Materiality, Meaning, and the Third Dimension

Kress and van Leeuwen regard material production as particularly significant because often it is in its processes that unsemioticized materiality is drawn into semiosis (p. 217). To explore material production is therefore also to explore the boundaries between the semiotic and the non-semiotic, and between individual expression and social semiosis. There are three major classes of production: (1) production in the narrower sense--that is, technologies of the hand, technologies in which representations are, in all their aspects, articulated by the human hand, aided by hand-held tools such as chisels, brushes, pencils, etc.; (2) recording technologies--that is, technologies of the eye (and ear), technologies which allow more or less automated analogical representation of what they represent, for instance, audiotape, photography, and film; and (3) synthesizing technologies which allow the production of digitally synthesized representations.

They also assert that for the time being there exists newly the need for conceiving of social semiotic practice in terms of rhetoric and 'design', where the term 'rhetoric' focuses on the social relations which obtain in the process of communication, and the term 'design' focuses on the arrangement of the available semiotic resources in the making of the representation as a message. Technology has also developed different distribution media, and it is here that the issue of (mass) reproducibility belongs, together with that of communication at (long) distance. What matters most is the production medium in which images are produced, and the distribution medium in which they are received, if the latter is different from the former, be it because of transcoding (photographic reproduction of paintings) or because of recoding at the other end of the telecommunication channel.

Kress and van Leeuwen argue for the meaning of material. They assert, "Our assumption remains that signs are motivated" (p. 225). It is no accident that the statues erected to commemorate heroic figures are made of durable materials. The durability of the materials makes them usable signifiers for the meanings of permanent feelings we intend to produce. There are also serial relations of translation between production media also, as in the case of the relation between paintings and their photographic reproductions.

The authors also discuss the communicative functions of colour saying that it is not restricted to affect alone. Colour is used metafunctionally, and that it is therefore a mode in its own right. Colour fulfills the three functions of a communicational system simultaneously: ideational, interpersonal, and textual.