“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the duty of e... more “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted.” (From the first two lines of The Name of the Rose)
It is but relatively just and ontological that every thinking creature’s unending quest, though debatably whether by volition or revelation, to discover truth arguably either by the metaphors of fiction or by the empirical matrix of reality. And in both ways, mortal beings, his finite intellect trapped between the crevices of a feeble mind, can only find the comforting utility of words, notwithstanding its multifarious forms, to assist him in traversing one of life’s many odysseys. It is thus tantamount to claim that, in the complex compendium of discursive practices, fiction and reality compound and compliment each other, inviolably hinged together like the essence of a triangle, inevitably resulting to a journey that is obstructed by a gamut of perplexing interpretations, incorrigible ideas, indistinct cognition, illusory information, unwise counsel, confounded inspiration, unfounded assertion, meaningless names, unintelligible signs that is twin brother to incomprehensible symbols, ambiguous expressions, sophistry, rumor, not to mention lies and deceit, which, for the uninitiated, sadly concludes to making trivial nominalism a province of truth. In the midst of this convoluted incertitude, it is imperative that a traveler (writer, teacher, student, reader) must, therefore, brave the walled pathways of fiction and reality – walls fortified by words, signs and symbols. And in this cyclical world of learning and doing, stumbling upon both is a necessity: the latter being dead-ends (enigmatic, allegorical, cerebral, undetermined yet comprehensible, theoria), the former as winding hallways (tedious, verbatim, sentient, predetermined yet unpredictable, praxis); the total experience of which would give clues that would, not without challenge, lead to the heart of the matter. Truth.
In this exposition, the researcher brings light on Umberto Eco’s labyrinthine semiotics just as the lamp of William of Baskerville and his faithful novice, Adso of Melk, illuminated the abbey’s labyrinthine library amidst misleading signs that lead to even puzzling directions purposely fashioned to shroud the way to a euphoric realization of truth, the epiphany of which is aggravated by being essentially tucked away between words, signs and symbols. This is an exposition that seeks to marry philosophical investigation with literary dissemination, as what was once done by the Scholastics to science and theology, under the semiotic machination of prose, narratives, discourses, tracts, imprints and metric lines. In serendipity, this exercise of configuring truth is preambular to what seems to be an uncharted concept – literary epistemology.
Visual communication, as a subject, can be complex; as a practice, it is dynamic nonetheless. Its... more Visual communication, as a subject, can be complex; as a practice, it is dynamic nonetheless. Its influence can be far-reaching, affecting consciousness, beliefs, behaviour, taste, among others. The skills required for its practice is broad-ranging. But with the accessibility of graphics and editing softwares, the profession in visual communication has become competitive in terms of "over supply", though not necessarily in terms of quality. This accessibility to editing softwares brought forth scores of visual designs that are found wanting in terms of visual grammar and meaningful design aesthetics. On the other hand, the availability of skills training in visual design did not necessarily address the need for students to understand visual communication as a practice that requires a load of meaning-making. The last statement has caused the author of this module to develop a module in basic semiotics. This is also motivated by the idea that images in visual communication could only have their linguistic and communicative function when their use and development is informed by some fundamental degree of understanding and knowledge of semiotics. Semiotic skills, therefore, should begin the journeys visual designers must undertake in discovering their potential in the good command of visual vocabulary, part of the totality that is visual communication. The author, thus, thought that, prior to plunging students to the more technical parts of design thinking, a short course on semiotics is in order. However, as semiotics is a highly and technically academic field of study, this module is uniquely developed for students with little interest in academic jargons and engagements. As such, many of the terms and demonstrations in semiotics are replaced in this module with the use of more popularly understood vocabulary. Nonetheless, extra care has been observed by the author so as not to trivialize the theories developed by semioticians, mostly coming from the field of academics.
