Iconically modeling the demolition of the Palast der Republik

Abstract

Palast der Republik, by the photographer Christoph Rokitta, is an independent photobook published in 2013 in Berlin. In Palast der Republik different semiotic resources interact with one another, in order to reveal a new experience about the demolition process of the homonymous building. In opposition to the trivial notion of icon as sign that stands for its object in a relation of similarity, we are going to analyze the book as an icon whose main feature is the possibility of discovering new information about its object through its manipulation. This specific feature is called operation criteria of iconicity. Our aim is to describe and analyze the relations between semiotic resources in this photobook, by exploring not only the operational criterion of iconicity, but also the roles of diagrams in reasoning, and how models function models as epistemic artifacts. Therefore, it will be presented here how semiotic resources with different morphological features in the photobook interact in order to create a diagrammatic epistemic artifact of its object: the demolition of the Palast der Republik.