In 2024, for the first time, two Nobel Prizes-in Chemistry and Physics-were awarded for technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI). Notably, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized the development of AlphaFold 2, a system capable of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences, solving a problem that challenged scientists for decades. While AI-generated scientific images are not new, the case of AlphaFold 2 exemplifies the introduction of some changes in the generation process of these visualization devices that leads to rethink the genre of scientific images. Through semiotic analysis and Vil & eacute;m Flusser's philosophy of technical images, this contribution will try to conduct an analysis of the reshaping processes affecting this genre and to reflect on how to configure this new type of imagery from an epistemological point of view.
The investigation we propose aims to explore, through the tools of narrative semiotics, the ways in which social media produce new kinds of genres. Our analysis will encompass a range of specific texts, including social media help centers, user and marketer guides, post patterns identified through professional tools. The objective is to examine the defining features of the Post genre and the transformations introduced by Stories, Reels, TikToks, and similar formats-not limiting ourselves to surface-level communicative aspects, but instead highlighting modes of enunciation, actantial structures, as well as thymic and
The interaction between new practices and new media for writing and reading has a significant impact on contemporary writing genres. Caught between different digital devices, media and practices, new formats are emerging that challenge pre-existing norms. This is the case, for example, with "short stories", which can be placed at the crossroads between narrative genres and short genres, defined by the external material characteristic of spatial or temporal constraint, showing a linguistic and semiotic autonomy in relation to its environment. These allow us to observe the cooperation of very different devices, media and practices (transport, reading, consumption, etc.) in the process of the emergence of a genre.
The present study focuses on the investigation of a prevalent phenomenon within the domain of political communication: censorship, as manifested in iconic messages. In recent years, this practice has been the subject of scholarly discussion, particularly within Media Studies, where it has been conceptualized as intersemiotic or intericonic phenomenon. This conceptualization reflects the view that intericonic censorship, as observed in press communication, may be effectively analyzed as a translation process. It is argued that Translation Studies, the Semiotics of Translation, and Structural Semiotics collectively furnish the requisite conceptual apparatus for approaching this phenomenon as a translation process. The examination is substantiated by illustrative instances originating in the Greek and international press. Although the phenomenon traces its origins to the first half of the twentieth century, it appears to endure and maintain its relevance in the current millennium. This sustained presence corroborates Lotman's assertion that translation functions as the essential instrument of semiotic research.
This article analyzes the performative construction of gender through television genres and the forms of their social consumption shaped by the medium. TV, from its origins as a "domestic environment" predominantly associated with the feminine through serials and soap operas, has historically defined traditional gender archetypes according to the evolution of the media environment, until the current digital landscape with channels explicitly for him and for her. Beyond personalized and targeted consumption, the transition towards transmedia seriality and the broader openness of generalist TV to other media platforms, has promoted forms of socialization no longer strictly tied to the viewer's specific gender or the content's genre, but rather to the capacity to collectively reinterpret complex media worlds-notably fostering the expression of an LGBTQ+ audience. Rather than seeking a third binary gender, this community leverages the very performativity of both sexual gender and media genres to re-elaborate mainstream codes, often through trash television. "Trash" here is interpreted not as low value, but as material activated and re-valued by a social practice of sharing and complicity that reveals the constructed nature of gender and genres. Through parodic remediation across different platforms, the LGBTQ+ audience not only reasserts its identity but also highlights the constant reproduction and manipulation of gender within the complex and stratified contemporary media ecosystem.
The aim of this contribution is to show that writing text, in any act of communication, is a semiotic activity that simultaneously creates genre. This first premise is linked to a second, semiotic premise, which argues that genre is a textual category without a fixed territory, yet one that belongs entirely to the text. Finally, I will present three concepts ("generic correlates," "generic molecule," and "generic community"), which constitute, within what I calla "praxis," the foundation of textual typologies.
The interest in the true crime fiction genre is closely tied to its success in the contemporary cultural and media landscape. True crime offers different perspectives on reality, shaping our perceptions of crime and evil. It is a form of storytelling that blends various discursive forms, balancing them to make the narrative more or less effective. In particular, the modes of journalistic discourse, historical-documentary discourse, and fiction play key roles in constructing the true crime narrative. Specifically, certain objectifying or subjectifying enunciative forms are used to create specific effects on the reader or viewer of true crime stories. These forms are essential for blending different discursive genres and determining the effectiveness of the narrative.
