Visual Semiotics

Indagare sugli esordi della prospettiva è possibile soltanto se si tenta di comprendere il modus operandi e la forma mentis di Brunelleschi. Ricostruendo la cornice concettuale possiamo attendibilmente azzardare quali siano state le strategie cognitive e quali le modalità operative che portarono, nella prima metà del Quattrocento a Firenze, a mettere in atto un sistema di rappresentazione spaziale che tutt’ora chiamiamo prospettiva rinascimentale. Cercheremo pertanto di dimostrare che Brunelleschi fu protagonista in un ambiente ove artisti, letterati e mercanti ritenevano i concetti di accertamento e dimostrazione, strettamente correlati all’esperienza concreta: un elogio del sapere pragmatico che anticipa, sotto l’aspetto della verificazione sperimentale, la scienza moderna. Fu proprio in seno a questo sapere pragmatico che prese corpo il concetto di verifica e dimostrazione e, nello specifico, il processo si realizzò nelle botteghe e nei cantieri degli architetti e degli artisti rinascimentali, le cui opere furono valorizzate dagli umanisti fiorentini ai fini di una glorificazione della storia cittadina. Non a caso Ernst Gombrich pose in evidenza che l’idea di progresso nacque nel quadro delle conoscenze applicative: è a partire da Brunelleschi e da Ghiberti che l’artista iniziò a lavorare come uno scienziato poiché le sue opere servivano anche a illustrare «in modo insolito e ingegnoso come il maestro risolve un problema artistico».

The paper aims to provide insights into the use of semiotic modes used in the shop signs of culinary business in Greece and Cyprus. In this context, we examine, comparatively, culinary shop signs collected from the commercial center of Thessaloniki and Limassol, two European, Mediterranean cities, with a significant gastronomic tradition and a lively city center. These semiotic modes are represented in a sample which is composed of shop signs whose verbal message constitutes verbo-cultural palimpsest or is written in a local dialect, as well as of shop signs which focus on their iconic visual message using intersemiotic translation or visual rhetoric to make their message appealing for the consumers. The main conclusion is that the shop signs under scrutiny seem to be addressed mainly to the native people of the two countries which are considered in the common cultural practice much better consumers than tourists as concerns their culinary habits. The study provides also evidence for the creative use of culinary shop signs in both cities. Intracultural interpretation as well as the design of the verbal element seems to make shop signs more appealing for the consumers.

Poter accedere a qualsiasi immagine, in qualsiasi momento, in qualsiasi luogo. I nuovi media prospettano straordinarie vie di fruizione. Ma come orientarsi in questo scenario? La nostra cultura visuale è capace di tenere il passo della tecnologia? Questo libro racconta come il cinema, ben prima dell'avvento della tecnologia digitale, abbia saputo accogliere immagini provenienti da archivi pubblici e privati: dai rapporti con la pittura al foundfootage, dalla pratica del remake all'intermedialità. Molte volte assegnato al compito di produrre un calco del "reale", il film costituisce piuttosto uno spazio del pensiero nel quale si rielaborano le immagini del passato e si rigenerano i materiali "usurati" della cultura. Se i nuovi media invitano lo spettatore a manipolare le immagini e non semplicemente a osservarle, è dunque a partire dalle lezioni di montaggio offerte da maestri come Godard e Herzog, Sokurov e Van Sant, Pasolini e Moretti, che diventa possibile assumere un ruolo attivo e consapevole nell'orizzonte estetico e mediatico contemporaneo.

The semiotics of the face studies the meaning of the human face in contemporary visual cultures. There are two complementary research foci: widespread practices of face exhibition in social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tinder; and minority practices of occultation, including the mask in anti-establishment political activism (Anonymous) and the veil in religious dressing codes. The meaning of the human face is currently changing on a global scale: through the invention and diffusion of new visual technologies (digital photography, visual filters, as well as software for automatic face recognition); through the creation and establishment of novel genres of face representation (the selfie); and through new approaches to face perception, reading, and memorization (e.g., the ‘scrolling’ of faces on Tinder). Cognitions, emotions, and actions that people attach to the interaction with one’s and others’ faces are undergoing dramatic shifts. In the semiotics of the face, an interdisciplinary but focused approach combines visual history, semiotics, phenomenology, visual anthropology, but also face perception studies and collection and analysis of big data, so as to study the social and technological causes of these changes and their effects in terms of alterations in self-perception and communicative interaction. In the tension between, on the one hand, political and economic agencies pressing for increasing disclosure, detection, and marketing of the human face (for reasons of security and control, for commercial or bureaucratic purposes) and, on the other hand, the counter-trends of face occultation (parents ‘hiding’ their children from the Internet, political activists concealing their faces, religious or aesthetic veils, writers and artists like Bansky or Ferrante choosing not to reveal their identity), the visual syntax, the semantics, and the pragmatics of the human face are rapidly evolving. The semiotics of the face carries on a comprehensive survey of this socio-cultural phenomenon.

