IV International Conference on Semiotics and Visual Communication 13–15 NOVEMBER 2020, Cyprus University of Technology, CYPRUS PANEL On Faces and Myths ERC Consolidator FACETS, directed by Massimo LEONE, PI Abstracts 1 KEYNOTE: The Visual Semiotics of Prosopopoeia Massimo LEONE – ERC Consolidator Project FACETS - PI, University of Turin, Shanghai University. massimo.leone@unito.it ORCID. 0000-0002-8144-4337 Prosopopoeia is a rhetorical expedient through which the voice of a narration is attributed to a character that cannot be identified with the empirical author of the narration itself. The presence and semiotic efficacy of this technique is particularly remarkable when such voice is attributed to non-human subjects, such as deities, but also animals, objects, and even cities or abstract entities like ‘evidence’ (in courts, for instance). The face is central both in the etymology of this narrative device (“prosopon” meaning “face” in Greek, so that “prosopopoeia” is, etymologically, the act of bestowing a face upon something, to attribute and ‘make’ a visage for the actant narrator of a story) and in its functioning: storytelling, indeed, acquires a different connotation when it takes place through “a face”. The keynote conference will propose several examples of prosopopoeia from different historical epochs, cultural contexts, formats, genres, and styles, concentrating on instances of ‘visual prosopopoeia’ and pointing out, in particular, how this rhetorical expedient is crucial in redefining the status of mythical voices. As Quintilian, the great master of Latin rhetoric, would write about prosopopoeia, this figure of speech is able to “bring down the gods from heaven, evoke the dead, and give voices to cities and states” (Institutes of Oratory, IX, ii). Key-words. Face; Myths; Prosopopoeia; Semiotics; Rhetoric. Bionote. Massimo Leone is Full Tenured Professor ("Professore Ordinario") of Philosophy of Communication and Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy and Permanent Part-Time Visiting Full Professor of Semiotics in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Shanghai, China. He is a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant recipient, the most important and competitive research grant in Europe. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Siena, and holds a DEA in History and Semiotics of Texts and Documents from Paris VII, an MPhil in Word and Image Studies from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD in Religious Studies from the Sorbonne, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Fribourg (CH). He was visiting scholar at the CNRS in Paris, at the CSIC in Madrid, Fulbright Research Visiting Professor at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Endeavour Research Award Visiting Professor at the School of English, Performance, and Communication Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Faculty Research Grant Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, “Mairie de Paris” Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne, DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of Potsdam, Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon (Collegium de Lyon), Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Munich, Visiting Professor at the University of Kyoto, Visiting Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, Visiting Professor at The Research Institute of the University of Bucharest, Eadington Fellow at 2 the Center for Gaming Research, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Fellow of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg „Dynamics in the History of Religions Between Asia and Europe“ (Bochum, Germany), Visiting Senior Professor at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna, High-End Foreign Expert and Visiting Professor at the University of Shanghai, China, Visiting Senior Professor at the Centre for Advanced Studies, South Eastern Europe (Croatia), Visiting Senior Professor at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies, Warsaw (PIAST), Senior Visiting Professor at FRIAS (Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, Freiburg, Germany), and Visiting Fellow at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. His work on the semiotic study of cultures, with particular enphasis on religion and images. Massimo Leone has singleauthored ten books, _Religious Conversion and Identity: The Semiotic Analysis of Texts_ (London and New York: Routledge, 2004; 242 pp.), _Saints and Signs: A Semiotic Reading of Conversion in Early Modern Catholicism_ (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2010; 656 pp.), _Sémiotique de l'âme_, 3 vols (Berlin et al.: Presses Académiques Francophones, 2012), _Annunciazioni: percorsi di semiotica della