This essay constitutes the beginning of my investigations on the language of immersive technology... more This essay constitutes the beginning of my investigations on the language of immersive technology * , though still within the confines of the multimodality of moving images, what Burn (2013) calls the kineiconic mode. However, the focus of my research has panned from the 180 0 camera format to the 360 camera. This is not to say that I have totally diverged from applying the kineiconic theory in studying the language of 180 0 image capture and projection. Rather, a study on 360 0 image capture and production, as a very young technology, can never be ever complete without alluding to its predecessors, an integral part of my paper's arguments in illustrating how immersive technology fits in in the universe of moving image cultures. As Spicheva (2014) would put it: All the manifestations of culture are combined in this digital Universe which merges the past, the present, and future manifestations of the communicative thought in a gigantic historical supertext (Spicheva, 2014, 82). If the invention of immersive technology is the next obvious advancement in the history of keneiconic technologies (e.g. cinema, television), does it simply fit in a series of technologies that could be replaced by future inventions within this spectrum of technologies; or simply part of visual culture that speaks of man's effort to transcend the limitation of physical embodiment? Answering the above complex question entails refocusing numerous developments in my study of visual language. For one, the framework I am fostering in my investigation of the grammar of visual language now largely included concerns pertaining to the advances of communication and media technology, and how new perspectives that come with these advances affect media production and consumption; cater to the introduction of a new genre (i.e. immersive, virtual reality) in visual language; reestablish the historical relationships and intermediary concepts between media formats and their implications to the future developments in the field of visual inscriptions, either static or moving images; reconfigure the socio-cultural dimensions in the introduction of immersive technologies (i.e. 360 camera capture, virtual reality projection) as it impacts visual practice and culture; the list of concerns can be overwhelming for this limited paper. In fact, topics that could be unraveled in connection to the technology is admittedly thick that LaValle (2017), in a comprehensive book on virtual reality, tackled the density of the field by segmenting the nature of the technology according to various layers of issues: its science and engineering, the mathematics involved in its configuration, its dynamics and architectonics, and so forth. But it is noteworthy that he held back from fully * The term immersive technology (i.e. corpus) is used in this paper as encompassing both the capture (e.g. 360 0 camera) and dissemination (e.g. virtual reality) of moving images. In some parts of the paper, specific mention of 360 0 camera apart from virtual reality, vice versa, are articulated in order to specify references to each but still within the overarching concept of the corpus.
My summative project was spurred by my work engagements as a volunteer video-maker for the commun... more My summative project was spurred by my work engagements as a volunteer video-maker for the communication strategies of a non- governmental organization, Vintage Vibe. The organization advocates taking loneliness and isolation from the senior citizens of Edinburgh who, by some unfortunate circumstances, have to live in isolation or away from family and friends. The target volunteers are students, self-employed, job seekers, or retired individuals who have so much time to share with seniors, identified in the volunteerism campaign of the organization as VIP. My work is limited to producing videos for social media postings, and perhaps would extend to archiving video documentations of the organization’s events. Nonetheless, in my endeavor to get to know the nature of the volunteer job and how it can maximize its purpose for the organization, I delved into their communication strategies and approached the project as I would during my advertising engagements.
My interest in writing this essay on the city as text is spurred by my enquiries on the dynamics ... more My interest in writing this essay on the city as text is spurred by my enquiries on the dynamics of visual design as a linguistic composite. In the preliminary progresses of my enquiries, I have identified two processes in the realization of a linguistic composite: semiotic practice and semiotic technology. In this essay, I will explore certain parameters that illustrate semiotic practice – the practice involved in meaning-making – by focusing on the city of Edinburgh and how its spatial features conjure textual functionality as ‘controlled’ by advertising texts around its fringes.
The discussion in this paper involves layers of themes that I will cautiously attempt to hinge together as I lay down varying perspectives of reading the city as a text. I will start from Walter Benjamin’s montage of city scenes in One Way Street that serves as maps in understanding the self; then proceed to the discussion of the notion of the city as language (i.e. text) partly based on Roland Barthe’s Semiology of the Urban; to the marketing characterization of the paratext as defined in the literary theory of Gerard Genette in his work, Introduction to Paratext. The latest layer will allow me to formulate my own perspective of reading the city as text – through the paratextual role of advertising to the city as main text (i.e. body text). Within the synthesis of these layers, I will answer the question: What are the contrasting (or complementary) realities that characterize the mixture of texts in Edinburgh’s landscape?
