The Ecstasy of Influence

Is appropriation a form of plagiarism? When is something merely appropriated and when does it become plagiarism? At what point does and influence become a copy?

It seems we are in an era where everyone owns this and that, and if you copy or mimic it, you are subject to lawsuit. One may question if art, media, etc. cannot be copied, then how are we to make it better? The creator of the simpsons has been quoted as saying that plagerism is inherit in cartoons. Without influences, working against eachother, would such cartoons be as successful? Without Fritz the Cat, Ren and Stimpy could have never came into existence. It makes one question if originality truely exists. It begs the question if influence can be a commodity.

In the era of whats yours and what's mines one wonders how society still functions. The streets are everyones and no ones. We are allowed to drive, ride bikes, motorcycles on the streets for free, as long as we follow the correct traffic signals and once in a while pay that pesky toll.

As described there is plenty of undiscovered public knowledge available. Yet research continues on-- perhaps it is because we are too "lazy" to actually seek out information in the "obsolete" form of a book. If everything were converted digitally, we can just click "ctrl 'f'" and find exactly what we are looking for- in theory.

It seems to be only a matter of time till people are claiming land in the oceans, the air, etc.

The body and the archive

The article discusses photography, a condensed history and how it was both privately and in the justice system. The article spends most of the time focusing on the coincidental proliferation of photography and phrenology. The study of phrenology talks about how one can measure a persons skull and use this basis on their intelligence/likelihood to commit a crime. These hypotheses constructed by Bertillon and Gaulton were scientific in nature, but lacked validity. Even more so, these studies seemed racist in nature. In addition, there was the problem of how one archives all the mug shots taken etc. You cannot organize photographs in the same method as you would a book or textual document. It's crazy to imagine that workers in the 1840s would have to turn in their phreonology analysis before applying for a job.

Exploring Language

The understanding of semiotics is not limited to language, but it can include other elements like clothing, hair styles, etc. There are many things a person is projecting to society if they are bathed, well groomed, wearing tattered clothing, etc. Then, after we all think we have an understanding of the abstract world-- we then are to discover that these signs, symbols, etc change over time. Such that, a person from the 1900's would have difficulty understanding our current world in the year 2007. It wouldn't just be that the style had changed, but certain understandings have changed by either being proven false or challenged. But this is not to say that people within our own time have difficulty understanding the semiotics of one another within the same society. Agreed understanding is what makes the world work-- from a simple nod, the person is conveying that they understood/agree with what was just said. If someone where to challenge these fundamentals, there could be complete chaos in certain regions.

Semotics for Beginners

Code is just not for software engineers. Our daily lives involve some form of coding. From the language we speak, write, to even the way we look at a photograph. We have 'learned' foreshortening, therefore we know that an item in a 2-d photograph is 3-d in real life. We know that just because the door in the distance seems to have converging parallel lines, it's just our perception. The manner which we read objects as figure/ground have all been learned. This learning process of code exists to create some order within the world and our daily lives. Things such as language which seem natural for communication were learned. Things get more complex as we can divide certain aspects even further-- if given a group of objects you can group them into color categories, dates, size, etc. Even at the grocery store, we try and choose the apples which have the darkest red pigment and least bruises-- because as we have learned, that is how we identify the best apples... then only to discover that the "red delicious" apple tastes like cardboard in comparison to other types. From film to books, it's all organized in a specific fashion for our "better understanding" meanwhile, there are directors like Tarentinos "Pulp Fiction" where the story is hacked up into isolated sequences which the viewer has to organize later.

Constructing the Swastika

The Swastika is just a symbol--
Many would argue with this statement, that it represents the horrors of Hitlers reign. Hilter claimed that the swastika was a symbol for the rise of the Aryan race-- but if one looks deeper-- they symbol predates such fascism. It has been used as a mere design due to its geometry and the visual effect of "spinning" it emanates-- in other contexts it has been used to symbolize good luck. Because of the symbols history, this clearly shows that the Nazis were dependent on the symbol, and not the latter as Hilter would have people believe. But the change of the symbol in western culture-- of meaning hatred, the holocaust, such tragedy, has made the symbol strong. When people see the swastika in American culture, they automatically associate it with evil; while in a Japanese culture- they may not automatically think of Hitler, they may think of an architectural design.

It seems like the symbol can never regress from what it has become. The power of the swastika cannot be undone as it was fully exploited by the Nazi Regime. Interestingly, the swastika went from being a positive/neutral symbol to becoming quite the opposite.

Modern Hieroglyphs / Language of Dreams etc

Isotypes can be useful-- but once again... as with symbols, they are learned. Something as simple as the symbol for man and woman (the one on bathroom doors) were learned. The dress on the female figure is only recognizable if i one is familiar with western fashion-- in addition, there is nothing on the door that pictorially shows that the place one is going to enter is a restroom. The idea of isotypes seems like a valid argument for uniting the world in the global sense, but in reality-- as westerners- we think why would one spend that much time creating all these symbols when one can just write English lettering much easier. Neurath was not looking to change the way we think perhaps, he was just aiding so that we can understand one another better. The purpose of isotypes is basic understanding when you are unfamiliar with the language, but still, in a Chinese airport there is no doubt that an American tourist would be thrown off by some of their symbols-- as once again-- the meanings are learned. Even if one knows the basic symbols, this does not mean that one can understand all of them. There are simply too many irregularities which could occur when trying to get specific-- meanwhile certain words can mean more than one thing. Trying to adapt an isotype system for communication globally would be interesting and very difficult as certain things are more recognized/used by another culture etc.

What is a sign- Peirce

It seems that everything is learned. As Peirce describes, no one is actually ever in a state of pure "feeling"-- except in a half waking hour. We always seem to attach things which we have learned to that which we experience. When he talks about the color red itself... one may think of a Crayola crayon-- while another may think of Gap's "Red" line. We seem to attatch our own sentiments to given signs, we try and believe that our sentiments are personally our own, but really-- we just learned them or picked them up somewhere in our lives... unless of course one is not of this world.

What is a symbol? It is a fully loaded question to investigate-- but really in the end nothing ever seems quite concrete. The word itself "symbol" is a symbol-- the letters are abstract signs that construct the word, and we only know the word because we have attached certain sounds to each syllable that are recognized in the English language. To anyone else, "symbol" could mean as much as "hrifeauolehgwra" does to us. Peirce doesn't get into where these symbols came from... but because there are an inifinite amount available, it is only logical that all symbols must evolve or be a tangent of an existing symbol. This is to say that one cannot create a pure symbol. Everything in this world is associated with something else-