Timing Is Everything

" Seems like every time you come back home, It's just to steal my heart and leave. Don't go away again"

My previous blog post was an image that represented or showed love, to me personally. With this same image, I am able to change or alter its meaning or what the image is displaying simply by changing its context. Context is the form in which the message was given. What I mean by this is the context of an image is when, where, how, why it was taken. I can change the context by changing the words or caption that go with this image.

The new caption or words that I put to this image are "Seems like every time you come back home, It's just to steal my heart and leave. Don't go away again"-Every Avenue. Now when I look at this image(try to imagine the "come back soon" and "i feel safe" aren't there) I see discouragement, sadness, heartache, routine,and frustration. These feelings are almost completely different then the feelings I first had with this image. That is because the context has changed.

The context is now two people sitting on a curb together and they are unable to fix or come up with a solution to their problem. The male is always having to come and go and the girl is tired of it and doesn't want him to leave again. I think that frustration can be seen in this image now because the girl is use to this routine and is kind of asking him to stay, knowing that he can't or he won't. Which then leads to sadness, heartache, and discouragement. They both are going to get discouraged to talk or work on the problem because they don't have any ideas how to fix it. The body language that at first was seen as closeness and wanting to be near each other, now can be seen as awkwardness and uncomfortable. The words "come back soon" originally showed understanding and encouragement. Now, the words "Don't go away again" show anger or sadness. The location of where the people are has changed now as well. First, the location of a girl and guy choosing to sit on a curb and talk was because they were probably trying to be alone so they could just talk to each other and not be bothered because they were in love. Now, the location of the curb can be seen as wanting to be alone because they were going to have a fight or argument and didn't want others to hear or see. This shows how the same exact place or location can stand for different things simply because of the context of the image.

The context of an image is really important because that is how we will interpret the meaning of the image. Not everybody is going to have the same meaning or take away the same thing from an image, even if it is the exact same picture. We all have different contexts in which we place it.

Showing Love without Saying it

Love. This picture shows or represents love without having to actually say "this is love". I have interpreted this whole image as meaning and showing the idea of what love looks like, or could look like. I can do this because of the idea of semiotics. Semiotics is roughly "the study of signs". Signs can be in the form of words, images, signs, gestures, or objects. A thought behind semiotics is that we construct our reality based on the way we interpret the signs around us. Meaning that the culture in which we are apart of helps to influence what the signs mean. This is because we assign meaning to things; they do not tell us what they are, we decide the meaning of something. There are several things that make this picture represent "love".

First, I saw what appears to be a pair of girls legs and a pair of males legs next to each other. The two people are sitting next to each other on a curb and are sitting tightly so that their legs and feet just barely touch. That is all that is visible of the actually people in this picture, but so much can be taken from just that. The body language suggests that they are comfortable with each other or attracted to each other because of the closeness and angle of their bodies. The position of the girls feet could also possible suggest nervousness, but of the good kind. Or of sadness. There are words involved with the image as well.

The words "come back soon." say so much. It means that these two people clearly care about each other and want to be around each other and are probably in love with each other. One of them has to go away and the other is letting them but saying to hurry back to them. The words "i feel safe" clearly show that this person feels safe with and because of the other person. Love is feeling safe, nervous, and excited for the return of the one we love after they have been gone. Although, few words are shown and less then half of an image, the idea that this image was trying to express comes through clearly.

Through semiotics we can take away meaning from symbols in many ways. The picture above represents "love" by the combination of what we know from our culture as body language that suggests love, and words that describe characteristics of love. This image is in a way showing the thoughts of the person in the picture who probably cannot say them out loud yet. This image overall uses semiotics in a creative yet subtle way to show "love"

Music and Feelings

The activity that we did in class with listening to clips of different types of music, and then free drawing whatever we felt from the music at the time, was really interesting. I think that it goes to prove that music really does have an influence on peoples emotions and mind sets. Most of the people in class had flowing, floating and "light" style drawings from the calmer music clips without a heavy beat. While for the Linkin Park clip that had a distinct beat a lot of us had sharp defined shapes or lines. I think that it also goes to show that we all hear the same thing differently. Meaning, that we all heard the same exact clip but interpreted it differently and unique to ourselves. Some heard the bass, some heard the guitar etc. I really like the idea of this activity and actually would like to do research on my own to learn more about this idea or concept, just because I personally love music and its ability and effect on people.