Semiotic Studies

Semiotics, Arts and Reality

2025-11-15T13:50:18+00:00

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.01

In 2024, in Warsaw, on the centenary of the birth (September 30th) of one of the most important Polish semioticians—Professor Jerzy Pelc—the 16th World Congress of Semiotics / 16th World Congress of the IASS-AIS (WCS) was held under the auspices of IASS-AIS, with the main theme being “Signs and Reali-ties” [...].

Art as a Language Facing Reality

2025-11-15T13:50:18+00:00

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.02

The paper examines the complex relationship between language, art, and reality through a semiotic perspective. Drawing on key theorists such as Eco, Greimas, and Barbieri, it argues that art operates as a distinct language that challenges perceptual and cognitive habits by subverting expectations. Aesthetic experiences are viewed as transformative moments that reshape the individual’s worldview and interpretive abilities. The analysis highlights how artistic texts, through ambiguity and self-reflexivity, encourage deeper engagement and innovation in meaning-making. The paper also considers the impact of digital technologies, suggesting that while they risk dulling sensory and imaginative faculties in programmed environments, they simultaneously offer new creative opportunities. Ultimately, art remains a crucial site for reflection and transformation, capable of redefining the boundaries of reality and driving cultural and subjective change. The paper advocates for a mindful engagement with media, underscoring the liberating power of artistic manipulation and the necessity of protecting imaginative freedom.

An Epistemological Way of Exemplifying Artistic Realities: From a “Transformational” to a “Transcendental” Sign

2025-11-15T13:50:18+00:00

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.03

The present paper shall principally consider two essential theoretical paradigms in semiotics. The first belongs to the post-structural paradigm designated by Greimas and Fontanille, whereas the second belongs to a recent paradigm named existential semiotics, authored by Tarasti. This text shall, therefore, explore how “artistic realities” are created through two semiotic methods: structural and existential semiotics. Theoretically speaking, there is a necessity to demonstrate how “semiotics of passions” enhanced such reality on the one hand and how existential semiotics asserted the notion of “action” and “performativity” through transcending signs on the other. I will focus on determined “classical” works of art (e.g., the position of figures, the text’s semiotic comprehension, etc.) to demonstrate the epistemological background of the artistic being (through their pre-, act, and post-signs). Semioticizing an artistic object of analysis (as known in existential semiotics through the Dasein), in my opinion, can enhance either inducing or deducing meaning. Such a sort of semioticizing exposes us to various sorts of “existential statuses” of discussable “semiotic objects” (in our case, artworks). By exemplifying fictive characters in the arts in general, I aim to reach a specific meaning of each of them: a fact that theoretically justifies an epistemology of semiotics.

Semiotic Mapping of Reading and Lolita’s Interpretations

2025-11-15T13:50:17+00:00

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.04

The paper explores the semiotic aspects of reading literature, focusing on the literary text as a unique artefact, differing from other verbal texts, the paradox of the literature’s (non)transparency, and the role of sensual perception in its signification/interpretation. It questions how readers engage with literary texts and defines this engagement semiotically. The paper proposes the semiotic classification of reading/interpretation and exemplifies this classification by examining Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and its interpretations. This non-axiological classification originates from a dialogue with the representatives of the Peircean semiotic-pragmatic approach to literature, Harri Veivo and Jørgen Dines Johansen. It revises and modifies their concepts within the logic of Charles S. Peirce’s sign concept and advances understanding of literary reading by integrating the question of textual materiality with Peircean semiotics, offering a nuanced framework to classify and interpret reading strategies. It treats reading as a sign-action, initiated by the reader who chooses the (conventional, contiguity-based, or analogy/resemblance-based) mode of interpretant to connect a representamen (addresser-text) with the dynamic object (semantic whole) and explores how these modes are manifested in reading. It seeks to uncover the differences in the modes and strategies of reading and the reasons/conditions for choosing one or another mode. Lolita is presented as a paradigmatic example of a non-transparent literary text that foregrounds its materiality and invites the reader to activate the sight. The paper analyses how Lolita’s textual structure prompts visual engagement and how the sight’s activation or its lack thereof influences the choice of iconic, indexical, or symbolic mode of reading/interpretation.

Pacarrete: The Aesthetics of the Screen in Journalistic Texts

2025-11-15T13:50:17+00:00

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.05

This article addresses how aesthetic aspects appear in cultural journalism focused on Brazilian films. The aesthetic question is semiotically identified based on the theory of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Observing films and analyzing them through textual approaches directed toward the realm of meaning, as defined by Peirce through the phenomenological category of Firstness, poses a challenge. This study considers the film Pacarrete (2019), directed by Allan Deberton, which won eight awards at the 2019 Gramado Film Festival. There are various signs within the cinematic realm and the specific production that journalists can articulate. It is observed how signs that align with an approach rooted in Firstness relate to other types of signs. As with all communication between humans, much of the film generates meanings within the phenomenological category of Thirdness, using symbols, words, and elements shaped by diverse cultural manifestations, but a closer attention to aesthetic aspects can offer a different perspective for journalistic approaches.

