Architecture as a symbol
Introduction
The semiotics of the image has to do with the study of the iconic sign and the processes that intervene in the creation of sense and meaning from the image.
Studying the image is linked to visual communication and goes beyond the pictorial or visual such as, for example, colors, shapes, icons, composition, etc., it allows including historical, social and anthropological elements that are part of the semiotics of the image.
By being part of culture, society and politics, the image allows the social construction of meaning in certain visual communication processes.
The image is not limited to a system of expression but can be an element in the explanation of social, religious, political and media groups. This is why image semiotics could be a tool for understanding how social processes occur in life.
The world of the visual, that is, of images, can lend itself to abstract reflections with philosophical, neurological or semiotic references, but also technical or methodological ones.
The semiotics of the image serve as a tool for reflection and analysis for socio-anthropological considerations of the image.
Due to the above, it is necessary to understand the semiotics of the image, within a semiotics of the visual. The visual integrates: the iconic and the plastic.
The iconic is the known, the analogical is a mimesis of an object of reality. There are iconic signifiers that depend on these systems and are made up of discrete units that separate their components. Ex. On a face: eyes, eyebrows, nose, etc.
The plastic mobilizes codes based on lines, colors, textures, they are independent of any mimetic reference. Its signifiers are not susceptible to division, like lines, shapes, textures.
According to Eco, the intention of semiotics is to study and understand semiotic systems such as images, gestures, objects, which can be mixed with verbal language, this leads to understanding semiotics as translinguistics, that is, codes that are found in expressive systems, whether linguistic or non-linguistic.
Semiotics takes a look at the way things can become signs and carry meanings depending on the social and cultural context to which they belong. For this reason, it is a contextualized phenomenon, in which the different meaning systems transmit meaning, whether verbal or not, through certain types of language such as audiovisual, passing through form to virtual communications.
These languages are used in architectural expression since it draws on all of them for its representation, whether through shapes, colors, images, textures, etc.