As the discipline which studies signs and communication, semiotics is mainly concerned with social behavior. However, the models and theories which have been proposed so far generally remain at a high level of abstraction and are mostly used for the purpose of description and interpretation. Socio-semiotics is the only branch of research which has systematically [...]
Chris Arning – on behalf of the Semiofest Organizing Committee “So why do a conference anyway? And what makes an event engaging? A well executed industry gathering is not just about educating your audience. It’s also about networking, space to think, and even having some fun.” Monocle magazine, How to Organize a Better Conference, 2011 [...]
Fashion might be counted among the regular topics of interest in semiotic studies. But what took place at the Kobe Fashion Museum, Japan, on May 12 and 13, 2012, perhaps moved beyond the ordinary understanding of “the semiotics of fashion.” It was the 32nd conference of the Japanese Association of Semiotic Studies (JASS), with the [...]
Donald Preziosi is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of California – Los Angeles and pioneer in visual semiotics in the United States and influential theoretician of art history and museology. His Rethinking Art History: Reflections on a Coy Science (1989) was a landmark text marking the theoretical turn in art history in the [...]
Humans are iconophiles: we love to connect form and meaning, and do so even when it doesn’t seem warranted. This holds for writing as well as for speech. The writing system of Chinese is a good example. Folk theories about Chinese characters have long held that they are like little pictures whose meaning can be [...]
On Saturday, March 31, 2012, Omar Calabrese succumbed to a heart attack in his home in Monteriggioni, Siena. Born in Florence on June 2, 1949, Calabrese has been a key-figure in semiotics and a protagonist of communication studies in Italy. He was President of the Italian Association for Semiotic Studies for two mandates from 1996 [...]
The 37th Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America will be held in Toronto from November 1-4, at the Westin Harbour Castle. Special events at the meeting will include plenary addresses by Eero Tarasti (University of Helsinki), Michael Silverstein (University of Chicago, Jacques Fontanille (Université de Limoges), and Rafael Núñez (University of California, San [...]
Evolutionary semiotics is a hot frontier in contemporary research. How modern humans reached the cognitive and communicative capacities which characterize us can be traced back through an examination of the archaeological record. Stages of mental competencies can be inferred from the artifacts early humans crafted and used in successive periods of time. This kind of [...]