The Semiotics of Movement in Space

Robert James McMurtrie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317276517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Semiotics of Movement in Space explores how people move through buildings and interact with objects in space. Focusing on visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, McMurtrie analyses and interprets movement and space relations to highlight new developments and applications of spatial semiotics as he proposes that people's movement options have the potential to transform the meaning of a particular space. He illustrates people's interaction with microcamera footage of people's movement through the museum from a first-person point of view, thereby providing an alternative, complementary perspective on how buildings are actually used. The book offers effective tools for practitioners to analyse people's actual and potential movement patterns to rethink spatial design options from a semiotic perspective. The applicability of the semiotic principles developed in this book is demonstrated by examining movement options in a restaurant and a café, with the hope that the principles can be developed and applied to other sites of displays such as shopping centres and transportation hubs. This book should appeal to scholars of visual communication, semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis and visitor studies.

1 Paving the Way

Theories, Terms and Texts

The Semiotics of Movement in Space examines how we move through the interior spaces of buildings and interact with objects in those spaces. Primarily using the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), a prominent contemporary art museum in Sydney, Australia, to analyse and interpret movement and space relations, this book provides new developments and applications of spatial semiotics as it proposes that we can use movement as a semiotic resource to transform the meaning potential of a particular space. How an exhibition space has been presented to us by the semiotic designers—the curator and the architect—may not necessarily be the way we experience it, and it is how we use something that contributes to its meaning. Can a church still be considered a church if we use it as a home?

Saying that movement is an integral part of an art museum experience may seem obvious. But movement is still not a comprehensively understood social practice. To illustrate how we use exhibition space, this book uses images from the footage of a micro videocamera that was attached to a number of visitors’ heads. As these visitors moved through the art museum, the microcamera recorded the museum experience through their eyes, so to speak, reproducing their ‘retinal image’. This method of recording movement in art museums has, to my knowledge, not been previously used, so it provides a complementary perspective on, and unprecedented insights into, how our movement and the perceived environment work together. It is for this reason that this book is written from a user’s perspective. It could have been written from a number of perspectives: the architect’s, the curator’s or the social semiotician’s. However, not all of us are designers, professionals or academics, but all of us move through space on a daily basis.

The overarching purpose of examining how we move in sites of display is to develop hodogrammatics, a theoretical description of a grammar of movement in space. Grammar is usually associated with language, but it does not have to be restricted to language. For example, Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) have developed a grammar of visual design to assist in reading and interpreting static images, and initial steps towards a grammar of buildings (O’Toole, 2011) and three-dimensional space (Stenglin, 2004) have been made. Grammar as a phenomenon of study can only be explained and interpreted through theory, known as grammatics (Halliday, 2002: 369). Grammar and grammatics play different roles: “grammar enables us, unconsciously, to interpret experience; and the metagrammar, or grammatics, enables us to reflect consciously on how it does so” (Halliday, 2002: 373). That is, knowing how we move through space is one thing, but understanding the meaning potential of doing so is another thing. Developing hodogrammatics requires a transdisciplinary approach, drawing on theories, concepts and frameworks, including those from visitor studies, multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics (SFL).

1.1 Visitor Studies

There is a large amount of literature describing how we move through various types of public spaces, including shopping centres (Ravelli, 2000; Underhill, 2000), airports (Fuller and Harley, 2004), the built-environment in general (Arthur and Passini, 1992; de Certeau, [1974] 2008, 1988; Hölscher et al., 2006; Lynch, 1960; Passini, 1984) and museums (Bitgood, 1993a, 1993b; Bitgood et al., 2006; Conroy, 2001; Hillier and Tzortzi, 2011; Klein, 1993; Melton, 1935; Penn, 2003; Wineman and Peponis, 2010). Observing our movements and behaviour in public spaces, especially in museums, is referred to as visitor studies.

Visitor studies is a relatively new discipline which began in North America around the 1920s, becoming established in the UK and Australia in the 1970s with increased interest in the 1990s. One of the earliest pioneers was Gilman (1916), whose interest lay in examining the phenomenon which he coined museum fatigue, the result of physical exertion, such as bending, stretching, crouching and twisting to see objects well (Gilman, 1916: 63). Gilman’s focus on museum fatigue was an attempt to persuade institutions to design ergonomically curated exhibitions. Museum fatigue was also of interest to Robinson (1928), who observed that in addition to aching muscles, museum fatigue is characterised by “the vague but insistent desire to escape from too many pictures or too much sculpture” (Robinson, 1928: 31). Visitor studies continues to be interested in approaches that can inform exhibition design so as to avoid unintended negative effects on us (Screven, 1986).

