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How to use this site:
Click on a theme in RHIZOMES to see how disparate parts of the ICI archive are joined together around a fleeting thought or by a slip of the eye or the shutter. Click on a subject in ICI CONNECTIONS to see how recurring ICI concerns coalesce around recurring themes or click on a place in the ICI ARCHIVES to see the raw material of our collections. TAGs below each post reveal hidden relationships between objects, thoughts, and interpretations. This is the place of laboratory research and play. -MORE-RHIZOMES
ICI Connections
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Category Archives: Signs
LIBRARY SHELF: Degeneracy
Ellis, Havelock, ed. Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs, and Results (1898) LAST LINE: “…the true source of success is to avoid ‘the falsehood of extreme.’” ICI SHELF: Galt ICI HISTORY: Today at the ICI-Twitter Feed (04-05-12)
LIBRARY SHELF: Surrealism and Women
Caws, Mary Ann, Rudolf Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg, eds. Surrealism and Women (1990) FIRST LINE: “Headless. And also footless. Often armless too: and always unarmed, except with poetry and passion.” ICI SHELF: Women ICI HISTORY: Today at the ICI-Twitter Feed (03-11-12)
Changed Priorities
Saussure tells us that no sign makes sense on its own but only in relation to other signs. The value of a sign is determined by the relationship between signs in the system as a whole. He notes the French … Continue reading
To the Temple
This is a nondescript sign on a back road of East Anglia, England. But to anyone who has read W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, this sign might (and it does) announce the site of Alec Girrard’s model of … Continue reading
This Could Be a Place of Historical Significance
In 1980, Braco Dimitrijević built an engraved slab into the pavement outside the Cathedral in Cologne, Germany. This photo was taken in January of 1992. Dimitrijević’s critique of history relies not only on language, the usual fodder of sign systems, … Continue reading
The Sign of the Masons
The main entrance of the Great Eastern Hotel in London offers a ‘sign’ that is hidden in plain sight. Even though it was left off the hotel’s official floorplan, three bricked in windows act as a visual sign for a … Continue reading
Flowers at Chimayo
This permanent memorial at Chimayo, New Mexico evokes the language of the temporary roadside shrine. The permanence of the ceramic calla lilies is undermined by a thin sheet of cellophane wrapped around the bouquet. Its haphazard embrace borrows the language … Continue reading
This is Bedlam
A small plaque on the side of the Great Eastern Hotel in London marks the site of the old Bethlehem Hospital. The sign obscures the other name for the site. As W. G. Sebald schooled us in Austerlitz, at this … Continue reading
Max Sebald’s Signature
As a form of written language, the signature is, in theory, a symbolic sign. Its relationship to the person who creates it is arbitrary and based totally on convention and cultural practice. In reality, though, the signature is a … Continue reading
The Ur-Sign: a graveyard in East Anglia
The Greek word for ‘sign’ is sema, which is also the word for ‘grave.’ For the Greeks the grave was the ur-sign of signification for it ‘stood for’ what it ‘stood in.’ The sema points to something only present through … Continue reading