religione_, 2 vols (Rome: Aracne, 2014, 1000 pp.), _Spiritualità digitale: il senso religioso nell'era della smaterializzazione_ (Udine: Mimesis, 2014), _Sémiotique du fondamentalisme : messages, rhétorique, force persuasive_ (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2014; translated into Arabic in 2015), and _Signatim: Profili di semiotica della cultura_ (Rome: Aracne, 2015, 800 pp.), _A Cultural Semiotics of Religion_ (in Chinese) [Series “Semiotics & Media”] (Chengdu, China: University of Sichuan Press, 2018, 210 pp.), _On Insignificance_ (London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 226 pp.; Chinese translation 2019), edited forty collective volumes, and published more than five hundred articles in semiotics, visual studies, and religious studies. He has lectured in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. He is the chief editor of Lexia, the Semiotic Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication, University of Turin, Italy, and editor of the book series “I Saggi di Lexia” (Rome: Aracne) and “Semiotics of Religion” (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter). He directed the MA Program in Communication Studies at the University of Turin, Italy (2015-2018) and is currently vice-director for research at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy. 3 Selfies: The Myth of Narcissus in a Socio-Semiotic Perspective Antonio SANTANGELO, ERC Consolidator Project FACETS – Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, University of Turin. antonio.santangelo@unito.it Abstract. According to many scholars (e.g. Buffardi and Campbell, 2008), people compulsively sharing selfies have a narcissistic personality which reveals something dysfunctional. As this behaviour is very common in our society, many connect it to a culture of narcissism (Lasch, 1979). However, other scholars (e.g. Turkle, 1996), underline how our self-representation on a screen can become a powerful instrument to construct our identity. In this perspective, selfies can be seen as “work” we conduct with others, a common reflection about who we are, who we want to be, how our image can be accepted, by whom, etcetera. The latter interpretation – which is shared, in its political meaning, by Lovink (2019) – may seem far from the narcissistic one, but it is not. In “Culture of the selfie” (2017), Peraica reflects on the many readings of the myth of Narcissus and she underlines that Narcissus doesn’t seem to recognize himself in his image reflected on the water, because the image is other from him, and that the only one who knows who he is and what he is doing is the nymph Eco, who loves him and is watching everything from outside. In other words, the myth of Narcissus can be also read as a tale on self-identity where the image of oneself and the glance of others play a big role. This can be interesting in a socio-semiotic perspective. After considering some interpretations that have been given of the myth of Narcissus to understand the selfie culture (McLuhan, 1964; Foucault, 1983 and 1988; Bal, 2004), the selfies of politicians and common people in the age of coronavirus will be analysed, with the aim of showing what these images mean not only for who makes them, but for who watches them and have to build a common interpretation of what they communicate. Key-words. Face; Selfies; Narcissus; Myths; Narcissism. Bionote. Antonio Santangelo is assistant professor at the University of Turin, where he teaches Semiotics and Semiotics of Television. He also teaches Semiotics and Philosophy of Language, Textual Semiotics and New Media Languages at the University eCampus of Novedrate. He is the executive director of the Nexa Ceter for Internet and Society at the Politecnico of Turin. He is the author of many articles published in Italian and international rewiews, of many book chapters and of Handbook of tv quality assessment (UclanPublishing 2013), Sociosemiotica dell’audiovisivo (Aracne 2013), Le radici della televisione intermediale (Aracne 2012) and Il gioco delle finte realtà (Vicolo del Pavone 2012). With Gian Marco De Maria, he has edited La Tv o l’uomo di immaginario (Aracne 2012); with Guido Ferraro, Uno sguardo più attento (Aracne 2013), I sensi del testo (Aracne 2017) and Narrazione e realtà (Aracne 2017). By Means of Memes: Deconstructing the Myth of Online Virality. Gabriele MARINO - ERC Consolidator Project FACETS – Assistant Professor, University of Turin. gabriele.marino@unito.it ORCID. 