Free Transcript of Episode 2.18 FIRE AND ICE: Ancient and Modern Semiotics
Semiosis 101 Season 2, Video 18 Transcript
Hello readers.
In this free transcript for the video published on Semiosis 101 on 13 Sep 2023, we look at semiotics from either end of our collective human history. Which means that we discover the roots of the human ability to encode shapes, marks and imagery with meaning.
Watch the free video on YouTube for the full impact…
…and here is the video’s transcript.
NOTE: As with any video transcript the tone used is conversational. The following transcript text features ad libs, and therefore should be read in the spirit of any semi-scripted video.
Welcome to Semiosis 101 season two’s eighteenth semiotic video.
If you have watched Semiosis 101 video before then you will already know I am Dave Wood.
Season two’s semiotic theme is a Semiotic Rosetta Stone, which is a metaphor to the unlocking and designer-centric translation of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory of Semiosis - sign-action.
Why do you need Semiosis 101?
Peirce’s writing and terminology is very …obtuse.
In the last few season two videos I will be focusing on wrapping up the Semiotic Rosetta Stone theme, by examining a wider understanding of Peirce’s semiotic theory and visual communication.
In this video we prepare the ground by looking at semiotics from either end of our collective history. We will do this with the final book review of season two!
Hit subscribe and I will explain…
In episode 2.6 earlier in season two, I summarised James Jakób Liszka’s work on Peirce’s four conditions a semiotic sign must have. In a very short book review there was no time to go deeper. But the four conditions, in designer-centric terms, are:
1. Representative Condition:
It must correlate to or represent a Concept (Object)
2. Presentative Condition:
It must have some sense or depth in its presentation of the representation
3. Interpretative Condition:
It must articulate something to someone
4: Triadic Condition:
It must mediate itself as a sign through the inter-relationship of the first three conditions.
This week, I will be reviewing two other books on signs, separated in time by thousands of years, but both applicable to how creatives can understand a semiotic sign. Liszka’s work will help us frame the books.
The two books I will be reviewing essentially cover the roots of visual communication and contemporary semiotic design thinking.
The two books separate the discussion of semiotic meaning by vast epochs of time. The first book takes us back to the Stone Age roots of recorded visual communication and symbolic behaviour - in the broadest definition of “symbolic.”
This is The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World's Oldest Symbols by Genevieve von Petzinger. This book explains her thesis and research into what could be the first graphic visual language.
The second book is FireSigns – A Semiotic Theory for Graphic Design by Steven Skaggs. A great book on graphic design and Peircean semiotics. This book brings this week’s video right up to the current state of applying semiotics into visual communication.
Von Petzinger’s The First Signs situates us in the Palaeolithic cave art of the Upper Stone Age. Forget your prejudices of brutish cavemen grunting. We are talking here about beautiful art on cave walls, deep inside cliff faces and mountains, where natural light does not penetrate.
The meaning of these beautifully painted frescos and engravings of mostly animals, is lost to us. But they meant something to our ancestors, who like us, were modern humans. Modern humans with the same cognitive abilities, social structures, emotions, languages, cultures, and ability to represent something as something more than its mere depiction.
The only thing separating them and us in the 21st century of gadgets, apps, etc. is materials and technology. They were restricted to natural materials from the available minerals, fauna and flora they could exploit.
So, what has this ancient human history lesson got to do with semiotics?
We are talking about groups of humans who thrived as hunter-gatherers on the European steppe, and painted depictions of Ice Age animals on dark cave walls that only a few of them could ever possibly see. The earliest cave art found is mainly European, in cave systems at the edge of the known glacial sheets of the Ice Age.
Investing in painting with animal fat lamps, in cramped and low accessibility cave systems, beautiful frescos of animals with superlative attention to form and detail, the paintings have symbolic referents to that people.
Von Petzinger acknowledges this art, but her book goes deeper than the image. Hidden in plain sight in the paintings are taxonomy of 32 symbols. Her book focuses on those and what they reveal.