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the duty of e... more “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted.” (From the first two lines of The Name of the Rose)
It is but relatively just and ontological that every thinking creature’s unending quest, though debatably whether by volition or revelation, to discover truth arguably either by the metaphors of fiction or by the empirical matrix of reality. And in both ways, mortal beings, his finite intellect trapped between the crevices of a feeble mind, can only find the comforting utility of words, notwithstanding its multifarious forms, to assist him in traversing one of life’s many odysseys. It is thus tantamount to claim that, in the complex compendium of discursive practices, fiction and reality compound and compliment each other, inviolably hinged together like the essence of a triangle, inevitably resulting to a journey that is obstructed by a gamut of perplexing interpretations, incorrigible ideas, indistinct cognition, illusory information, unwise counsel, confounded inspiration, unfounded assertion, meaningless names, unintelligible signs that is twin brother to incomprehensible symbols, ambiguous expressions, sophistry, rumor, not to mention lies and deceit, which, for the uninitiated, sadly concludes to making trivial nominalism a province of truth. In the midst of this convoluted incertitude, it is imperative that a traveler (writer, teacher, student, reader) must, therefore, brave the walled pathways of fiction and reality – walls fortified by words, signs and symbols. And in this cyclical world of learning and doing, stumbling upon both is a necessity: the latter being dead-ends (enigmatic, allegorical, cerebral, undetermined yet comprehensible, theoria), the former as winding hallways (tedious, verbatim, sentient, predetermined yet unpredictable, praxis); the total experience of which would give clues that would, not without challenge, lead to the heart of the matter. Truth.
In this exposition, the researcher brings light on Umberto Eco’s labyrinthine semiotics just as the lamp of William of Baskerville and his faithful novice, Adso of Melk, illuminated the abbey’s labyrinthine library amidst misleading signs that lead to even puzzling directions purposely fashioned to shroud the way to a euphoric realization of truth, the epiphany of which is aggravated by being essentially tucked away between words, signs and symbols. This is an exposition that seeks to marry philosophical investigation with literary dissemination, as what was once done by the Scholastics to science and theology, under the semiotic machination of prose, narratives, discourses, tracts, imprints and metric lines. In serendipity, this exercise of configuring truth is preambular to what seems to be an uncharted concept – literary epistemology.
Visual communication, as a subject, can be complex; as a practice, it is dynamic nonetheless. Its... more Visual communication, as a subject, can be complex; as a practice, it is dynamic nonetheless. Its influence can be far-reaching, affecting consciousness, beliefs, behaviour, taste, among others. The skills required for its practice is broad-ranging. But with the accessibility of graphics and editing softwares, the profession in visual communication has become competitive in terms of "over supply", though not necessarily in terms of quality. This accessibility to editing softwares brought forth scores of visual designs that are found wanting in terms of visual grammar and meaningful design aesthetics. On the other hand, the availability of skills training in visual design did not necessarily address the need for students to understand visual communication as a practice that requires a load of meaning-making. The last statement has caused the author of this module to develop a module in basic semiotics. This is also motivated by the idea that images in visual communication could only have their linguistic and communicative function when their use and development is informed by some fundamental degree of understanding and knowledge of semiotics. Semiotic skills, therefore, should begin the journeys visual designers must undertake in discovering their potential in the good command of visual vocabulary, part of the totality that is visual communication. The author, thus, thought that, prior to plunging students to the more technical parts of design thinking, a short course on semiotics is in order. However, as semiotics is a highly and technically academic field of study, this module is uniquely developed for students with little interest in academic jargons and engagements. As such, many of the terms and demonstrations in semiotics are replaced in this module with the use of more popularly understood vocabulary. Nonetheless, extra care has been observed by the author so as not to trivialize the theories developed by semioticians, mostly coming from the field of academics.
