Art, Media Design, and Postproduction

5Bifurcated Meaning

Infliction of Statements

Premise: This chapter examines the slippage of meaning in the process of creating direct and open-ended works of art and media design.

The way meaning is constructed was analyzed at length in early semiotics, which is linked to methods that fall under the general paradigm of structuralism; which, in turn, proposes the assumption that everything can be explained in terms of systems. As researchers continued to implement structural methods of analysis, they began to question many assumptions about structuralism itself. In semiotics, what became evident was that meaning is unstable, because it keeps changing based on subjectivity by both readers and producers. This in effect is a feedback loop that ...