Search results for "Semi"
showing 10 items of 3894 documents
Il Grande Cretto di Gibellina
2022
The essay aims to make explicit the methodological criteria underlying the semiotic analysis of a space, taking as an example the case of the Grande Cretto that Alberto Burri realised in Gibellina in the second half of the 1980s. An impressive Land Art work that presents at first sight a series of clear-cut oppositions, but which on closer inspection calls them into question, rather emphasising gradations and nuances. The essay considers the discourses of space and those on space, the levels of the generative path, the plastic and figurative languages, showing how the analysis is the outcome of a continuous adjustment between the researcher and the text: the former engaged in constructing a…
Zoosemiotica 2.0. Forme e politiche dell'animalità
2017
Questo volume ha tre direzioni di discorso. Innanzitutto, un dialogo fra la semiotica e le altre discipline interessate agli studi animali: la filosofia, la filosofia del linguaggio e della mente, le scienze umane e sociali, le scienze cognitive e le neuroscienze. Non a caso molti degli interventi contenuti in questo volume non sono di semiologi ma di filosofi, sociologi, antropologi, linguisti, filologi, letterati etc. In secondo luogo, una discussione interna alla semiotica, nel passaggio dalla zoosemiotica 1.0 (tradizionalmente più interessata ai linguaggi e alle forme di comunicazione delle diverse specie animali) alla zoosemiotica 2.0, di conserva con altri settori a prima vista oppost…
Brand language. Methods and models of semiotic analysis
2015
There are several reasons why scrutinizing brands from a semiotic point of view is mandatory. Some of them are technical, and relate to the fact that brands are above all pieces of communication; others pertain to a recent and pervasive cultural phenomenon whereby brands have migrated from marketing to everyday social life. A brand is a mark, a sign that, by producing various possible meanings, generates pragmatic effects on subjects and objects: it identifies, transforms and gives them value(s). A wide roster of social phenomena are rooted in brands as signs: communication strategies, production and reception of discourses, inter-subjective dynamics, changes in a collective imaginary, iden…
Postfazione. Che cos'è un progetto?
2021
We should go back to the project and redesign it. Maybe even changing its form. No longer a technical drawing, a sketch on paper, a working scheme of an object that does not yet exist, but something different. Maybe a different kind of drawing, a diagram, or maybe a story. No storytelling though, please, at least if by storytelling we mean telling stories as is done in marketing to sell products. No, the project can be thought of as a story only if the story is also thought of as a project. Without a formal definition of storytelling we cannot think of formalizing the way to take into consideration the social dimension of objects. In the end it is Bruno Latour, perhaps in spite of himself, …
Tecnologie in cucina
2020
There is no better inorganic actor than Vorwerk's Thermomix to demonstrate how the kitchen is a fertile ground for investigating the relationship between humans and non-humans. We can think of this particular blender as an exemplary text, a cultural product that, if properly analyzed, allows us to reconstruct the mechanisms that dominate a much broader class of artifacts. What interests us is in fact that objects (in general, and therefore kitchen objects) have nothing objective and therefore that their nature as "tools", as we commonly call them, does not imply either a gregarious role or a presumed inertia that makes them dumb helpers able to perform more or less well a function that is g…
Zeta printing. Storytelling mon amour
2017
Storytelling, or "storytelling." This is the the watchword of contemporary communication, the key concept on which to work in order to to be successful, to fascinate crowds and become memorable memorable, and even to convince them to buy a product, whatever it is. a product, whatever it is; this is the discovery, the discovery, communicative innovation, the ace up the sleeve of today's advertiser. As simple as the ubiquitous minimalism, as effective as that "subliminal message that "subliminal message" of hidden persuaders, whose idea communicators of every kind caress as Number 1 does with his white cat (the archenemy of agent 007 of agent 007 who commands the Spectre, ed.). Storytelling i…
Esperti di corpi, corpi di esperti: expertise e dietetica.
2021
Today, dietetics is sectoral, specialised. The cause, among others, is to be found in the emergence of so-called nutritionism, a paradigm that arose at the end of the the 19th century and established itself in the first half of the 20th century, which brings together discoveries from food science and the needs of the food industry, imposing the dominance of calories and so-called nutrients. This shifted the attention of scientists and ordinary people to the invisible substances that food contains on a chemical and physical level (vitamins, fats sugars, proteins, and the like), with a profound transformation the way in which we consider food: no longer just units and sensory units, made up o…
Dietetica e politica: regimi di senso.
2021
Usually when we use the word "diet" in contemporary culture, the first thing that comes to mind is the slimming diet. And, with it, everything in the collective imagination: calories, reducing quantities, giving up quantities, giving up the tastiest foods, and also instructions, manuals periodic checks, scales and so on. But the word 'diet' comes from the ancient Greek dìaita meaning 'way of life', 'daily habits'. What is meant by diet, then, can also be extended in reference to today: not only, in the strict sense, a programme to lose weight but a way of life, a way of regulating one's day, food choices, physical exercise, body care. This is how we will consider it: in the sense of regime …
Cat Cafés and Dog Restaurants
2018
Starting from the assumption that space is a language and that food is also a language, what we will try to show in this paper is how these two languages, together, carry specific concepts of animality. For this reason, we will focus on two different places of food consumption that place animals at the centre of their proposal and that in recent years have spread in urban environments: cat cafes, where cats are conceived as subjects to pet, endowed with a predominantly emotional value, and dog restaurants, where dogs are in fact the real restaurant clients.
Dilettanti, fra resistenza ed estasi
2021
Who is the amateur? what does he do? what doesn't it do? And especially: what can he do and what can't he do? There is a very close connection between the problem of expert competence, today as yesterday, and that of dilettantism, yesterday as today. But it is not always the same link: the internal intensity of the relationship varies, the degree of certainty of those who assume it, the value of the terms involved. According to the Italian dictionary, a dilettante is someone who "shows little ability", therefore an incompetent subject, far from skilled, inexperienced, therefore narratively inconclusive. But if we insert this description in its appropriate context, i.e. in the complex of the…