This article presents a Teacher Professional Development Research (TPDR-Ricerca-Formazione) project aimed at developing semiotic models for teaching interpretation in visual education. Overcoming the idea of tacit knowledge as inexpressible, the study explores how semiotic tools can make the expertise of educators visible and communicable. In this research, the semiologist acts as an intercessor, facilitating the co-construction of meaning and shaping the discursive dynamics of interpretation through generative and relational frameworks. The project promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue between semiotics and education, highlighting interpretation as a complex and situated practice, shaped by actantial interaction regimes and multimodal expressive practices. The case study, developed in collaboration with the Pinacoteca di Brera, a high school of human sciences in Milan and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, involved interdisciplinary groups of teachers and museum educators who co-designed and implemented interpretive practices in museum educational contexts.
We first focus on the oxymoronic shock of the expression "inventiveness of tradition", which contains the possible matrix of a myth, the two antagonistic terms being illuminated by each other. We examine the case of "vintage" to illustrate this point. Keeping this mythical aim on hold, we consider the actantial status of tradition, associated with "custom" (according to Montaigne), as a sovereign and imperious Sender, far from any inventiveness and even prohibiting it. From then on, related to the enunciative operations of convocation and revocation of the products of use generated by enunciative praxis, the inventiveness of tradition will appear for what it is: a creative revocation. The semiotics of enunciating instances (Coquet 2007, 2022) to which we add a few ideas here allows us to analyze it and outline a typology of the processes of "inventiveness of tradition" based on literary, social and political examples.
Recanati is a pretty town in central Italy, in the Marche region, to which thousands of tourists flock every year. This medieval hamlet owes its fortune to the fact that it is the birthplace of one of the greatest poets of 19th century and of all time, Giacomo Leopardi. After his death and especially in the last decades, a very effective marketing strategy has turned Leopardi into a brand. Every corner of Recanati appears as a semiotic manifestation of scenes and atmospheres described by him in his poems. This article investigates the theme of tradition by analysing how a brand identity works at the scale of a territory. The theoretical stake is to discover, through an analysis based on the methodological tool of translation, how reality, i.e. the semiotics of the natural world, becomes, in Recanati, a secondary language with respect to a primary modelling language that is literature. Here, in fact, Leopardi's texts constitute the source of the tradition, whose target is the world of life, a byt that is intertwined with them. In particular the "Hill of Infinity", which is now a park and a vegetable garden in the frame of the promotion plan Where Infinity Begins, stands out for its ability to translate, but also to betray (tradurre and tradire), Leopardi's famous song. An epistemological challenge also emerges, relating to the obviousness with which we tread the soils: how is Recanati the place where infinity begins? What properties are selected to mark it as such?
The essay deals with the comparison between two artists such as Renato Carosone and Pino Daniele, who had a very close relationship with the Neapolitan song tradition, starting from a position of criticism and detachment from stereotypical musical forms. The themes of their songs entertain a relationship with everyday life and the reality of Naples, described in its diversity and difficulties, with a reinterpretation made through popular music of Anglo-American origin. The use of Neapolitan dialect also makes it possible to discuss the relationship between local dialect forms and cultural grafts from media cultures. In the background remains the problematic, but at the same time creative, relationship between the tradition linked to the city of Naples and the questioning of oleographic forms.
The essay returns to the theme of the invention of tradition from the perspective of the semiotics of cultures. It does so in two stages. In the first stage, it calls for an overall assessment of The Invention of Tradition, focusing particularly on the introduction and conclusion by Eric Hobsbawm. Then, it draws a parallel between this approach and what Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij have developed regarding the invention of memory, starting from the case of Russian culture. The second stage, incorporating other fundamental contributions on the subject, offers, in the form of Theses, indications for moving beyond the stale conflict over whether traditions are invented or not: the goal is to achieve a better understanding of the continuous semiopolitical work of translating historical identifications, in which we are all necessarily involved.
This article offers a semiotic analysis of culinary tradition, challenging essentialist views and the myth of pure origins in food heritage. Drawing on structuralist critiques of authorship and enunciative praxis theory, it reinterprets tradition as a dynamic process of reiteration and cultural negotiation. The manifesto of Gualtiero Marchesi's Nuova cucina italiana serves as a starting point to explore the tension between innovation and normativity. The study calls for future analyses of individual dishes as syncretic texts where meaning, identity, and politics converge.
Social cognition refers to the logical and cognitive processes enabling subjects to interpret and understand others' social behavior through the attribution of intentions and beliefs. However, this process presupposes a prior competence: the ability to recognize people. Bringing together reflections from cognitive research, developmental psychology, anthropology and semiotics, the proposal investigates how the ability to recognize others-far from simply works as a logical preamble to social cognition-is deeply rooted in ontogenetic, cultural and intergenerational processes that mark out, constrain and influence subsequent operations of social cognition. We argue how a semiotic perspective on social cognition offers an effective framework to account for the diverse ways in which social cognition emerges and to trace its concrete intersubjective dimension.
