W2: Innocence Lost

We started the lecture by looking at the recent TalkTalkTv advert which involves a female ballerina and a male astronaut. Simply by looking at this one example we were able to see how certain points are denoted, like that it involves a ballerina, but others were connotations, e.g. that the plot is a romance story. It was interesting to see how we add our own meanings onto images.

Meanings are created through a social relationship, which includes how the audience interpret an image and the context in which the image is seen. Consequently this leads to multiple meanings for one image because everyone's experience differs. However there can still be dominant meanings.

These can often be influenced by the political view that you start with, for instance Euro-centrism, where by European concerns are given greater importance. This can affect how you see an image because of your personal priorities and preferences created by the culture/ place that you grew up in. Being aware of how meanings can be interpreted is useful when analysing images and creating them.

Particularly as despite wanting an image to have an intended meaning, often the audience will interpret a different meaning from it. Karl Marx argued that power and people with the means of production controlled ideas and that consumers agree with this, yet Althusser believed in the importance of family, media, religion and education in promoting values. In society naturalisation of ideas can occur, but we can also reinvest products with a different meaning, e.g. graffiti and pop art.
Cultural appropriation perhaps goes a step further as one group takes an aspect of one culture and changes the meaning. While the meaning can be completely flipped with juxtaposition to form cultural distance, where two images/ products etc are combined to make a statement.

Changing the corporate message from it's intended meaning is called culture jamming and can be used by a viewer/ consumer to reclaim a public space that was once controlled by the corporation.

In general it seems that as viewers we can not look at an image/ product without attaching our own meanings that have been formed from our cultural position. This might go against the intended meaning of the piece and furthermore our own cultural production can challenge these ideas as well, so that we have more power as viewers.