how do I know what the photograph I’m perceiving means? Why, facing certain images, do I feel scared and, with others, calm? Can I anticipate —or even manipulate— how people will react and understand the photographic image? Is the emotional experience, from one and the same photo, arbitrary and absolutely subjective for each person? Most people today believe that with an expensive camera, fancy software and a few tutorials, one can consider oneself a professional photographer and, most, believe that the meaning of a photo is either completely arbitrary and subjective —the ‘everyone feels and thinks differently when they see a photo’ fallacy— or that it is intrinsic and automatic. This book proposes an interpretative method on semiology for  photography, based on different scientific findings about visual perception, form neuroscience, experimental psychology and evolutionary biology. Combining semiology with the use of photographic technique, will help photographers produce photographs with a high degree of predictability as for how the public will understand and feel the image, managing to elicit the response that the photograph is intended to produce.

The semiotics of the face studies the meaning of the human face in contemporary visual cultures. There are two complementary research foci: widespread practices of face exhibition in social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tinder; and minority practices of occultation, including the mask in anti-establishment political activism (Anonymous) and the veil in religious dressing codes. The meaning of the human face is currently changing on a global scale: through the invention and diffusion of new visual technologies (digital photography, visual filters, as well as software for automatic face recognition); through the creation and establishment of novel genres of face representation (the selfie); and through new approaches to face perception, reading, and memorization (e.g., the ‘scrolling’ of faces on Tinder). Cognitions, emotions, and actions that people attach to the interaction with one’s and others’ faces are undergoing dramatic shifts. In the semiotics of the face, an interdisciplinary but focused approach combines visual history, semiotics, phenomenology, visual anthropology, but also face perception studies and collection and analysis of big data, so as to study the social and technological causes of these changes and their effects in terms of alterations in self-perception and communicative interaction. In the tension between, on the one hand, political and economic agencies pressing for increasing disclosure, detection, and marketing of the human face (for reasons of security and control, for commercial or bureaucratic purposes) and, on the other hand, the counter-trends of face occultation (parents ‘hiding’ their children from the Internet, political activists concealing their faces, religious or aesthetic veils, writers and artists like Bansky or Ferrante choosing not to reveal their identity), the visual syntax, the semantics, and the pragmatics of the human face are rapidly evolving. The semiotics of the face carries on a comprehensive survey of this socio-cultural phenomenon.

Wykresy, schematy i diagramy nie są wyłącznie ilustracjami. Jak dowodzi Model i metafora, można je dziś uznać za niezbędne narzędzia ułatwiające tworzenie współczesnej humanistyki. Wykorzystując jednocześnie teksty i obrazy, książka w zwięzły sposób przedstawia szereg zagadnień istotnych dla każdego historyka, socjologa czy badacza literatury. Na Model i metaforę składają się teoretyczne podstawy myślenia obrazem, zarys historycznych relacji słowa i obrazu w humanistyce, a także praktyczne wskazówki dla tych, którzy chcieliby korzystać z obrazów w trakcie planowania i pisania tekstów. Inni czytelnicy mogą traktować tę książkę jak przewodnik, ułatwiający poruszanie się w epoce obrazów.
Jak przystało na książkę o komunikacji wizualnej, Model i metafora jest połączeniem obrazu i tekstu na równych prawach – zawiera ponad 150 rysunków wyjaśniających kwestie, które byłyby trudne do omówienia przy pomocy tekstu.

Semiotics is the realm of research that studies sign as an important part of cultural life and message. During the semiotics, we can identify the culture and its reality by an explanation of sign, during the system of signification.
Through this, this essay analysis the myth of the phenomenon of the advertising in the semiotics and linguistic method to let us know how advertising creates myth by using sign and how the myth of advertising come into being might be discussed. Also, this essay seeks to find how the visual massage is formed and given meaning.

"Le basi teoriche della Sociosemiotica e le sue applicazioni nell'analisi di film, programmi e canali televisivi, pubblicità e opere di videoarte.

Sociosemiotics theories and their application to the analysis of films, tv programmes and tv channels, advertising and video art."

