand our environment by assembling it or by “picturing” it; building dialectical images and dimensions of reality. We are continually navigating our world by re-picturing it from the continual flow of both established and new image-texts. Images within the city and of the city are catalysts forming and reforming the city through this process of picturing. Using the model of the Semiosphere, a self-regulating ecological system structured by language, we can model urban space as a metabolism comprised of the narratives and mythologies of culture. This paper will outline a model for an urban semiosphere and graphic semiomes within this semiotic ecology.
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| Google image search “Los Angeles punk rock”, June 2014 |
