Experiment

My understanding of polysemy by from the Essay 'Rhetoric of the Image' by Roland Barthes from my first reading was very vague. I understood from the essay that an image could have more than one meaning but the language in it was really diverse which made it hard for me to grasp. While I was reading through the Essay I tried to relate Barthes statements to my own discipline. Things which I thought related to Textiles was words and how it changes a subject from a persons interpretation. I related it to my Trend Project as we had to choose a heading and interpret it in our own way into fabrics, The fabrics which we make from the interpretation of the heading is similar to the Text and Image used in the essay and how people interpret things differently. After writing notes and discussing the Essay with people in a group I came to understand it a bit more. We then did an experiment which tried to help our understanding of polysemy. In order to start the experiment we had to group up to look for 3 random images. Our images were the below:



After obtaining these images we each went away to ask family and friends to make up a story with these 3 images in a random order. I asked my sister who is 16 and still at school, My boyfriend who is 25 and is a sales assistant and my aunty who is 40 and works in a chinese take away. The stories they came up with were different. Similarities in the stories occurred in the group so we decided to pick our favourite story being that it was a holiday to a costal village of the Mediterranean where they followed a path lined by palm trees, this led them to the beach where they bumped into a local lady who agreed to take them around the local beauty spots. This was very interesting as a lot of the stories jumped to the conclusion that the pictures represented that it was a holiday. This relates back to the Essay by Barthes as he mentions 'stereotype'. His example was on a pasta advert which showed people immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was Italian and in this experiment it showed that because there is a girl on a beach then people assume its a holiday. As we agreed that this was the story most common in all of our stories we added a 4th image to enhance the understanding of the rep taking the tourists to local beauty spots, so went out again to ask strangers around the art college to read the images in the order we gave them. We asked 5 different people and the majority came up with similar stories. One girl called Michaela said it was people on holiday who meet a rep, she lives on the beach and later they meet up with family to go for a walk along a path. This story was pretty close to our chosen story as she mentioned the Rep on the beach and it was a holiday. As a lot of people assume these picture connotated a Holiday, it makes me think of culture as we think sun shine and beaches relates to holidays whereas people who live in countries with beaches would read the picture as being a normal day. In the last part of the experiment we added text to each of the images. Our 4th image was :

We added words such as Mediterranean, Path, Rep and Activity. These words really helped the people who were analysing our pictures as they were much closer to our original story when text was added. An example of this is a girl called Shawn. Her initial story was the girl was on a plane, then goes for a walk, stops for a drink at the beach and then goes for a walk in the forest for an excursion. When text was added her story became A plane view of the Mediterranean. Walked along a path to hotel to meet Rep who took them to do activities. This shows that the concept of Polysemy in Barthes Essay does work shown in this experiment. In the Essay Barthe mentions the Linguistic Message which I translated to be the Written Message. Text is used for quickness so that people don't need to ask 'What is it?' Barthe also mentions that text adds Fresh information to an image which is clearly shown in our experiment. People responded more clearly and had a better understanding of what is portrayed in the images when Text was added. In the Denoted Image section of Barthes Essay he said that the 'Literal message cannot be substantial but only relational' shows that the text added to the image is only related to the image to make the experiment work. If the experiment was done with just text and no image then the story wouldn't transmit the correct story that's trying to be told.