This essay constitutes the beginning of my investigations on the language of immersive technology... more This essay constitutes the beginning of my investigations on the language of immersive technology * , though still within the confines of the multimodality of moving images, what Burn (2013) calls the kineiconic mode. However, the focus of my research has panned from the 180 0 camera format to the 360 camera. This is not to say that I have totally diverged from applying the kineiconic theory in studying the language of 180 0 image capture and projection. Rather, a study on 360 0 image capture and production, as a very young technology, can never be ever complete without alluding to its predecessors, an integral part of my paper's arguments in illustrating how immersive technology fits in in the universe of moving image cultures. As Spicheva (2014) would put it: All the manifestations of culture are combined in this digital Universe which merges the past, the present, and future manifestations of the communicative thought in a gigantic historical supertext (Spicheva, 2014, 82). If the invention of immersive technology is the next obvious advancement in the history of keneiconic technologies (e.g. cinema, television), does it simply fit in a series of technologies that could be replaced by future inventions within this spectrum of technologies; or simply part of visual culture that speaks of man's effort to transcend the limitation of physical embodiment? Answering the above complex question entails refocusing numerous developments in my study of visual language. For one, the framework I am fostering in my investigation of the grammar of visual language now largely included concerns pertaining to the advances of communication and media technology, and how new perspectives that come with these advances affect media production and consumption; cater to the introduction of a new genre (i.e. immersive, virtual reality) in visual language; reestablish the historical relationships and intermediary concepts between media formats and their implications to the future developments in the field of visual inscriptions, either static or moving images; reconfigure the socio-cultural dimensions in the introduction of immersive technologies (i.e. 360 camera capture, virtual reality projection) as it impacts visual practice and culture; the list of concerns can be overwhelming for this limited paper. In fact, topics that could be unraveled in connection to the technology is admittedly thick that LaValle (2017), in a comprehensive book on virtual reality, tackled the density of the field by segmenting the nature of the technology according to various layers of issues: its science and engineering, the mathematics involved in its configuration, its dynamics and architectonics, and so forth. But it is noteworthy that he held back from fully * The term immersive technology (i.e. corpus) is used in this paper as encompassing both the capture (e.g. 360 0 camera) and dissemination (e.g. virtual reality) of moving images. In some parts of the paper, specific mention of 360 0 camera apart from virtual reality, vice versa, are articulated in order to specify references to each but still within the overarching concept of the corpus.
My summative project was spurred by my work engagements as a volunteer video-maker for the commun... more My summative project was spurred by my work engagements as a volunteer video-maker for the communication strategies of a non- governmental organization, Vintage Vibe. The organization advocates taking loneliness and isolation from the senior citizens of Edinburgh who, by some unfortunate circumstances, have to live in isolation or away from family and friends. The target volunteers are students, self-employed, job seekers, or retired individuals who have so much time to share with seniors, identified in the volunteerism campaign of the organization as VIP. My work is limited to producing videos for social media postings, and perhaps would extend to archiving video documentations of the organization’s events. Nonetheless, in my endeavor to get to know the nature of the volunteer job and how it can maximize its purpose for the organization, I delved into their communication strategies and approached the project as I would during my advertising engagements.
My interest in writing this essay on the city as text is spurred by my enquiries on the dynamics ... more My interest in writing this essay on the city as text is spurred by my enquiries on the dynamics of visual design as a linguistic composite. In the preliminary progresses of my enquiries, I have identified two processes in the realization of a linguistic composite: semiotic practice and semiotic technology. In this essay, I will explore certain parameters that illustrate semiotic practice – the practice involved in meaning-making – by focusing on the city of Edinburgh and how its spatial features conjure textual functionality as ‘controlled’ by advertising texts around its fringes.
