Signs

Today in the Media Histories and Culture lecture, we learnt about signs. The basic form of communication that exists between us. What we did this lesson was a bit of practice to help ourselves understand the concept. Some of us were told to get out a pad and a pen and turn around and face our colleagues sitting behind us. We weren't allowed to look on the front screen. Our colleagues sitting behind would look at the screen and tell us what is being drawn in the screen. We, then, had to draw them relying on the information given by the colleagues. This exercise was quite fun to be honest and definitely helped us grasp the concept. Soon after this exercise we were shown the process model of communication to further ease our understandings which was something like this:

       Signs, messages, information
T    ----------------------------->    R
      <-----------------------------
                     Feedbacks

Here, T means Transmitter and R means Receiver. Transmitter communicates (provides information) to the Receiver via various possible methods (speaking, signalling, gesturing) and when the Receiver responds back to the transmitter, he/she is giving feedback in response to the transmitter's information. This is the basic form of communication.

In this lesson, we came across a term "Semiotics". I didn't know the meaning of this term but this lecture sure helped me understand it. From what I gained, I take the meaning of semiotics as certain signs and their arrangement that create certain meanings which can be used in the communication. All the text created in different languages all around the world are the examples. But also the certain artefacts, objects and codes used in various cultures can also be considered as the valid examples.

This artefact has a meaning as it clearly represents the structural figure of a wild Rhino.

This is a form of visualisation. This is very important stuff to understand in my chosen course of Digital Animation as it is mostly about visual communication. We, as animators and artist students, have to have clear understanding on the visuals to be able to successfully create them in the digital world of animation.