Free Transcript of Episode 2.19 HUMBLING PICASSO? Semiotic Message-Carrying Across Time
Semiosis 101 Season 2, Video 19 Transcript
Hello readers.
In this free transcript for the video published on Semiosis 101 on 20 Sep 2023, the main focus in this penultimate season two video I will be focusing on bringing the theme of a Semiotic Rosetta Stone to a close. Which means that I will take you much further back into prehistory to semiotically examine our visual communication roots.
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 nineteenth 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 this penultimate season two video I will be focusing on bringing the theme of a Semiotic Rosetta Stone to a close. This metaphor takes us back to the Bronze Age and early forms of written language.
In this video… “HUMBLING PICASSO? Semiotic Message-Carrying Across Time” …I will take you much further back into prehistory to semiotically examine our visual communication roots.
Hit subscribe and I will explain…
Two weeks ago I reviewed the last two books for now. FireSigns I will discuss again next week, but The First Signs segues nicely into the topic of this week’s video.
We are time travelling back at least 45,000 years and entering the dark caves of Stone Age Europe, when we humans were hunter-gatherers living at the edge of Ice Age glaciers …and were painting images on hard to access cave walls …in darkness.
(Okay, they took light into the caves in the form of animal fat torches).
Why are we suddenly time-travelling back to look at what some “ape-man” daubed on a wall between clubbing mammoths?
Firstly, like with Semiosis, suspend your immediate bias.
Secondly, these people were not brutish apes but modern human beings, like you and me.
Thirdly, well…
Thirdly, these people were sophisticated. Granted they had no identifiable ‘written language’ (we would have to wait until we became farmers in the Bronze Age for that).
Von Petzinger’s book The First Signs suggests Symbolic language is ancient with interesting research evidence to support her hypothesis. We are in this video interested in both these signs and the figurative animal paintings that surround them.
These Stone Age painters verbally communicated, they had culture and social structures. There were not great numbers of our ancestors roaming the Ice Age European tundra, and they probably were tribally interconnected with each other. Their brains were exactly the same as our brains, their technology and material culture was just different to ours.
This means that very little Stone Age artefacts of daily living survive. Just what is in the caves.
The Stone Age mobile artefacts that do remain offer tantalising insights to their socio-cultural world. We know from our own human species family tree, that ochre had been utilised as pigment by our cousins Homo neanderthalensis as far back 300,000 years, and probably goes further back to our distant human ancestors too.
Ochre as a pigment can be used on many surfaces such as leather, human skin and rocks. Worn as body paint it is thought to have been both a prophylactic against bug bights and the sun, and a tribal signifier. It is this evidence that is fragmentary as everything except rocks rot over time.
We are talking about the creation of paintings that remained in use for 10,000s of years. Think of your grandparents’ generation. Then go back at least 1600 generations.
We are focussing on a period of at least 12,00 generations of humans that communicated something that had socio-cultural importance across vast periods of lived existences before the agricultural revolution took place. A vast time of mammoths and snow.
The caves across southern Europe containing these paintings were rediscovered over the last two hundred years, and contain many friezes of beautifully observed and represented Ice Age animals.
An apocryphal tale quotes Pablo Picasso, after visiting the cave paintings at Lascaux cave, stating “we have learnt nothing.”
So, “What has all this contextual history got to do with Semiosis?” I hear you snap back at the screen.
I am not suggesting the Ice Age painters knew of Semiosis when painting. That would clearly be a stretch, and I want to make clear I am not making.
I am stating that the act of encoding meaning into visual forms IS a human skill we inherited from further back than anyone appreciates. 1600 odd generations later Peirce just found one philosophical way to explain how we semiotically communicate.
So what can we learn about our early human ancestors’s socio-cultural world … semiotically speaking? After all, by the sheer passage of time we are certainly not the target audience.
As we have seen in these Semiosis 101 videos so far, creatives should only consider their target audience when encoding semiotic sign-action. By the time a tertiary audience, so far removed from the target audience tries to interpret what they see, they will bring there own lived experience bias to the interpretation and apply a narrative and meaning that makes sense to them.
Therefore, from where we are in the 21st century we are in danger of mis-interpreting the paintings based on our own socio-cultural references and biases. So let us avoid doing that to these paintings, as much as possible.
Instead, let us learn from the images what we can through applying Semiosis using the three representation of the concept lenses of Iconic, Indexical and Symbolic, shall we?
We are safe from misinterpreting the cave images if we approach them from a phenomenological direction of lived experience and material culture.
When we look at any cave painting we know several immediate things that helps us position our inquiry.
SomeONE wanted to paint in areas of caves that had no direct sunlight and were difficult to access, that required dedication, observational skills and creative skills to be successful.
I will not focus on any spiritual aspect of why they were painted. Let us leave that thought hanging behind our semiotic focus.
We know these cave areas were not habitable and that the people probably lived in the surrounding valleys, in hide tents, perhaps also painted?
The majority of paintings across the tens of thousands of years these caves were visited, were animals. Both prey animals and carnivores. (Very rarely are human figures painted on these cave walls).
By applying abductive reasoning we can say that as hunter-gatherers, animals were of great importance to our ancestors’ survival. Edible plants would also be as important to them too, but these are not painted on cave walls. This point is indicative to why animals, which using Semiosis as a decoding exercise we will summarise soon.
Abductively reasoned, we can say that the style of painting is very anatomically realistic, and does not evolve of the vast expanse of time people painted in caves.
Just consider that fact for a moment. Stylistically, the representations of animals remained fairly consistent for tens of thousands of years. Now consider how painting and visual representations rapidly evolve across different socio-cultural groups and shorter time periods over the last 3,000 years.
There is some great experimental research by a French illustrator Bernard David that could explain the material culture Ice Age technology behind why. Check the description below for his book.
Again, we can abductively reason that the cave paintings were painted there for reasons more important than ‘because’ or that it was an ‘art gallery.’ They told the viewing Ice Age audience someTHING about themselves.
We can see the outlines of ochre painted with brush, fingers or pigment blowing. We can see the animal skin patterns recreated on the animal shapes, the body language indicated by both line and shapes of the cave walls. As a tertiary audience 1600 generations later, we see these converging elements forming shapes and textures as familiar to us in the 21st century. We can identify them as animals. We can identify these elements as graphic shapes too (see von Petzinger). These Iconic representations begin the semiotic sign-action.
If you are aware you can say “mammoth” or “horse.” But if you are a scientist you may follow the Indexical representations to actual species from the painting. So far, so good …for Semiosis.
We are still on safe interpretation ground here. So what about the highest level - Symbolic?
To end this nineteenth season two video, we will end on the Symbolic level of Ice Age cave painting interpretation.
Again, by applying abductive reasoning on limited knowledge of the lived experience of Ice Age hunter-gatherers, we can hypothesise that on a semiotic Symbolic level, the animal depictions had important meaning to hunting societies. Painting of them on hard to access walls in darkness suggests ritual significance, so Symbolically it is safe to interpret a visual connection between the carnivores and humans with a successful hunting of prey animals?
Semiosis can be encoded by the creative into the visual communication work to aid successful interpretation. We have been doing it for thousands of generations. We are only now just realising the power of semiotic sign-action.
Come back next week for the Semiosis 101 review of season 2.
Watch the free video on YouTube for the full impact…