Connotations: An Exploration of iPhoneography

Interactions, 2015

This paper traces the steps to social aesthetics as exemplified in four well-known paintings. It begins by affirming the central place of sense experience for aesthetics and the refinement of perceptual acuity in a developed sensibility. This leads to associating aesthetic appreciation with such perceptual experience. Rejecting the identification of disinterestedness with such appreciation, I propose the full participatory involvement in the experience of appreciation as expressed by the concept of aesthetic engagement. This can be shown by describing the appreciative situation as an aesthetic field in which the perceptual, creative, focusing, and activating factors are in reciprocal interaction, and it is seen clearly in appreciating personal, social, natural, and built environments. A social aesthetics exemplifies these environments in aesthetic engagement as shown by the gaze in the experience of the four paintings presented at the beginning.

THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SEMIOTICS, 2001

A book review essay explicating Alain Robbe-Grillet, SNAPSHOTS [1962]. Uses Ernst Cassirer's symbolic forms for explication.

Forthcoming in _Punctum_, the International Journal of the Greek Association for Semiotics

Semiotics has always inquired about visual signification, that is, about signs that predominantly elicit a reception of meaning by adopting signifiers that mainly work as perceptual stimuli for the sight, or that emulate or evoke such stimulation when they affect other senses or even that inner cognitive faculty of visual imagination that allows individual to conjure up, in their minds, mental constructs that closely resemble those which emerge at the actual empirical sight of images. Different perspectives can be adopted to study visual signification. They can be articulated depending on the specific consequences that such visual signification brings about: images can be studied as cognitive signs that encourage the formation of new ideas in the mind, as emotional signs that urge the transformation of a receiver’s mood, or as pragmatic signs that prompt action toward a certain direction and with a certain goal. In exerting these effects, images often rely on the biological schemes of the neurophysiology of perception, which, nevertheless, are molded by sociocultural agencies into evolving patterns of visual culture or, rather, second visual nature. An image, however, is not only something that has human beings think, feel, or act in a certain way. Images, and especially certain kinds of images, intrinsically and, sometimes, even impetuously trigger a meta-reflection on their very signification and meaning. Why do certain patterns of visual stimuli appear as such in the first instance, why do they stand out in relation to a context and present themselves as image, and why does this image signify, whereas analogous patterns of visual stimulation inconspicuously remain in the dark shadow of insignificance? Reflecting on such questions is not usual for semiotics, which has rather focused on the conditions and effects of signification of actual visual artifacts, but it is imperative for the development of its meta-semiotics, that is, a semiotically inspired philosophical inquiry into the very origins of visual meaning.

Leonardo, 2003

Favored by connected tools and social media, the second revolution of digital photography is that of the conversational uses of image. Since the advent of cinema or television, this mutation profoundly transforms our visual practices. Photography was an art and media. We are contemporaries of the time when it reaches the universality of a language. Integrated via versatile tools into connected systems, visual forms have become powerful shifters of private and public conversations. The part individuals can play in their production and interpretation contributes to a rapid development of formats and uses. The visibility conferred by social network sites accelerates their diffusion and gives rise to self-made norms. Appropriation of visual language makes us witness a reinvention of the everyday.

This is an exploration of how image based communication is being transformed by the “mobile-phone-as-camera”. Based on a pilot study done in 2008, the ways in which people interact with mobile media on a visual level to generate shared meanings were studied. Drawing from a grounded theory approach this preliminary exploration maps out possible avenues for investigating the ways in which meanings are decoded and encoded within images produced by those using mobile phones. In considering these aspects, points of discussion in focus on notions one is both reader and author, are there any commonalities emerging in decoding mobile phone images which enable readers to glean shared meanings without the use of words?

Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, 2020

This book deals with two fundamental issues in the semiotics of the image. The first is the relationship between image and observer: how does one look at an image? To answer this question, this book sets out to transpose the theory of enunciation formulated in linguistics over to the visual field. It also aims to clarify the gains made in contemporary visual semiotics relative to the semiology of Roland Barthes and Emile Benveniste. The second issue addressed is the relation between the forces, forms and materiality of the images. How do different physical mediums (pictorial, photographic and digital) influence visual forms? How does materiality affect the generativity of forms? On the forces within the images, the book addresses the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze and René Thom as well as the experiment of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne. The theories discussed in the book are tested on a variety of corpora for analysis, including both paintings and photographs, taken from traditional as well as contemporary sources in a variety of social sectors (arts and sciences). Finally, semiotic methodology is contrasted with the computational analysis of large collections of images (Big Data), such as the “Media Visualization” analyses proposed by Lev Manovich and Cultural Analytics in the field of Computer Science to evaluate the impact of automatic analysis of visual forms on Digital Art History and more generally on the image sciences.

2016

This book uncovers an underlying dispute over the role images play in contemporary society and, consequently, over their values and purposes. Two decades after the concepts of the pictorial and the iconic turn changed our vernacular involvement with regard to images, it has become clear that it was not only a newly discovered social, political or sexual construction of the visual field that brought turbulence into disciplinary knowledge, but that images have their own “pictorial logic” with powers exceeding those that are purely iconic or visually discernible. Instead of underscoring previously defined concepts of the picture, the contributors to this book view visual studies and Bildwissenschaft “merely” as a place for the theory of images, making a case for the hotly-debated topic of their powers and weaknesses on the one hand, and of their respective theories on the other. Therefore, as the title indicates, this book theorizes images, but it does not present a theory of images, because visual studies cannot lead to a unified theory of images unless a unified ontology of images can be agreed upon first. Although that would be a different task altogether, all the contributions in this book (in different ways and at different paces), by theorizing images in their aesthetic, historical, media and technological guises, pave the way for the future of visual culture and for the image science that will make this future more comprehensible.