0000-0003-3358-9563 Abstract. Virality is an umbrella term mainstream media, professionals in marketing business and even communication scholars apply to a wide range of Internet phenomena that spread online “like wildfire”, “in an uncontrolled fashion” etc. The metaphorical image of contagion is powerful and effective, which granted great success to the notion, but assigns users a passive role echoing the old “hypodermic needle” model and, moreover, is heuristically pointless; applying this category to a given phenomenon does not help us understand it. Still, today, the success of a piece of media or content is exactly achieving the status of “viral”: something everybody is talking about, all the time, at the same time, even though ephemerically; a digital update of Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. At closer scrutiny, things spread online not thanks to uncontrolled replication but rather an articulate set of appropriation and manipulation practices. Semiotically speaking, communication is not merely an exchange of information but rather a translational ecology wherein phatic and identity values play a key role, capable to make pragmatics overcome semantics (Leone talks of an “aesthetic drift” in contemporary communication); in other words, it is not so relevant what we are saying, but how and to whom. Studying Internet memes, the most popular macro-typology among so-called viral contents, may help clarify the whole thing. Mainly circulating as captioned pictures and videos, memes are featured by icastic, synthetic qualities and easiness to be modified and personalized. From the one hand, they feature a striking, “whimsical” element (according to Shifman), a punctum (in Barthes’ terminology; e.g. exaggerated facial expressions in emoticons, emojis, rage face comics, Facebook reactions, meme icons etc.). On the other hand, they feature modular “serial syntagms” (in Geninasca’s terms), being “rickety” (in Eco’s). Memes can be created according to three main “radicals” (to take up Frye’s terminology), which outline both a chronological and a syntactic-pragmatic typology (a digital update of Lévi-Strauss’ bricolage and Genette’s hypertextuality): sharing, remixing, and remaking. Coming out from the subcultural guts of the Internet (pre-dating the Web-era; emoticons were invented in 1982 on Usenet, a precursor of forums), such a conceptual, visual, and cultural form has become an established, institutionalized and widespread form of communication even in mainstream culture. In sociolinguistic terms, memes are stylistic practices around which communities of practices congeal, wherein members challenge each other as regards their both encyclopaedic and textual competences, mainly for humour, playful, parody, and satire purposes. In recent years, however, memetic communication has de-generated (has gone outside its original borders as a textual genre), becoming a kind of meta-macrodiscoursive palimpsest; an infrastructure upon which many other discourses are being implemented (e.g. art, politics, religion etc.), including the outcomes of the so-called post-truth Zeitgeist (conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, misinformation, fake news etc.). The paper aims at addressing how Internet memes as a cultural form are capable to translate contemporary culture into spreadable tokens and how such a growing form of literacy is affecting the way we communicate everyday over the social media; in other words, it is argued that memes are capable to both mirroring and shaping our contemporary imagery and imaginary (more than often in a subtle, surprising fashion). Key-words: Cultural Templates; Internet Memes; Internet Ontologies; Online Virality; Semiotics. Bionote. Gabriele Marino (1985) graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Palermo and holds a Ph.D. in Semiotics from the University of Turin. He has been working with universities, research institutes, and private companies mainly dealing with music, social media, design, and digital marketing. His publications include: the essay about music criticism ‘Britney canta Manson e altri capolavori’ (‘Britney sings Manson and other masterpieces’; Crac, 2011) and the monographic issue of the international journal of semiotics “Lexia” dedicated to online ‘Virality’ (No. 25-26, 2017, co-edited with Mattia Thibault). 6 Atlas and Ganesha: Old Myths Nowadays. Silvia BARBOTTO – ERC Consolidator Project FACETS - Postdoc Researcher, University of Turin. silvia.barbotto@unito.it ORCID. 