One of the main distinctions between Italian Manneristic artistic period and the Dutch golden age of the 17th century painters is, as Svetlana Alpers noted, a question of the position of the observer. Italian art , linked with the themes chosen by a patron, creates an unreal and harmonic world , enclosed by a framed window and with the viewer-us-forced into a specific position. Linear perspective was, instead of an aid to reality, a portal to illusionism. Where these paintings were located? Often they were the so-called altarpieces, displayed behind the altar, symmetrical to the main axis on a Latin cross floor plan church. They were located in an area that was inaccessible to the common observer. (This idea worked even for Art moved in the smallest lateral naves chapel, normally a location for buried clerics. Inaccessibility was the source for the placements of the observers.) Since the middle age, Art was invested in the role of a teacher for te faithful. The uneducated were not able to obtain the word of god through a mass spoken in Latin, moreover they were moved to Faith with an illusionism far removed from everyday life. Linear perspective creates a timeless representation, a sort of explanation of Faith. It was a rhetoric figure placed permanently in front of our eyes. The renaissance concept of a reality that refuses the chaos of the everyday, that looks for the shape of perfection, a symmetry that only art had the power to set. Since Early Dutch painting, themes show off their distance with that conception. an example can be found in the Arnolfini portrait by Van Eyck: the commissioners are the subject of the painting (even in Italian Art Renaissance the commissioner was often depicted in the paintings, placed in a hidden or lateral position, often bowing to the religious theme which would hold the central position.) they are not particularly attractive or perfect, their wealth essentially hidden in small objects. See for example the famous round-shape mirror (Fig.

Qu'est-ce qu'une image ? La multiplication proliférante des images semble bien – et c'est là son paradoxe – inversement proportionnelle à notre faculté de dire ce qu'est réellement une image. Si notre interaction quotidienne avec les écrans a fait disparaître certaines peurs archaïques quant au pouvoir perturbateur des images, cette normalisation des rapports fait elle-même écran à une confrontation réelle avec l'efficace des images.
Prenant acte du fait que l'image n'est pas structurée comme un langage, cet ouvrage se fait le témoin des débats actuels autour des logiques imaginales, notamment les Bildwissenschaften allemandes ainsi que les visual studies aux Etats-Unis. Que ce soit à partir d'une perspective contemporaine ou encore depuis une position délibérément anachronique, les différents essais forment ensemble un arsenal conceptuel permettant d'affronter de façon nouvelle la question de l'image et de son efficace.

In Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments, Barbara Postema uses the notion of the gap to explain how comics create meaning. As texts that combine words and images, comics rely on the verbal register to communicate meaning, but they also use images in a number of different ways, many of which are based on leaving out information, forcing readers to fill in the blanks. By foregrounding the narrative qualities of comics, Postema demonstrates the ways in which comics are structured at every level of communication—image, panel, sequence, narration—to guide the reader to assemble the narrative from fragments. Besides advancing a new understanding of the structure of meaning in comics, this work’s exploration into the form of comics integrates two traditionally separate approaches to the study of comics, namely, the semiotics of the Franco-Belgian school of visual culture and comics studies, and the practice-based comics theory advanced by American cartoonists Will Eisner and Scott McCloud. It combines these traditions to advance a novel analytical framework and a vocabulary to study the form, an approach that is demonstrated through a series of readings of contemporary North-American comics.

در اين مقاله، براي تحليل صفحة اول روزنامهها و گفتمان حاكم بر آنها
دورههاي چند ماههاي از چندين روزنامة كثيرالانتشار را مطالعه كرديم تا
دريابيم آيا صفحهآرايي صفحة اول روزنامهها به شيوهاي هدفمند انجام
ميشود يا برحسب اتفاق و صرفاً بر مبنايي زيباييشناسانه. در انجام اين كار از
مدل چندوجهي گونتر كرس و تئوفان ليوون استفاده شد كه براي صفحهآرايي
روزنامه چهار شيوه قائل است و اكثر روزنامهها براساس يكي يا تركيبي از
آنها صفحهآرايي ميشوند. در تحليل صفحة اول روزنامههاي ايراني به نتايج
مشابه تحقيق كرس و فان ليوون رسيديم كه معتقدند صفحهآرايي صفحة اول
روزنامهها نوعي جهتدهي ايدئولوژيك براي هدايت خواننده و القاي معاني
خاص به او وجود دارد.

The revolution taking place across the world and Nigeria are of diverse forms, some overt and some others covert. Among the covert ones are the gradual introduction of social robots in form of sex dolls, also known as female humanoids into homes. These dolls are designed and advertised for companionship, sexual stimulation, artistic representations of human fantasy, and other creative reasons. These human-like entities of various sizes and shapes can be inflated before use, and deflated after use by the male owner, and many women may not know that such objects are in their houses competing with them. This paper attempts to interrogate this emerging trend, and argues that the status of women will gradually wane with the introduction of sex dolls, explores the negative effects of the presence of these female humanoids on the image and dignity of women through the use of online questions from the Google platform that got anonymous responses from respondents. The survey and qualitative content analysis methods woven around Fairclough"s CDA were used to analyse the data. Findings show that sex dolls can never take the complementary role played by real females to their male counterparts in the society; as such, the female gender needs no redefinition. It opines that there is a need to reiterate and uphold the traditional status of women as being complementary to men, and not just as object of fun. It offers further recommendations that will assist women cope in this humanoid society, and concludes that the unconscious shifting of the traditional roles of the female gender to artificial beings will have unquantifiable consequences on the family and the society at large. The study concludes that this emerging trend of men having intimate relationship with female humanoids will likely cause fundamental changes in the meaning of social interaction and the nature of human communication in the society.

