We are the semiotics virtual LABORATORY OF Universiteit Twente.
Semiotics is broadly the study of how meaning is structured, embeded, and communicated via such cultural artifacts as text, image, myth, sound, and architecture. The field has had a formative role in understanding the underlying structures of human culture and communication, having inspired key developments in, among others, cybernetics and information theory, (post)structuralism, anthropology, media and communication studies, critical social studies, and urbanism and achitecture. More recently, the field has had a growing engagement with artificial intelligence and whether—or what kind of—meaning can be found in AI, also in relation to human sense-making, rendering once more semiotics a key critical discipline for digitalisation, cultural change, and high tech / human touch topics. Cassirer defined human civilisation as the outcome of an animal symbolicum rather than animal rationale, which is a fitting vouche for the value of semiotics for humanist tradition, especially in today's ever-chaning meaning of knowledge, culture, and, ultimately, of what it means to be human.
Our topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Cultural and social semiotics
- Sign systems and their change
- Architectural, urban, and topological semiotics
- AI & robo semiotics [see further below «collaborative research & education» and «reading group»]
- Literary semiotics, incl. of myths and narratives
- Biosemiotics
- Media, film, and musical semiotics
- Civilisational semiotics [see further below «collaborative research & education»]
- Existential semiotics
Our main activities are the following:
❖ Supervision of Master's and PhD theses on topics including, but not limited to, the aforementioned thematic directions. We are interested in both theoretical theses that develop a given semiotic tradition further, and in applied theses where students implement semiotic methodologies on, e.g., a cultural, technological, design, social, or political problem.
❖ Collaborative research & education on topics where semiotic theory and/or applied semiotic analysis can be a meaningful and productive component. On this front, we have been core part in establishing UT's first course on AI & robotics from a Humanities perspective (the M-PSTS course Ethics and epistemology of AI & robotics), which, among others, provided a semiotic angle, firstly, to the epistemology of artificial intelligence and, secondly, into the analysis of AI and robotics as a cultural artefact. Furthermore, we have founded a new field of semiotics, named Civilisational Semiotics, in orfer to capture the symbolic substratum of civilisations in relation to their habitat, as well as the impact it has for a people's existential resilience through time.
❖ Reading group «SÉMÉIOLOGIE», with regular informal gatherings, each dedicated to discussing a text by one of the wide range of subjects in the European and American semiotic traditions. Our inaugural meeting was held on 9/3/2023, where we discussed AI semiotics through the paper Jean G. Meunier (1989), Artificial Intelligence and Sign Theory, Semiotica 77(1-3): 43-63, https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1989.77.1-3.43.
Contact for collaborationS, THESIS supervision, or joining our reading sessions:
| dr. Athanasios Votsis |
