The purpose of this assignment was to investigate Roland Barthes’ theory of ‘Polysemy’. And what does this mean? Well to some up, Barthes suggests that images have multiple meanings, and that when one is understood others are discovered. (“all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others.”)
So in this assignment we were asked to create a series of inkblots and ask a variety of people to interpret them. I asked 6 people, 3 boys and 3 girls, all the same age but each person was studying a different subject (a History student, a Medic, a CLD student, a Fine Art student, an Education student and a Buisiness Studies student).
The results were… a mix haha For example the first image was seen to be a “forest scene” by all of the girls asked, but one of the boys could see “two guys with long heads, standing back to back, holding lights.”
So seeing as there was no image where every single person could see the same image I chose to focus on the third one and made small alterations to see just how much I had to change the image for each person to see the same. As the History student picked out images of two feet, I decided to go with that one. To my surprise I only had to make one small line, to slightily indicate a foot shape, for each person to also see the feet shapes.
Can you see the feet too?
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