This review will not reveal that (you will have to read the book), but what the significance of her meticulous research, is the hypothesis that our encoding of meaning in both image and graphic-form is older than written language.
In Semiosis 101 videos we have discussed the target audience, and focused only on semiotically communicating to our primary audience. When we look to the ancient past we do so as a tertiary audience, so we have to be mindful that any meaning we take from these caves is mediated by our 21st century biases. So we can never fully understand what the ancients meant.
However, what Von Petzinger’s research and hypothesis does provide us with, is the understanding of what we now do as illustrators and designers is intrinsic to our social-cultural lived experiences.
In the late 19th and early 20th century Charles Sanders Peirce developed his theory of Semiosis. With that as a framework, we can apply the principles to the cave to realise that yes there were Concepts encoded within the symbols and images.
These Concepts were Represented in exceptionally detailed animal depictions and graphic symbols to be seen …not by everybody… but by a target audience (for whatever reason they culturally had).
These caves were re-used over thousands of years, each generation adding to the frescos, or not. But there was some intention for the Representations …to be Interpreted.
Concept > Representation > Interpretation
A semiotic determination flow, older than the written word by thousands 43,000+ years.
We will touch more on our ancient roots in upcoming videos, but let us jump now to the 21st century.
I bought Steven Skaggs’ FireSigns when it was first published in 2017, a year after my PhD thesis. This was significant to me, as while I had been struggling with understanding and applying Peirce’s semiotic theory in my PhD in Scotland, Skaggs had been writing his book in the USA.
Skaggs states in his foreword on page 9 that he hopes, as a graphic designer/semiotician, that, “a new generation of intrepid designer-scholars will come forward to make the next advance.”
I first began to read FireSigns in 2017 around the time I was formulating what a Semiotic Rosetta Stone meant and needed to be for designers and illustrators. So, at the time I only read half the book and paused. This was to give myself chance to channel Peirce through my own Visual Communication Design lens.
Skaggs’ excellent book takes the reader through Peirce toward “A Semiotic Theory for Graphic Design.” My demarcation for the Semiotic Rosetta Stone was slightly wider in its disciplinary focus than FireSigns. So, I did not wish to be too influenced, or have to critique a fellow pilgrim through Peirce from my disciplinary area before I had my own take.
This was a sensible position for me to take, as this would be five years before I conceived of Semiosis 101, and I have published, presented and workshopped many times since then.
I recently returned to FireSigns with a healthy conceptual demarcated distance, to now share with you both a convergent lens and a divergent lens on FireSigns.
I really recommend Semiosis 101 viewers read FireSigns yourselves, and join us as intrepid Peircean semiotic designer-scholars!
Thanks to the Covid pandemic I am still to meet Steven Skaggs, as back in 2020 we were in communication and he was trying to organise to visit me and another colleague while Steven was on a European sabbatical.
Unfortunately, during this time I moved (virtually thanks to the first lockdown) universities and lost his correspondence on my old university email. (If you watch this video Steven, I will be getting in touch for season 3/4).
Over the coming final season two videos I will be drawing on both First Signs and FireSigns books to help wrap up the Semiotic Rosetta Stone theme.
In re-reading FireSigns I returned to my highlighting and annotations from 2017. Skaggs uses a term that will be very useful, and a convergence between FireSigns’ and Semiosis101’s theses on applying Peirce.
To end this eighteenth season two video, we can first conclude that the human ability to encode shapes, marks and imagery with meaning stretches back to the dawn of humanity, and was not recently “invented’.
Secondly, like myself, Steven Skaggs agrees that Peircean semiotic theory is best for designers, as “the enormous opportunities [Semiosis] presents not only to fit our experience as designers of visual messages, BUT TO ILLUMINATE ASPECTS WE MAY NOT HAVE NOTICED.” (p40)
The word I will leave you with this week is “visent,” and this word ties together most of season two’s take on perception and interpretation, and how to encode your aesthetic to HOOK your target audience.
Oops! I have just ended video 18 on a semiotic cliff-hanger!
You will now just have to come back next week!
Watch the free video on YouTube for the full impact…