Der Begriff des Interface kategorisiert die Ausprägungsstufen einer kommunikationsstabilisierenden Schnittstelle als Interaktionsmechanismus, wobei die Interaktion von maschinellen Komponenten (Hardware, Software) sowie die vielfältigen Interaktionen zwischen UserIn und Maschine zur Geltung gebracht werden.

Les reconfigurations actuelles des films et documents audiovisuels, qui changent notamment de support ou de média, interrogent bien sûr les définitions acquises de ce que nous appelions sans trop d’incertitude, jusque dans les années 1990, « cinéma » ou « télévision », mais elles peuvent aussi questionner les catégories théoriques mêmes que nous utilisons couramment pour les étudier : genre, format, média. Prenons tout d’abord quatre exemples de migration et recatégorisation d’objets audiovisuels pour poser des repères. Nous approfondirons ensuite la réflexion en montrant comment la notion de « levain des médias » nous permet de clarifier certains de ces phénomènes. Avec cet éclairage, nous observerons comment les objets se déplacent et se situent de façon dynamique au sein d’une tension entre genre, format et média, pour mieux repenser la « logique des genres » aujourd’hui.

A B S T R A C T Visualisations can highly contribute to the importance and authority of new ideas, concepts, and knowledge claims. Among the many visualisations, few become well-known and influential in environmental governance. Whilst these have been objects of specific research, this study questions what constitutes and underpins their influence. For this, the paper codifies influential visualisations and defines criteria for studying their visual characteristics. The criteria are applied to two case studies, the " traffic light " and the " planetary boundaries " diagrams. To increase the validity of the findings, the study also introduces two " failure cases " as a plausibility check.

The technologies that in the last ten years affected our life and the social dynamics have highlighted an unavoidable collision between the real and the virtual world. They seem to mesh up in a new territory made by stories and imaginaries, in which the concepts of local and global overlap and the plural identities left place to heterogeneous fluxes of tales and signs.

This article is primarily concerned with the question of understanding of notions and phenomena such are idolatry, iconolatry, and image in the framework of religious culture in European and Levant history from classic – antique age until late modern times.  Since the topic is broad, the article is composed as a short discussion about main ideas and problems connected to the understanding and the interpretations of the notion of idolatry and images that were and are presented in public and scholar discourse.  Theoretical basics for his article were taken from the work of several prominent post-modern scholars and researchers of scientific and academic fields of visual culture and art history such as Hans Belting, Michael Baxandall, David Freedberg, Peter Burke. In addition to this, the semiotic approach, as well as theory of media and communication was also engaged in the analysis conducted in the article.
Keywords:
Images, Christianity, cult, object, icons, visual

Resumen

Recientemente, el estudio de la semiología ha cobrado progresivamente mayor presencia en la currícula de programas como artes visuales, plásticas, diseño gráfico, comunicación, lingüística, literatura, arquitectura y otros. Sin embargo, como disciplina, es difícil decir cuándo y cómo nace; su origen y su estado actual. Muchos autores atribuyen su origen al norteamericano Peirce y al suizo Saussure, cuando en realidad el término semiótica es mucho más antiguo y su fundación como disciplina es o anterior o posterior a estos dos autores, dependiendo del criterio que se elija. Es un buen momento para hacer un repaso del origen histórico y desarrollo de la disciplina semiológica que se está tratando de consolidar como parte integral y útil de la currícula de todas estas profesiones. 
Palabras clave: arte, diseño, semiología, semiótica.

Abstract

Recently, the study of semiology has progressively gained presence in the curricula of programs such as visual arts, fine arts, graphic design, communication sciences, linguistics, literature and others. Nevertheless, as a discipline, it is hard to say when and how it was born; its origin and current state. Many authors attribute its origins to the American Peirce and the Swiss Saussure, when in truth the term semiotics is much older and its inception as a discipline is either earlier or later to these two authors, depending on the chosen criteria. It is a good time to make a review of the historical origin and development of the semiologic discipline that is striving to consolidate as an integral and useful part of the curricula in all those professions.
Key words: Art, design, semiology, semiotic.

