The main tasks of a semiotics of artificial intelligence

The article indicates the essential tasks of a semiotics of artificial intelligence:studying the way it simulates the expression of intelligence;the way it produces content that is creatively endowed;the ideological assumptions of artificial intelligence within the culture that produces it.Artificial intelligence is,from a semiotic point of view,the predominant technology of fakery in the current era.On the strength of its studies on the false,semiotics can therefore also be applied to the analysis of the fake that,in increasingly sophisticated forms,is produced through artificial intelligence and through the deep learning of neural networks.The article focuses on the adversarial ones,trying to highlight their ideological assumptions and cultural developments,which seem to indicate the entry of human societies and cultures into the‘realm of the absolute fake'.

The Singular Countenance: The Visage as Landscape, the Landscape as Visage

The article shows that,in the effort to convey a notion of the singularity of the beloved face,especially in tragic settings,often human cultures resort to nature,and adopt animal,vegetable,and even mineral metaphors in order to rhetorically transfer the singularity of their shapes to that of the facial representations.This trend develops across cultures in world literature but imposes itself with particular emphasis in those traditions,authors,and texts that posit a systematic correlation between the microcosmos and the macro-cosmos,between body and nature,and between the face and the landscape.

Face-to-Face:The Semiotics of Online Teaching(or,in Praise of the Classroom)

The paper consists in an in-depth semiotic analysis of the spatiality of present-day online teaching as compared with that of the traditional classroom.Its spatiality,the paper contends,cannot be properly digitalized,because it is strictly dependent on embodiment.The embodied spatiality of a classroom,it is argued,is nevertheless fundamental to bring about the ritual transfiguration that underpins the didactic experience and its socio-cultural functions.Hence,the urgent need to rethink digital teaching environments in relation to these crucial lacks,which only semiotics,with its specific attention to non-verbal elements of communication—including spatiality—is fully equipped to detect.

The Death of the Reader： Meaning in the Era of Digital Narcissism

Roland Barthes' s famous essay on the "Death of the Author" inaugurated an intense reflection on the progressive dwindling of the importance of the traditional biographic idea of "author" in the activity of receiving and interpreting a text, especially a literary one. In the new epistemic era favored by the emergence and affirmation of structuralism, the meaning of a text was, indeed, no longer seen as stemming from an individual agency but from the social dimensions of language and culture. As digital communication is progressively supplanting many forms of non-digital meaning transmission, though, present-day semiospheres are confronted with a different scenario: on the one hand, "empirical" authors are actually becoming more and more prominent, meaning that audiences are starving for non-digital and "auratic" experiences of encounter with meaning, minding more meeting with authors, for instance, than reading their novels; on the other hand, given the easiness of meaning production with digital technology, the same cultures are going through a progressive "agony of the reader": individuals are so intent in creating new particles of meaning, with impatient and daily frenzy, that they never become patient readers of other people's meaning creations, especially if these challenge the instantaneousness that characterizes the contemporary digital communication. The shortness of present-day meaning creation and its lack of audience is bound to change the entire semiosphere. The essay aims at foreseeing some of these changes, pinpointing one of the main features of Narcissism in the digital era.

Deadly Simulacra

Taking the lead from a tale by French writer Prosper Mérimée,narrating the terrifying story of a statue of Venus that suddenly—and tragically—becomes alive,the paper will dwell on the several versions of this narrative topos(William of Malmesbury in the 12th Century,Gautier de Coincy in the 13th,Hermann Kroner in the 15th,up to Richard Burton in the 17th,Joseph von Eichendorff in the 19th,Gabriele D’Annunzio in the 20th)in order to semiotically refl ect on two streams of the human imaginary:on the one hand,the statue that becomes alive;on the other hand,the human being that becomes a statue.Following such historical,anthropological,and semiotic excursus,the paper will conclude with an in-depth analysis of a very common present-day urban performance:living statues.Also with reference to contemporary British novel Observatory Mansions,by Edward Carey,the paper will seek to answer the following questions:why is the spectacle of the human body that becomes like stone so fascinating?Why are spectators attracted by immobility and yet offer their coins in order to see it turn into movement and life again?