This paper explores a dialectic of indexicality variously theorized in different semiotic theories as enunciative praxis (as in Paris School semiotics) or the total linguistic fact, indexical orders, and enregisterment (as in North American linguistic anthropology), extending these concepts to think about the historical process by which different types of textual coherence (iconic/aesthetic, indexical/interactional, and symbolic/denotational) are virtually mediated and sedimented as cultural models (viz. as aesthetic styles, registers, and narrative genres). As a case study, I look at the historical fate of "lens flare" in American cinema. Lens flares are the result of the refracting of light within the lens of a camera that leave streaks on the image. Once considered an imperfection in the 1940s aesthetic of Hollywood studios, the anti-mainstream "New Hollywood" filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s seized upon lens flare-among other aesthetic techniques-as markers of a more authentic realism. Later directors wedded this live-cinematographic aesthetic with science fiction genres and spectacular special effects, citing this aesthetics or style in contexts where, in fact, no lenses were used. Now the dominant "tradition", lens flares live on in video games, animated films, and digital special effects. Tracing this history reveals the emergence, stabilization, and transformation of virtual semiotic norms via realized entextualizations of them, a dialectic between the "invention of tradition" and the "traditionalizing of invention". To account for this requires us to discern the interplay of these semiotic dimensions (aesthetic textuality and its stylization, interactional/pragmatic textuality and its enregisterment, denotational/narrative textuality and its generification); in particular, I argue that the driving engine of this dialectic are social indexical processes of enregisterment, that is, that indexicality serves as the gateway of the iconic and symbolic, possible and general, virtual and realized.
An area in the center of Florence has been named Borg'unto (Greasy Village) by residents, to emphasize the effects (the grease - "unto") of a tourist practice that is concentrated there: "eating in the street". A practice that is considered "indecorous", not in itself but for the conditions in which it takes place and for the residues, the figure of the grease, that it leaves behind. The adoption of a specific toponym marks the perception of a "difference" within the urban space, which is qualified in dysphoric terms precisely because of this practice that negatively opposes a system of expectations that implicitly govern the definition of the "correct ways" of being a tourist in a place characterized, par excellence, as a "spiritual" space of "high" culture (the Unesco area around Piazza della Signoria). The article proposes an ethnosemiotics study, which combines an analysis of the theme of indecorousness as it emerges from articles in the local press, and a participant observation conducted in the space that hosts the "incriminated" practices.
This article aims to explore the semiotic relevance of indecorous phenomena, focusing on the close connection between ethical and aesthetic decorum. The first part introduces three general issues: the relationship between aesthetic decoration and moral dignity, the relationship between standards and refusal, and the distinction between improper conduct as alack of normative competence or a voluntary provocation. The second part attempts to clarify four more specific aspects: the relationship between decency and deviance, the issue of the evolution of decorum norms, the concept of urban etiquette, and the connection between decorum and sexual morality. The third part introduces the essays in the volume and emphasises their theoretical contribution to the abovementioned central problems.
The paper is devoted to female sanitary napkin advertisements, focusing on how they face the menstrual taboo and the related gender stigmas and gaps. The research consists of the analysis of some Lines and Nuvenia commercials issued between the late 1970s and 2020. The aim of the study is to reconstruct continuities and variations within and between brands with respect to some closely related research questions: how these texts have narrated and figured this product and the related practices and consumers; what point of view on women and of women these narratives imply; how these discourses have evolved in reaction to social and value transformations that any relatively long-lived brand has experienced.
Supporting a football team is a voluntary and collective practice, sometimes taken to extreme levels, but primarily contingent and situated. This article applies the methodological framework of the semiotics of passions and combines it with an ethnosemiotics approach focused on observing stadium spaces and people who experience it. The aim is to clarify the deeply somatic nature of supporting and, by this, to investigate the tension between the disciplinary devices that shape today's sportsmanship and the need to ensure the emotional expression, both individual and collective, of football match spectators as a necessary element to ensure the economic, cultural, and media interest.
The present proposal centers on the research conducted by Yuri Shavelnikov and Yuri Fesenko (1998) in their work "Lenin Inside You and Inside Me" ( Lenin v tebe i vo mne ). The underlying premise guiding this investigation posits that engaging with Lenin cake entails a narrative-like experience that triggers encoded perceptual paradigms facilitating evaluations of propriety (taste) and impropriety (disgust). From various viewpoints, the notions of degradation and decorum serve as tools to validate or modify established norms, thereby stimulating a discussion on an emerging ethical framework regarding aesthetic preferences.