In argumentation theory pictures traditionally has been considered unable to function as argumentation. In this text Jens E. Kjeldsen analyses and critiques the assumption that argumentation is tied to explicit verbal communication, and that the semiotic character of pictures makes pictorial argumentation impossible. We should rather, he proposes, consider argumentation as performative communication acts; and because pictures can perform the role of enunciation and communicative action, they can also perform argumentation.

In an essay on the picture frame, Georg Simmel claims the sacredness of this device considered fun- damental for the dialectical articulation of the delicate relationship between art and reality which con- stitutes, for the german philosopher, the core of his aesthetic meditations, including those on theatre. In the most contemporary forms of immersive theatre it is nevertheless no longer the framing of the proscenium – that imaginary “fourth wall”, according to a purely visual approach, through which the audience observes actions on stage – that threshold-figure (according to Simmel’s viewpoint) to which the function of separating and connecting the factual reality of the spectator and the counterfactual one of the (dramatic) possible world is delegated. In fact, in the immersive theatre this boundary devi- ce is embodied by the actor himself, who becomes the figure responsible for the continuous transfor- mation and transfiguration of the performative frame, decidedly more opaque and less transparent than to more traditional theatrical forms, such as bourgeois drama.
We are, therefore, in presence of a sort of 2.0 fictionality, no longer delegated to that specific fictional frame marked by boundary indicators such as the darkness in theater room, the curtain, the silence, etc. Actually, in this new kind of fictionality bodily matter and aesthesia at stake in the actor-spectator experience are solely account for the establishment of the performative frame.

This  paper  discuss  one  of  the  very  features  of  the  urban  spaces, namely  the inscription  of  the  human action  as  a  privileged  viewpoint  for  its    constitution.  Three  examples  are  briefly  discussed  about  howspatial  articulations  value  the  postulate  of  action,  thus  setting  up very  diversified  types  of  “modelreaders”.  Expecially  in  the  case  of  the  “dissuasive  architecture”  of  the  cities,  the  matter  on  how  theaction is conceived and valued is emphasized. In particular, the modal featuring of dissuasive space is not  injunctive  (namely  it  has  not  the  possibility  of being  constitutive  of  law),  but  it  is only  targeted  to mere  interdictions  regarding  the  modality  of  “doing”.  In  the  end,  some  features  about  thephenomenological  construction  of  the  subject  (as  “action  instance”)  are  briefly  discussed,  focusing  in partiular Agamben and Husserl.

According to a sociosemiotic theoretical framework, this paper reflects on the enunciative relations between the so-called "dramatic text" and its performance. First we will address the textual nature of playing on stage, to be no longer thought of as a deflection from the dramatic text, but as the result of dynamics of translation converging in the stage practice. The alleged opposition between the closure of the dramatic text and the phenomenal presence of the actor's body on stage must be reconfigured on the ground of enunciation frames, along with all their effects of reality and presence. During the performance, the actor uses his own figure to project an image that displays a series of semantic articulations, adopting enunciation strategies that can be analysed sub specie textis. Though many studies on theatre still support the idea that the effect of naturalism on stage depends on casualness and impermanence, we will rely also on the approach of cognitive studies to remark that this very effect is the result of precise enunciative strategies oriented to produce empathy between the actor and the spectator.

The protagonism of the image in the media benefits the disciplines that better control its mechanisms. Among them, Advertising stands out effortlessly because, in a moment when the communication sees its image dimension accentuated, this discipline emphasizes the power of the image to communicate and persuade under the cloak of a permanent seduction. Consequently, Advertising emerges in contemporary culture as a markedly imaginative discourse, capable of infecting all others (Ferreira, 2012), vulnerable to the seductive power of the image and a culture that defines itself from it. In this way, its association with Rhetoric, while “faculty of theorizing about what is appropriate in each case to convince” (Aristotle, 1355b), though inevitable, does not appear free of obstacles, especially in which regards the choice of the model to analyse the specificity of the advertising image. This article presents the semiotic-rhetorical models related to image analysis of Roland Barthes (1964), Durand (1964), Péninou (1973), Grupo μ (1987), Floch (1981), Sonesson (1993), Umberto Eco (1997), Martine Joly (1999) and José Saborit (1999).

Reseña publicada en el número 13 de la revista "Comunicación" del departamento de Comunicación Audiovisual y Publicidad de la Universidad de Sevilla (pp. 97-100). ISSN 1989-600X

Jorge Lozano (ed.): "Secretos en red. Intervenciones semióticas en el tiempo presente". Madrid: Ediciones Sequitur, 2014. 198 páginas.

"Secretos en red" es un libro surgido del trabajo conjunto por parte de los miembros del Grupo de Estudios de Semiótica de la Cultura (GESC) Jorge Lozano, Marcello Serra, Rayco González o Luis Pablo Francescutti, con aportaciones de Umberto Eco, Paolo Fabbri, Maurizio Bettini, Jacques Fontanille, Denis Bertrand y Alberto Abruzzese.