0000-0003-1675-3405 Abstract. Atlas for charging the world over its cervical and Ganesha for having elephant semblances in the superior part of its body, are two controversial myths from Greek and Indian cultures. Both of them involved their faces as principal motors of archetypical positions in the semiotic of space, between the circumnavigation and assumption, heaviness and lightness. Revisiting their origins and their iconographies, this presentation proposes a symmetry of history and contemporaneity looking for the construction of a panoramic cartography, a re-signification of old myths and their repercussion nowadays. Sensorial-motorial and neurophysiological criteria’s, together with intercultural physiognomy interpretation and artificial experiences, build together the analysis that will be supported by theorical semiotics texts, old materials from international archives, ethnographical emic research and artist’s innovative production. Key-words. Semiotic of Body and Space; Myths; Physiognomy; Iconography. Bionote. Post Doc research Fellow for ERC Project FACETS (headed by Prof. M. Leone), professor p/h. in UADY-CAHAD México. PhD in Art (San Carlos, Valencia, Spain) and graduated in Communication, UniTo. Member of IASS, SSA, SIBE, Journalist Board, IYA and other Collectives. Artist and Yogini, my practices join academic Semiotic research and aesthetic/experimental practices in collaborations with universities, institutions, multimedia-decolonial Labs, pop up groups. Few articles, various expositions, one book: Vitácora. “Sensi Inversi” in progress. Some works have been presented in México, USA, Latin America, Europe and India. 7 Faces, Mirrors, and the Riddle of Asymmetry. Remo GRAMIGNA - ERC Consolidator Project FACETS - Postdoc Researcher, University of Turin. remogramigna@unito.it ORCID. 0000-0002-9015-7348 Abstract. Magical, whimsical and enigmatic, mirrors have been a source of fascination to Greek mythology and long a source of curiosity. In contemporary scholarship, mirrors have also been a concern for semioticians, art historians, literary scholars as well as physicists. Mirrors have many dimensions and functions. The mirror is intimately interlocked with the (self)perception of the human face. Without the use of such a device, man would not be able to perceive himself through the sense of sight. Hence, the function of mirrors as device of auto-determination for the human subject. However, mirrors possess defensive and intrusive functions, too. At any rate, mirror reflections pose serious challenges to the interpretation. Particularly challenging is the notion of symmetry and asymmetry, which not only is apparent in the phenomena of mirror reflections but cuts across the history of mankind in a debate that is as fascinating as complex. Asymmetry is found as an organizational matrix within cultures, is found in the difference between the left and right hemisphere of the brain and it is manifested within the human body – the sidedness or laterality of the human face, the anatomical bilateral asymmetry between the two sides. This study will shed light on the riddle of asymmetry and laterality. In order to put these concepts in perspective, it focuses on the the face’s two-sided nature and on mirror reflections. Key-words. Face; Mirrors; Magic; Semiotics; Myths Bionote. Remo Gramigna is a Post-Doc at the University of Turin, within the ERC research project FACETS led by Prof. Massimo Leone. His academic research to date has focused on semiotics and culture studies, cognitive theory, and communication studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Semiotics and in the last two years he has been a Research Fellow in Culture and Cognition Studies at the University of Tartu (Estonia). His latest monograph tackled the philosophical problem of the sign in tandem with deceptive forms of communication. His interests include strategies of lying and deception in human interactions, deception in science, distorted communication, manipulation, insincerities, make-believe, fakes and forgeries, masks and disguise. Remo’s most recent article explores the role of prediction in deception. He has published in such journals as Journal for Communication Studies, Frontiers of Narrative Studies, Lexia, Sign Systems Studies, DeSignis, and Versus. Semiotics of a Meta-Myth: The Selfie in the Cinema. Bruno SURACE - ERC Consolidator Project FACETS - Postdoc Researcher, University of Turin. b.surace@unito.it ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3532-7885 The selfie is now a semiotic object widely studied from various perspectives: as a text, as a format, as an aesthetic sign, as a practice (see for example Peraica 2017, Leone 2018, Yiu 2018). A semiotics of the selfie must in fact consider all these components, which precisely because of their co-presence individuate the selfie as a myth, or rather a meta-myth, through which experience of reality is realized in a mosaic of faces codified through certain grammars. Still few, however – but it is only a matter of time – are the systematic studies of the selfie in cinema and audiovisual media, as a format (see for example Krautkrämer and Thiele 2018) or as a mythical object. Yet the cinema is also a system of tracing and mapping the imaginary, a testimony of the mythologization of the selfie. For example, the short film Selfie from Hell (Ceylan 