The discussion in this paper involves layers of themes that I will cautiously attempt to hinge together as I lay down varying perspectives of reading the city as a text. I will start from Walter Benjamin’s montage of city scenes in One Way Street that serves as maps in understanding the self; then proceed to the discussion of the notion of the city as language (i.e. text) partly based on Roland Barthe’s Semiology of the Urban; to the marketing characterization of the paratext as defined in the literary theory of Gerard Genette in his work, Introduction to Paratext. The latest layer will allow me to formulate my own perspective of reading the city as text – through the paratextual role of advertising to the city as main text (i.e. body text). Within the synthesis of these layers, I will answer the question: What are the contrasting (or complementary) realities that characterize the mixture of texts in Edinburgh’s landscape?
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Papers by Gregg Lloren
(From the first two lines of The Name of the Rose)
It is but relatively just and ontological that every thinking creature’s unending quest, though debatably whether by volition or revelation, to discover truth arguably either by the metaphors of fiction or by the empirical matrix of reality. And in both ways, mortal beings, his finite intellect trapped between the crevices of a feeble mind, can only find the comforting utility of words, notwithstanding its multifarious forms, to assist him in traversing one of life’s many odysseys. It is thus tantamount to claim that, in the complex compendium of discursive practices, fiction and reality compound and compliment each other, inviolably hinged together like the essence of a triangle, inevitably resulting to a journey that is obstructed by a gamut of perplexing interpretations, incorrigible ideas, indistinct cognition, illusory information, unwise counsel, confounded inspiration, unfounded assertion, meaningless names, unintelligible signs that is twin brother to incomprehensible symbols, ambiguous expressions, sophistry, rumor, not to mention lies and deceit, which, for the uninitiated, sadly concludes to making trivial nominalism a province of truth. In the midst of this convoluted incertitude, it is imperative that a traveler (writer, teacher, student, reader) must, therefore, brave the walled pathways of fiction and reality – walls fortified by words, signs and symbols. And in this cyclical world of learning and doing, stumbling upon both is a necessity: the latter being dead-ends (enigmatic, allegorical, cerebral, undetermined yet comprehensible, theoria), the former as winding hallways (tedious, verbatim, sentient, predetermined yet unpredictable, praxis); the total experience of which would give clues that would, not without challenge, lead to the heart of the matter. Truth.
In this exposition, the researcher brings light on Umberto Eco’s labyrinthine semiotics just as the lamp of William of Baskerville and his faithful novice, Adso of Melk, illuminated the abbey’s labyrinthine library amidst misleading signs that lead to even puzzling directions purposely fashioned to shroud the way to a euphoric realization of truth, the epiphany of which is aggravated by being essentially tucked away between words, signs and symbols. This is an exposition that seeks to marry philosophical investigation with literary dissemination, as what was once done by the Scholastics to science and theology, under the semiotic machination of prose, narratives, discourses, tracts, imprints and metric lines. In serendipity, this exercise of configuring truth is preambular to what seems to be an uncharted concept – literary epistemology.
Drafts by Gregg Lloren
The last statement has caused the author of this module to develop a module in basic semiotics. This is also motivated by the idea that images in visual communication could only have their linguistic and communicative function when their use and development is informed by some fundamental degree of understanding and knowledge of semiotics. Semiotic skills, therefore, should begin the journeys visual designers must undertake in discovering their potential in the good command of visual vocabulary, part of the totality that is visual communication. The author, thus, thought that, prior to plunging students to the more technical parts of design thinking, a short course on semiotics is in order. However, as semiotics is a highly and technically academic field of study, this module is uniquely developed for students with little interest in academic jargons and engagements. As such, many of the terms and demonstrations in semiotics are replaced in this module with the use of more popularly understood vocabulary. Nonetheless, extra care has been observed by the author so as not to trivialize the theories developed by semioticians, mostly coming from the field of academics.
The discussion in this paper involves layers of themes that I will cautiously attempt to hinge together as I lay down varying perspectives of reading the city as a text. I will start from Walter Benjamin’s montage of city scenes in One Way Street that serves as maps in understanding the self; then proceed to the discussion of the notion of the city as language (i.e. text) partly based on Roland Barthe’s Semiology of the Urban; to the marketing characterization of the paratext as defined in the literary theory of Gerard Genette in his work, Introduction to Paratext. The latest layer will allow me to formulate my own perspective of reading the city as text – through the paratextual role of advertising to the city as main text (i.e. body text). Within the synthesis of these layers, I will answer the question: What are the contrasting (or complementary) realities that characterize the mixture of texts in Edinburgh’s landscape?