La llamada a la transversalidad del subtítulo ("intervenciones semióticas en el tiempo presente") hace alusión a la diversidad de metodologías y enfoques presentes en un volumen que tiene como base un único fenómeno de actualidad: Wikileaks, los documentos, los secretos, las demandas de transparencia y las críticas a la opacidad. No existe sin embargo sospecha posible en torno a que la amplitud de miras pueda pecar de dispersión, puesto que las aportaciones de la semiótica de la imagen (Calabrese, pág. 65; Marin, pág. 21; Careri, pág. 24; sobre la mediación del dispositivo de la obra de arte que al mismo tiempo filtra y permite el acceso por medio de la sustancia de su expresión) no hacen sino complementar el ameno análisis del concepto de “transparencia” a través de la lengua latina y de los textos literarios llevado a cabo por Bettini (Séneca, Cicerón, Plauto, Quintiliano… pág. 119-125) o las consideraciones en torno al discurso histórico, las “historias del presente” (pág. 66) y el problema del archivo planteadas por Lozano siguiendo a autores y textos de referencia como "La arqueología del saber" de Foucault (1969). Así planteado, un archivo como el de Wikileaks no es sino “ante todo la ley de lo que puede ser dicho, el sistema que gobierna la aparición de los enunciados como acontecimientos singulares”, esto es, un problema netamente enunciativo, semiótico, comparable al Atlas Mnemosyne de Aby Warburg, “archivo de archivos” (pág. 20), o incluso a la concepción de la Enciclopedia de Umberto Eco como biblioteca de todas las bibliotecas, tema por cierto del su discurso de investidura.

Völlig neue Bild- und Erfahrungswelten versprechen die jüngsten Produkte der Medienindustrie ihren Usern. Euphorisch investieren Google, Microsoft und Co. Unsummen in digitale Medientechnologien wie Virtual-Reality-Displays. Jeder Blockbuster muss in 3D gedreht werden. Entwicklungen wie diese verdeutlichen nicht nur den hohen Stellenwert, der sowohl der technologischen Seite als auch den ästhetischen Strategien visueller Medien zukommt. Sie werfen auch eine Reihe von Fragen auf: Wie adressieren multimodale Medienarrangements die Sinne der Rezipienten? Welche Rolle spielen Technologie und Wahrnehmung bei der Modellierung von Bildwirkungen? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, legt der vorliegende Band den Fokus auf die Analyse medialer Interfaces. Konzentrierte sich die Bewegtbilder-Reihe bislang auf den Film, widmet sich Bild und Interface auch interaktiven Digital- und Computerspielbildern. Dadurch sollen weitere Bausteine einer kritischen Bewegtbildwissenschaft herausgearbeitet werden.

Dissertação de mestrado defendida no ano de 2019 pela Universidade do Minho - Portugal. Atribuiu-se 19 valores como avaliação do trabalho.

Entendendo que as teleficções são capazes de veicular narrativas homogeneizadoras e definir identidades sociais, esta dissertação, examina como os discursos de gênero e sexualidade se manifestam na minissérie Anos Rebeldes. A partir desta ficção televisiva, quais são as possibilidades de ser e agir como mulher?
Para tal pesquisa, foi priorizada uma abordagem qualitativa. O corpus prioriza cenas das quatro personagens femininas presentes ao longo de toda a minissérie. A partir da Análise Crítica do Discurso (ACD) e da socio-semiótica visual, fez-se uma análise do funcionamento dos diálogos e das imagens contidas em 19 cenas, reunidas no anexo deste trabalho, com a duração total de 33 minutos.
Conclui-se que, apesar de alguns avanços, algumas questões referentes as identidades de gênero e sexualidade persistem e não são negociadas, levando a uma identificação quase automática da feminilidade a uma relação heterossexual monogâmica, em que o papel “natural” da mulher é o da maternidade e docilidade.

Ventriloquo è colui che parla col ventre, che simula uno slittamento della voce dalla bocca allo stomaco, da un’interiorità che si apre all’altro attraverso l’inter-faccia del volto, a un’intestinità che nega l’altro nella figura dell’in-volto, dell’in-viso, da una parola nutrimento a una parola escremento, e non quello della sua eiezione naturale ma quello di una parola-vomito, borborigma che parla a sé stesso, che inverte la traiettoria del bolo dal dentro al fuori. Ma ventriloquo è anche colui che parla al ventre, nel senso che non si rivolge al viso, alle orecchie, alla bocca, al volto dell’altro, ma spinge l’interlocutore a dismettere il proprio volto per farsi ventre, per rimanere nel chiuso del proprio io, nel rimuginare la parola ricevuta dal ventriloquo finché essa non diviene a sua volta sterco, e non viene eietta come natura vorrebbe ma vomitata verso il volto altrui, negandone la purezza fenomenologica, frustrandone la funzione di volto, oppure spingendolo a diventare anch’esso pancia, in una asemiosi illimitata che spegne il senso invece di accenderlo, che chiude l’esistenza nell’angolo buio dell’essere, che restituisce i corpi alla natura e li rende ferini, invisi gli uni agli altri, nemici, barbari.