Enunciation and Memory: Conservative Representations of the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict Through Comics

2025-11-15T13:50:16+00:00

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.06

This article analyzes how Peruvian comics represent the internal armed conflict (1980–2000) from a conservative perspective, transforming it into a graphic narrative that contributes to shaping a collective memory aligned with political interests. Motivated by the lack of critical studies addressing comics produced by conservative groups from a semiotic perspective. The analysis focuses on contemporary productions characterized by short formats distributed through print and digital media, which reconfigure both state actors and victims. Methodologically, the study examines the enunciative discursive strategies used to exalt state figures and demonize adversaries through the construction of characters, spaces, and temporalities. The findings reveal that actoriality shifts from an empathetic representation of urban victims to an idealized military heroism; temporality moves from a closed past toward a narrative of ongoing threat; and spatiality leaves behind concrete urban settings to become abstract scenarios that glorify political decisions. Finally, the article identifies the emergence of a conservative protological myth that reactivates epic narratives of the past and turns comics into instruments of symbolic domination, aimed more at mobilizing fear than at fostering historical understanding.

A Naïve Realist Account of Depiction

2025-11-15T13:50:16+00:00

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.07

Reacting against the view expressed by the British art critic John Ruskin that “the whole technical power of the painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye”, Gombrich and Goodman initiated in the 1960s several decades of intense discussions aiming to show that Ruskin was wrong and that pictorial perception is never innocent. This paper intends to partially reinstate the innocence of the eye, by giving a novel account of depiction that argues that pictorial perception is not a special kind of perception but rather perception through a special kind of medium. This account appeals not at all to resemblance, symbolic systems, make-believe, illusory experiences or recognitional abilities but relies instead on the phenomena of transparency and causal mediation. It argues that a painting depicts a scene only in virtue of its instantiation of some visual features that are independent of the existence of symbolic systems, artistic movements and styles, the nature of aesthetic experience and the psychology of the artist.

Garden of Eden. Art and the Artificiality of the Natural

2025-11-15T13:50:15+00:00

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.08

Inspired in Joana Vasconcelos’ artwork called Garden of Eden, this paper discusses the sociosemiotics relationship between “nature” and art. In turn, the notions of garden and landscape are also considered as fundamental in order to understand the meaning-making process of our contemporary sensitive experience. In fact, the technological conditions of individual and social perception of the surrounding phenomenological world produce a continuous resignification of our embodied imaginary.

What does “nature” (or natures) nowadays mean? In what way the garden, as an artefact, represents a cultural paradigm of our (non)human nature? The very notion of landscape, permanently re-created by visual artists, can be useful to problematize our connection to the other living beings, rather animals or plants, in a planet at serious risk or, at least, subject to an irreparable transformation.

Semiotized Spaces in Pictorial Arts

2025-11-15T13:50:15+00:00

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.09

Each picture evoking perception of another space is included in processes of subject-object representation and inter-subject communication. Pictorial arts create their separate spaces distinguished by structures, functions, and relations to reality. The depicting space is two-dimensional and closed, unlike the depicted space, which can be three-dimensional and open. It can be formed in a real object (drawing, painting, photo, etc.) as a flat projection of a volumetric original. The depicting and depicted spaces are semiotized with the help of various spatial codes, and their connection is regulated by a special complex of iconic and indexical semiotic means. It is possible to speak about a special perceptographic code regulating the formation and interpretation of indexes, due to which the viewer’s gaze can penetrate “through” the depicting surface into the depicted space “behind” it. Depending on the concentration of the viewer’s intention on these spaces or on their connection, diverse spatial codes become relevant in the picture’s interpretation. Various stylistic directions have differently highlighted these codes and relations between pictorial spaces. Accordingly, the picture could be treated mainly as a “wall” with a painted surface, a “window” open to a three-dimensional space, or a “curtain” between the real and transcendent worlds.

Sound as Modulating Reality: A Semiotic and Phenomenological Approach to Electroacoustic Music

2025-11-15T13:50:14+00:00

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxviii1.10

This paper explores the semiotic and phenomenological dimensions of sound, positioning it as a modulating reality, rather than a fixed entity. Drawing from Henri Pousseur’s theory of generalized periodicity and Michel Butor’s intermedial poetics, we examine how electroacoustic music challenges conventional frameworks of composition and perception. Integrating Peircean semiotics, existential phenomenology, and cybernetics, we demonstrate how sound functions as a dynamic sign system that reshapes meaning through interaction and transformation. We introduce the concept of spectral semiotics as both an analytical and epistemological tool for understanding how sonic meaning emerges through the modulation of spectral qualities—frequency, timbre, and temporal flux—as experienced through focused, embodied listening. Special attention is given to 8 Études Paraboliques, which exemplifies sound as a recursive, self-organizing system of modulating relationships. We also draw on Votre Faust: Fantaisie variable genre Opéra—not for comprehensive analysis, but as an object of comparison in the Wittgensteinian sense—to illustrate how intermedial strategies and open forms reinforce the epistemological potential of sound. This perspective aligns with Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of listening as resonance, where sound is not merely received but co-constituted through perception. By foregrounding fluidity, impermanence, and intermediality, we propose that sound—both in music and literature—functions as a modulating reality that actively shapes experience, cognition, and the aesthetic imagination.