(From the first two lines of The Name of the Rose)
It is but relatively just and ontological that every thinking creature’s unending quest, though debatably whether by volition or revelation, to discover truth arguably either by the metaphors of fiction or by the empirical matrix of reality. And in both ways, mortal beings, his finite intellect trapped between the crevices of a feeble mind, can only find the comforting utility of words, notwithstanding its multifarious forms, to assist him in traversing one of life’s many odysseys. It is thus tantamount to claim that, in the complex compendium of discursive practices, fiction and reality compound and compliment each other, inviolably hinged together like the essence of a triangle, inevitably resulting to a journey that is obstructed by a gamut of perplexing interpretations, incorrigible ideas, indistinct cognition, illusory information, unwise counsel, confounded inspiration, unfounded assertion, meaningless names, unintelligible signs that is twin brother to incomprehensible symbols, ambiguous expressions, sophistry, rumor, not to mention lies and deceit, which, for the uninitiated, sadly concludes to making trivial nominalism a province of truth. In the midst of this convoluted incertitude, it is imperative that a traveler (writer, teacher, student, reader) must, therefore, brave the walled pathways of fiction and reality – walls fortified by words, signs and symbols. And in this cyclical world of learning and doing, stumbling upon both is a necessity: the latter being dead-ends (enigmatic, allegorical, cerebral, undetermined yet comprehensible, theoria), the former as winding hallways (tedious, verbatim, sentient, predetermined yet unpredictable, praxis); the total experience of which would give clues that would, not without challenge, lead to the heart of the matter. Truth.
In this exposition, the researcher brings light on Umberto Eco’s labyrinthine semiotics just as the lamp of William of Baskerville and his faithful novice, Adso of Melk, illuminated the abbey’s labyrinthine library amidst misleading signs that lead to even puzzling directions purposely fashioned to shroud the way to a euphoric realization of truth, the epiphany of which is aggravated by being essentially tucked away between words, signs and symbols. This is an exposition that seeks to marry philosophical investigation with literary dissemination, as what was once done by the Scholastics to science and theology, under the semiotic machination of prose, narratives, discourses, tracts, imprints and metric lines. In serendipity, this exercise of configuring truth is preambular to what seems to be an uncharted concept – literary epistemology.
The last statement has caused the author of this module to develop a module in basic semiotics. This is also motivated by the idea that images in visual communication could only have their linguistic and communicative function when their use and development is informed by some fundamental degree of understanding and knowledge of semiotics. Semiotic skills, therefore, should begin the journeys visual designers must undertake in discovering their potential in the good command of visual vocabulary, part of the totality that is visual communication. The author, thus, thought that, prior to plunging students to the more technical parts of design thinking, a short course on semiotics is in order. However, as semiotics is a highly and technically academic field of study, this module is uniquely developed for students with little interest in academic jargons and engagements. As such, many of the terms and demonstrations in semiotics are replaced in this module with the use of more popularly understood vocabulary. Nonetheless, extra care has been observed by the author so as not to trivialize the theories developed by semioticians, mostly coming from the field of academics.
The discussion in this paper involves layers of themes that I will cautiously attempt to hinge together as I lay down varying perspectives of reading the city as a text. I will start from Walter Benjamin’s montage of city scenes in One Way Street that serves as maps in understanding the self; then proceed to the discussion of the notion of the city as language (i.e. text) partly based on Roland Barthe’s Semiology of the Urban; to the marketing characterization of the paratext as defined in the literary theory of Gerard Genette in his work, Introduction to Paratext. The latest layer will allow me to formulate my own perspective of reading the city as text – through the paratextual role of advertising to the city as main text (i.e. body text). Within the synthesis of these layers, I will answer the question: What are the contrasting (or complementary) realities that characterize the mixture of texts in Edinburgh’s landscape?