The paper defines the role of airlines’ names in nation branding. The author describes the types of identity (territorial, political, ethnic) in airlines’ names and the main types of onyms communicating these identities.
Key words: country’s identity, airlines’ name, nation branding, brand, onym.

Even as Saussure’s dogma of the “tyranny of writing” recedes farther into the past, writing systems remain a subject at the margins of linguistics.  Although much has been accomplished in the interdisciplinary area of writing systems research, or grapholinguistics, most major contributions to the field are of exclusively descriptive nature.  As a result, Watt’s (1998:118) observations are still true today: there exists no theory of writing that can explain “why each […] writing system is the way it is, instead of some other way, and why all such systems have in common what they have in common”.  The reasons for this are that valuable grapholinguistic findings from the various disciplines interested in writing – aside from linguistics, these are history, psychology, pedagogy, and many others – often fail to reference one another and are not embedded in a larger context.  An overarching theoretical framework remains a desideratum, as do shared concepts and terminology that would allow the comparison of typologically diverse writing systems.  For precisely these reasons, endeavors such as a comparison of the Chinese and German writing systems remain unfeasible.  Provocative claims such as “some writing systems are better than others” (Rogers, 1995:31) are, against this background, ultimately untestable.
Based on Meletis (2018), this talk introduces the core tenets of Natural Graphematics as an explanatory theoretical framework that makes possible the comparison of writing systems.  It is positioned in the framework of Naturalness Theory and modeled after its subbranch of Natural Morphology.  In Natural Morphology (Dressler et al., 1987), the semiotic structure of signs is assumed to have a bearing on how they are cognitively processed by humans, with structures that are cognitively processed with less effort being termed natural, giving the approach its name.  As writing systems are semiotic systems linking the visual units of scripts (= signifiers) with linguistic units (= signifieds), the semiotic parameters of Natural Morphology can be fruitfully transferred to graphematics.  Accordingly, parameters such as transparency (a grapheme is transparent if it only corresponds with one linguistic unit, e.g. German <f> only corresponds to /f/) prove to be useful categories for the description and comparison of the graphematic module of writing systems.  In this talk, the parameters of iconicity, diagrammaticity, indexicality, transparency, compositional transparency, positional transparency, and figure—ground will be presented and illustrated with examples from a variety of diverse writing systems.
While the investigation of how these parameters are reflected in different writing systems descriptively evaluates their linguistic fit, i.e. how well they fit their respective languages, in a next step, the processing fit of these parameters can be assessed with the help of external evidence such as data from literacy acquisition and the history of writing.  Here, the central question reads: How do the structural features of writing systems affect their processing by humans?  The processing fit also gives Natural Graphematics its explanatory force, as it does not stop at describing structures, but strives to explain how human pressure has shaped them and how they affect humans.  In sum, taken together, the naturalness parameters and their linguistic and processing fits introduced in this talk offer instruments for the evaluation of writing systems.  This presents a remarkable step in the development of a theory of writing.

DRESSLER, WOLFGANG U., WILLI MAYERTHALER, OSWALD PANAGL, and WOLFGANG U. WURZEL.  1987.  Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
MELETIS, DIMITRIOS.  2018.  What is natural in writing? Prolegomena to a Natural Grapholinguistics.  Written Language and Literacy 21:52-88.
ROGERS, HENRY.  1995.  Optimal orthographies. In Scripts and literacy: reading and learning to read alphabets, syllabaries and characters, edited by INSUP TAYLOR, and DAVID R. OLSON, 31-43. Dordrecht: Springer.
WATT, W. C.  1998.  The old-fashioned way. Semiotica 122:99-138.

