This object – the lamb – has been top-of-mind for me because I’ve had a recent, novel experience with it. Over winter break, I travelled to Chile, where in the Andes mountains I watched local Chileans kill, skin, prep and ultimately roast two lambs. It was a more everyday occurrence for them, a “get back to your roots” event for others. I had seen and petted the lambs while they were alive, just minutes prior. The affair felt eerily ritualistic. Before this, lamb in my mind was little more than a food dish, perhaps on the more gourmet side of foods. But now, post this experience, I wanted to explore more deeply what the lamb means, to me and in general societally through the imagery and symbols that are associated with it. Post-ritual experience, the lamb had taken on layers and layers of complexity of meaning, which is illustrated in my poster: from the basic childish associations (a childhood toy) to higher abstract concepts like sacrifice and purity.
If we looked at all objects this way, the world would definitely become richer. There would be layers and layers of symbolism and meaning when we glance at the things around us; the world would be come ultra “high signal”, with lots of information being registered by us with every scene.
However, with the “high signal” quality comes “high noise.” By which I mean that in order to carry about our daily lives and tasks in a normal, medium efficiency manner, we usually have to focus on the most important message or signal that is being conveyed to us by an object. When we see a traffic cone while driving for instance, we should grasp right away that we should not drive past the area delineated by this traffic cone object. However, if we were perceiving the traffic cone in this more rich perceptual manner, we would be pondering about the meaning of the color orange, the history of said color, the shape, the material, and many other layers of complexity on top of that. This would be a perhaps detrimental distraction that prevents us from moving onto the next images and next signals (quite possibly very detrimental, in the context of driving!).
Because of the above problem, we may learn to tune out the noise of all these other layers – in fact our brains are programmed to tune out noise. There is a biological basis for how our attention is tuned, which makes sense as behavioral changes due to attention is linked to survival. (Again, the driving example is salient here.)
On the flip side, we would need to look at the world this way when we are coming up with very high-meaning, frequently observed things. For example, in the realm of consumer goods or services (both digital and otherwise), icons/logos for companies may need this depth of analysis to make sure that all layers of meaning or signal that is perceived by most people still align with the values and image that the company seeks to project. Another area is religious iconography and images that are venerated. The details and symbols that are portrayed are rich and layered there, as people focus their attentions and derive meaning from those images. Most art – designed to be looked at and pondered upon – also fall into this bucket.
The meaning of the object has changed quite a bit. I’ve made much deeper linkages through the act of going through this exercise between the object (lamb) and meanings that has surrounded this object from historical/religious context. All those past interpretations and usages of the image of the lamb make a lot more sense to me now. Those concepts seem to have more natural linkages and flow, for example from childhood, to purity, virginity, holiness, and sacrifice.