Journaling Project 2

In regard to my final project, the role of authorship is to create new meaning from repurposed images.  I know my work is not fully original because it will contain elements that are not mine.  In many ways I am a viewer of other's work, and I am taking pieces of their work to derive my own meaning from it, or at least that is the goal in the end.  Truly, I just want to take these elements so far away from the context they were in that hopefully, this new creation is in some form mine.  I believe the work I want to create will be as original as a collage created from a magazine.  This also means that yes, at times I will indeed attempt to anchor my image to a specific meaning, but there is no guarantee the viewer will engage with that.  In an effort to repurpose different elements of other images, I feel better with anchorage as opposed to something more polysemic.  However, as I said before, there is nothing forcing the viewer to engage with the meaning I assign to my image.  Yes, they can see that meaning, but it is wholly possible for them to derive their own.  I agree with Barthes in his meaning that what matters is the experience of looking at the image, not the intended meaning of the creator.  This quote says, "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author."(148).  For my project, I am thinking about this heavily and how I am assigning meaning with the images I create.  I am also interested in the use of color and how color can be used to convey meaning through phycological association, cultural symbolism, or individual context.