Tradicionalmente, el Diseño ha sido una disciplina directamente relacionada con el aspecto meramente estético. Tan sólo alguna de sus especialidades, como el Diseño Gráfico, se ha asociado a la Comunicación Visual, y en el terreno periodístico se ha tratado como un complemento de la información y un procedimiento secundario en la elaboración de noticias, reportajes y otros contenidos. Esta disociación entre Diseño e Información no tiene sentido y consideramos que limita el poder comunicativo de ambas materias. Son igual de importantes el «qué» y el «cómo» en la elaboración de los mensajes de carácter informativo. Del mismo modo, son tan importantes los redactores como los diseñadores (frecuentemente conocidos en los medios impresos como maquetadores). En definitiva, forma y contenido están en el mismo nivel y deben ser complementarios. El objetivo principal de este capítulo es destacar la intensa relación existente entre Periodismo y Diseño y proporcionar a los estudiantes más herramientas que potencien su capacidad narrativa e informativa. Conocer estos puntos que los unen hace que los estudiantes de Periodismo pierdan la reticencia inicial a adentrarse en el Diseño porque consideran erróneamente que para diseñar hace falta dibujar.

La scrittura, per linguistica e semiotica, è invisibile. Nei testi verbali, infatti, è soltanto un dispositivo esterno al linguaggio, la cui unica funzione è di essere trasparente rispetto al contenuto veicolato.
Esistono alcuni testi verbali, tuttavia, in cui la sostanza espressiva grafica gioca un ruolo chiave, come nei carmina figurata medievali e nella poesia concreta moderna, sia orientale sia occidentale, e nelle ricerche visive del graphic design contemporaneo. Come ha sottolineato James Elkins, questi testi, verbali e visivi allo stesso tempo, possono essere considerati “mixtures of reading and seeing” (The Domain of Images, 1999, p. 84).
Questo contributo si incentra, in particolare, sull’opera di Massin, considerato uno dei più importanti graphic designer del secondo Dopoguerra in Francia. Le sue sperimentazioni grafiche (celebri, tra le altre, le interprétations typographiques basate su alcune pièce teatrali di Ionesco) tentano di dare vita alla pagina scritta con mezzi puramente tipografici, lavorando sulla possibile connessione tra il verbale e altri registri espressivi.
L’obiettivo principale di questo lavoro sarà dunque quello di riflettere più da vicino sulle diverse possibilità di articolazione tra verbale e visivo in testi verbo-visivi complessi come quelli di Massin, in cui la scrittura non è soltanto notazione, ma si rivela anche una vera e propria pratica espressiva.


In the place of the author.
Typographic alterations and strategies of enunciation in Massin’s interprétations typographiques

Writing, according to linguistics and semiotics too, is invisible. In written and verbal texts, indeed, writing is considered to be a mere external device, whose function is to be transparent to the language beyond itself.
Sometimes, nevertheless, it happens that the graphic expression-substance plays a key role in verbal texts too: you could bracket together medieval carmina figurata and modern concrete poetry (both Eastern and Western) plus the visual researches of contemporary graphic design. As James Elkins pointed out, such texts, verbal and visual at the same time, become “mixtures of reading and seeing” (The Domain of Images, 1999, p. 84).
The main theme of this paper is centred on the work of Massin, one of the most important post-war French graphic designers. His experimentations (famous, amongst others, the interprétations typographiques based on Ionesco’s plays) attempt to bring a page to life by purely typographical means, working on the connection between verbal and other ways of signification.
The aim of this paper, then, will be to focus on different possibilities of articulation of word and image in complex verbal-visual texts, such as the Massin’s ones, in which writing is not just a notation, but also a real expressive practice.

Einladung der Planungsgruppe „Haus der Zeichen“

im Rahmen des Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Semiotik laden wir zu einem 2. Workshop am Mittwoch den 13. 09. 2017, von 17.30 bis 19.00 Uhr in der Universität Passau im Hörsaal 7 / WiWi ein.
Zeit/Ort: 13.09.2017, 17:30–19:00 Uhr (HS 7 | WiWi)
Moderation: Friz Fischer und Christina Nuhr (Breuninger Stiftung)

Ziel des Forums ist es, neben einem Archiv für Semiotik (unter Einbezug der bestehenden Textsammlungen von Martin Krampen an der UdK Berlin und der HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd sowie von Roland Posner an der TU Berlin) ein lebendiges Kommunikationszentrum zu schaffen. Für beides gilt es einen Ort zu finden, für Letzteres zudem Konzepte zu entwickeln. Mit dem Forum soll an die bisherige Arbeit der Planungsgruppe um Ingrid Lempp (Haus der Zeichen, 1. Vorsitzende), Eva Kimminich (Universität Potsdam, DGS Sektion Jugend- und Subkulturen) und Martina Sauer (DGS, Sektion Bild) angeknüpft und Ideen und Darstellungsformen für ein „Haus der Zeichen – House of Signs“ entwickelt werden, um damit die Macht des Bedeutens von Zeichen zu veranschaulichen.  Organisatorisch ist die Begegnung als ein Round Table mit Workshop-Charakter angelegt.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Ingrid Lempp, 1. Vorsitzende und Martina Sauer, DGS, Sektion Bild