| Among the most prominent legacies of the twentieth century is the astonishing renaissance of the picture as manifested in a ubiquitous visual legacy. With the advent of television, pictorially-based communication ultimately seized the central role in both entertaining and informing American society. However, due not only to its sheer quantity, but also to its puzzling quality, the imagery of the past stubbornly resists scientific evaluation. In offering a new theoretical approach to the nature of visual communication, the thesis proposes a novel scientific corset tailored for analyzing the pictorial sources as truly sign-based artifacts. The argument centers on the notion of dialectically interconnected visual signs, whose meanings are generated in a historically dynamic process of creating, collecting, and cultivating a pool of general, semantic expressions, before they are possibly able to specify any relevant information in their actual immediate detail.;In the first part, a new semiotic model locates the matrix of visual signs within the picture, describes its embedding in a transmitter-receiver relation, and characterizes its predominantly symbolic arrangement of meanings within the bounds of a historically dynamic, collective visual literacy. The second part addresses the problems of historiography that arise when trying to infer historical content from visual sign structures, such as icons and emblems that are subject to a code, which itself is of a historical nature. In light of the complex transmitter-receiver relation governing the praxis of American broadcasting, a particular characterization of the broadcast spectacle and its central visual symbols, icons, and emblems is then carried over into the third part. Using historical examples, conventionally drawn boundaries between fictional and non fictional pictures, as well as the notion of influencing a pictorial message in front of a camera(man) are discussed with the help of concepts such as the "art of painting Chinese characters" and "hyperrealism." An assessment of early television's at times playful and entertaining, at times contradictory and problematic mise en scene of messages and their transmitters, concludes the exploration into the genesis of the novel, extraordinarily coherent visual language at the hub of American society. |