Another pioneer was Melton (1935), who was interested in the layout, or composition, of exhibits in relation to movement patterns. His seminal contributions were, among other things, ‘the turn right’ and ‘the exit gradient’ principles; that is, most of us turn right and become increasingly attracted by the exit as we approach it. Today, these observations have been challenged and may be culture-based (Bitgood, 1993a; Cranny-Francis, 2005), but visitor studies is still interested in behavioural patterns, proposing that there is a direct correlation between the composition of the built-environment and our movement patterns (Bitgood, 1993a; Bourdeau and Chebat, 2001; Choi, 1991; Martin and Stenglin, 2007; Psarra, 2005). Indeed, compositional meanings in museums have been described as “arranging the visual, spatial, and material elements of an environment into a composition that visitors move th[r]ough” (Dean, 1994: 32). To demonstrate this point, some researchers have changed the number of exhibits and the number, placement and design of labels and observed differences in our interactive patterns (Bitgood, 1993a; Peart, 1984). Our movements through galleries are often monitored to find out which exhibits we visit more often (tracking frequency) and longer (tracking score) (Choi, 1991) as concepts such as attracting and holding power were key concerns, especially in the 1990s (Bitgood, 1993a, 1994; Doering and Pekarik, 1997: 69; Haeseler, 1990; Serrell, 1997a, 1997b; Shettel, 1997).

Visitor studies is thus interested in understanding our museum experience, which is, according to Falk and Dierking (1992, 2000), personal, social and physical contexts working together. Falk and Dierking (1992, 2000) developed a conceptual framework, or a multifocal interpretive lens, to understand better how a museum offers a potential experience and how we create the actual experience by choosing what to attend to. Gallery space was no longer perceived as a space to display and view objects; rather, it was an environment which afforded us an experience (Falk and Dierking, 2000: 127). Clearly, our movement is intrinsic to the museum experience, and while it is true that most of us do indeed move through exhibition space, our movement patterns cannot be considered simply a consequence of composition. Rather, they are an essential part of the meaning-making, or semiotic, process. As Ravelli (2006: 47) states, there is the potential for us “to resist, subvert or reinvent” the composition by our interacting with it.

Current research is continuing to examine how simultaneously interacting phenomena create the museum experience by analysing our behaviour in relation to our conversations (vom Lehn et al., 2001) or examining how we physically activate ‘interactive’ exhibits (Djonov and Djonov, 2013). This research demonstrates that exhibits do not have intrinsic attracting and holding power and denounces the transmission model of communication. We do not receive an experience prescribed by the curator; rather, we “become ‘ad hoc experience producers’ who momentarily shape how each other views and makes sense of the exhibits” (vom Lehn, 2006: 1353, original emphasis). It is now also acknowledged that we need to be studied in conjunction with the content to understand what a museum is (Hein, 2000: xi). That is, “there is a shift from thinking about visitors as an undifferentiated mass public to beginning to accept visitors as active interpreters and performers of meaning-making practices within complex cultural sites” (Hooper-Greenhill, 2011: 362).

Overall, visitor studies is an interdisciplinary field of research which draws on the theoretical frameworks of, and attracts researchers from, psychology, architecture, education, anthropology, marketing, visual studies, wayfinding and spatial syntax, as well as linguistics, MDA and social semiotics. Despite its transdisciplinary nature, visitor studies is an important field of study in its own right, developing its own theories and various methodologies of observing, tracking, filming, recording and transcribing movement patterns (see Hein, 1998: 100–134). Thus, it contributes to the body of knowledge of its own field as well as to that of the disciplines from which it adopts theories and principles.

Notwithstanding these previous investigations, there is a dearth of literature addressing movement’s functional roles in relation to choice. When movement is denied, it becomes manifest that in most exhibition spaces, we have choices in where we go, and so we become aware that our movement plays a functional role in the museum experience. While the concepts of function and choice have been considerations in the field of spatial semiotics (O’Toole, 2004, 2011; Ravelli, 2000, 2006, 2008; Ravelli and Stenglin, 2008; Stenglin, 2004, 2009a, 2009b, 2011; van Leeuwen, 2008) and geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003), few social semioticians have foregrounded the contribution that our movement makes to the meaning of space (see Lim et al., 2012; McMurtrie, 2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2012b, 2013; McMurtrie and Murphy, 2016; Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016). When we have been taken into consideration, we are usually perceived as assuming an affective role. That is, our sense of (in)security is affected by the physical and ambient aspects of space (Stenglin, 2004); our directions are controlled by the pathways within the building (Pang, 2004; Ravelli, 2006) or our behaviour is reengineered by the content in space (Alias, 2004).

