The purpose of this project is to simulate a range of potential images of wide scope in order to find what our actual image is. We are examining and taking a closer look at outside influences which, unbeknowst to us at the time, have influenced our creativity in some way. Project one suggested that mere nuances and schemate surrounding particular objects or images we encountered as children may have significantly influenced our creative thinking as adults. The second project serves to further heighten our awareness of external influences as we seek to identify influences from the realm of entertainment. Barthes' awareness of external influences was similarly heightened in his journey to Japan. While in Japan, Barthes encountered a dramatically different hegemony from that which he was accustomed. The differing nature of Japan's Buddhist society gave Barthes insight into his own nature, in other words the external world he experienced in his tour of Japan lent direct insight into Barthes' own internal world. For this project, we want to tour the diagesis of our entertainment work in the same way that Barthes toured Japan. Barthes describes Japan in a very personal way in Empire of Signs. He refers to an imaginary space in time of a world that bears similitude to a real world. This relates to our project in that by examining an entertainment work, we are seeking understanding of the diagesis between the world within our entertainment work and its relationship to our reality.

In "Empire of Signs", Barthes uses photographs and language to represent an area completely different from the physical world of Japan. Within his description of Japan and its culture lies the story of a rendezvous between Barthes and a famous Japanese actor. At first glance then, "Empire of Signs" appears to be nothing more than a collection of brief descriptive stories about Japan and its culture, upon closer examination of photographs and images however, the story of the rendezvous is made apparent. The significance of the meeting with the actor is made clear through repetition. We know that the encounter with the actor is of particular importance because Barthes makes repreated references to the rendezvous and reinforces the verbal references with pictures of the actor at the beginning and end of the work. Barthes style is characterized by an absolute focus on the physical world, no assumptions are made in his descriptions. Barthes imitates the style of the haiku through use of careful, close description, and he structures the work so that it functions as a methaphor, the greater the detail contained in a passage the more powerful the metaphor. The language that Barthes uses is filled with parentheticals and rhetorical questions, presumably to emphasize detail, and facilitate creative thought respectively. Whereas traditionally, repreated use of parentheticals and rhetoricals would be considered fairly redundant and relatively ungrammatical, with reagrds to Barthes' descriptions of Japan and our own description within the entertainment work, such a structure can prove helpful when describing a scene in detail while also trying to convey personal nuances surrounding its meaning. For the purposes of this project then, we are looking at Barthes, not in terms of the relevance of the content of "Empire of Signs," but rather with regards to the stylistic and structural devices which we may find useful in our own projects.

As mentioned above, Barthes draws attention to images and events he views as particularly important through repetition and juxtaposition. In much the same way,for the purposes of my project, I attempt to draw attention to attitudes, images, and events which I feel are of considerable importance to the eventual discovery of my wide image by repeating, juxtaposing them with each other, and situating them within the testimony so as to draw particular attention to their presence. This is directly related to the way in which Barthes' repetition of the word "rendezvous" and the picture of the Japanese actor served as a clear indication of their significance within the text. With regards to sentence structure I modeled the form of my testimony to that in "Pachinko." In "Pachinko" Barthes writes, "Pachinko is a slot machine. At the counter you buy a little stock of what look like ball bearings; then, in front of the machine (a kind of vertical panel), with one hand you stuff each ball into a hole, while with the other, by turning a flipper, you propel the ball through a series of baffles..." The sentence continues with additional parentheticals and semi-colons but the basic structural model is that of extremely long sentences containing an abundance of detail. This is helpful with regards to the testimony in that it capably conveys a personal feelings or emotional relationships surrounding a particular scene without explicitly saying "Watching this made me feel like this." Thirdly, in addition to Barthes use of image and sentence structure to convey meaning, Barthes draws our attention to the value of Haiku in creating a careful, close description of a scene. This is not suggesting that the testimony should be written as would a haiku with regards to structure, but rather that in terms of content and feeling, we should strive to create powerful and intense metaphors by including "'impressions' whose brevity would guarantee their perfection, whose simplicity would attest to their profundity(by virtue of a double myth, one classical, which makes concision a proof of art, the other romantic, which attributes a premium of truth to improvisation). Thus Barthes suggests that our projects can be as profound in what is left verbally unsaid, through use of image repetition and juxtaposition, as in what is verbally stated, through use of parentheses, rhetorical questions and sentences punctuated with colons and semicolons. The implication then is that our projects should contain a wealth of emotional representations and objective correlatives which are identifiable through structure and style, repetition and juxtaposition.