2015), with today over 21 million views, constitutes one of the first introductions of the selfie in the territory of horror, which is often the laboratory for experimenting with the concerns related to new social actors and objects. Something similar had already happened with Unfriended (Gabriadze 2014), entirely shot in "selfie" mode with the webcam. Selfie (Ferrente 2019), too, demonstrates the testimonial power of the format, capable of capturing also the face of tragedy, while Selfie (Aurouet, Bidegain, Fitoussi, Gelblat and Lebasque 2020) ironically reflects on the now incontrovertible presence of this communicative communication in our lives, and Mon bébé (Azuelos 2019) does the same with bittersweet tones. Other auteur films such as Austerlitz (Loznitsa 2017) reflect on how the selfie has described our ways of appropriating space and memory (see Surace 2019), taking on an ontologically probative dimension, as does the documentary #Uploading_Holocaust (Nir and Bornstein 2016). A filmographic galaxy is being created, tracing and simultaneously feeding the metamyth of the selfie through specific enhancements, aesthetics and semio-ethics. Key-words. Face; Cinema; Meta-Semiotics; Myth; Selfie. Bionote. Bruno Surace is a Ph.D in Semiotics and Media at the University of Turin, Research Fellow for the ERC Project FACETS (headed by prof. Massimo Leone), Adjunct Professor in Semiotics and in Cinema and Audiovisual Communication. He published the book “Il destino impresso. Per una teoria della destinalità nel cinema” (Kaplan, Turin) in 2019. He has written articles for numerous peer reviewed journals, co-edited books, participated in European summer schools, and given lectures in conferences and seminars in Europe, the USA and China. Tentacular Faciality. Cthulhu, Medusa, and the Borders of the Semiosphere of the Face. Cristina VOTO - ERC Consolidator Project FACETS - Postdoc Researcher, University of Turin. cristina.voto@unito.it ORCID: 0000-0002-9448-6122 Abstract. The starting point of this paper is the semiosphere of the face, understood as a dynamic diagram that organizes in its interior a range of biological and represented faces whose aesthetic and normative acceptability configures a specific plastic cartography (Leone 2019). It is in this semiosphere that faces can be thought of not only as individuals but also as signifiers capable of projecting identity and communication. The aim of the paper is, therefore, to explore a particular topos of this semiosphere, the border, by analyzing two different mythological faces. The face of Cthulhu and the face of Medusa are the tropoi for the analysis of the tentacular borders of the semiosphere of the face. Cthulhu, fictional entity created by H.P. Lovecraft in “The Call of Cthulhu” and published in the magazine Weird Tales in 1928, is “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind”. On the other side, the face of Medusa, the certainly well-known Gorgon, is surrounded by venomous living snakes and characterized by a faciality that turned those who beheld her to stone. The turn from the topos of the border of the semiosphere of the face into the tropos of the tentacular (Haraway 2017) faciality of Cthulhu and Medusa, will enable to describe this semiosphere as a moving in and out cartography limited by feelers, something both for the feeling and the trying. Key-words. Face; Monstrosity; Myth; Tentacles; Semiotics Bionote. Cristina Voto is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turin (FACETS _ ERC Project), Professor in Semiotics at the University of Tres de Febrero (Buenos Aires) and curator of the Biennial of the Moving Image of Buenos Aires. She is a member of IASS (International Association of Semiotics Studies), FELS (Latin-American Federation of Semiotics), ASAECA (Argentinian Association of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies) and SIGRADI (Ibero-American Society of Digital Graphics). She has written articles for peerreviewed journals and given lectures in Italy, Spain, England, Argentina and Colombia. She has worked as a programmer and a curator in film festivals and biennials. She was a Lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires and at the University of La Matanza, Buenos Aires. She was a Visiting Professor at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University (Bogotá) and a Visiting Researcher at the Nacional University of Colombia. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 819649 - FACETS. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/facetsunito Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/facetsunito/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/FacetsU Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/FacetsERC Website: http://facets-erc.eu/ Email: massimo.leone@unito.it