This previous research has contributed greatly to a better understanding of buildings as social constructs, cultural artefacts and forms of communication. It has also established spatial semiotics as a legitimate and exciting field of study. But our role in the meaning-making process needs further investigation. We must be perceived as playing an equal role in this semiotic process; that is, our environment and we are intersemiotic complementarities sharing the semiotic workload (cf. Royce, 1999, 2007). The concept of complementarity is a perspective on how meanings are made; “the complementarity means that, unless you shift your angle, you will distort the picture: you cannot know all that is going on if you keep to just one observational perspective” (Halliday, 2008: 85). In other words, it is impossible to understand comprehensively how exhibition spaces mean unless there is a better understanding of how we mean with them.

1.2 Multimodality

Multimodality “refers to a field of application rather than a theory [per se]”, but it is a field that engenders its own theories and methodologies, so it “can be understood as a theory, a perspective or a field of enquiry of a methodological application” (Jewitt, 2009: 2; see O’Halloran and Smith, 2011). To develop its theories, multimodality draws on appropriate and effective theoretical frameworks and analytical tools from language and semiotics as well as from other disciplines, including, as in the case of this book, museology, architecture and film, which may assist in elucidating the meaning potential of particular multimodal texts, texts which are constituted of multiple modes. A mode can be construed as a material resource such as colour, sound, layout, font or movement inter alia, which is used in a recognisable, stable way as a means of articulating discourse—that is, “socially constructed knowledges of … [a] reality” (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001: 4). Modes do not themselves inherently possess a particular value, but they can be co-deployed in texts to achieve a specific social purpose (see Kress, 2010: 79–102). Multimodality is thus a transdisciplinary approach to meaning-making in multiple modes (Unsworth, 2008: 8) and is concerned with the development of theoretical and practical approaches for the analysis of meaning created through the co-deployment of various semiotic resources in discourse (cf. O’Halloran, 2008: 443–444).

Hodogrammatics is part of a subdivision of MDA called spatial discourse analysis (SpDA), a term I coined while analysing the movement patterns of residents of a highrise apartment complex (McMurtrie, 2011a; see Ravelli and McMurtrie, 2016). It is closely related to multimodal interactional analysis, a branch of mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, 2001), as it perceives our interaction with our environment as co-constructed (cf. Norris, 2004: 4, 2009: 81). This is because our environment is meant to be used. But because we can use buildings and exhibition spaces in different ways, they are in effect not only multimodal texts but also semiotic resources.

1.3 Social Semiotic Resources

It is the term resource, as opposed to sign, that differentiates social semiotics from semiology. First, semiology, derived from the Greek word semeion meaning sign, is concerned with the meaning of signs … what signs stand for. Contemporary semiotic theory has been shaped by the philosopher Peirce and by the linguist de Saussure, but their approaches to semiology are distinct (Iversen, 1986). Peirce developed a tripartite typology of signs: iconic (a sign represents an object because of its resemblance); indexical (a sign has an existential link between the sign and its referent); or symbolic (a sign and its referent are linked due to conventional usage). Peirce advocated infinite semiosis, “the process by whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Colour Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Paving the Way: Theories, Terms and Texts
• 2 Modelling Movement in Space as a Semogenic System: The Discourse-Semantic and Expression Strata
• 3 Modelling Movement in Space as a Semogenic System: The Hodogrammatical Stratum
• 4 Framing and Reframing Exhibition Space: Viewing Stations, Isoglosses and Focal Orientation
• 5 Points of Departure and Connections: Theme, Spatiotaxis and Intersemiotic Connection
• 6 Transforming Space Into Place: Rhythm and Occupation Value
• 7 Interacting in Exhibition Space: (Dis)Aligning with the Semiotic Designer
• 8 Negotiating the Authorial Voice: Spatial Engagement and Graduation
• 9 Representing and Experiencing Perceptual Structures: Assigning Participatory Roles
• 10 Exploratory Exhibition Spaces: A Child’s Perspective
• 11 Movement in Restaurants and Cafés: Sites of Performance and Display
• 12 Retracing Our Steps and Moving Forward
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index