Annual Conference of AISS.

The annual meeting of the Italian Association of Semiotic Studies has just been held in Teramo (near Rome).

We had three days of conferences about Nature and Authenticity with the participation of many important scholars among which Umberto Eco himself!

In the congress I had the chance to meet two of my favorite academic authors: Patrick John Coppock and Paolo Bertetti.

Coppock is a very prolific philosopher and semiotician, you can check this paper too see from yourself how interesting is the stuff he writes!

Bertetti wrote a book on the intertextual and transmedia character Conan the Barbarian. This work will be one of the pillar upon which I'm struggling to build my PhD thesis!

I myself have presented a paper on the materiality of toys (soon on #SemioNerd) as part of University of Turin's Atelier. As always working in close contact with them has been informative and engaging!

Here a picture of some of the members of the Atelier from Turin.

My Article "Immagini Agentive: uno Sguardo Biosemiotico" on:
Lexia 17-18: Efficacious Images.

Although not so nerd my article will appear on the next issue of the International Journal of Semiotics of Turin university: Lexia.
Here you can find the abstract of my article and the issue's cover!

 Abstract:
This paper exposes some considerations on images' agentivity and
its links with biology and evolution. Trying to find out which kind of images are able to make people do things without involving any
cognitive process, brings us to wonder about the role of natural
instinct in our way of communicate. A biosemiotic point of view
become thus very important to understand the way of working and the source of agentivity in images. If traditional tools fails to investigate properly a message without a content, biology give us an answer. An answer that we need to understand how and why some images cause a certain reaction in us.

Key words: images, agentivity, biosemiotics, evolution, semiotics.

Link

The Video of "Toward a Semiotic Analysis of Toys" now on Youtube.

Here the video of the presentation I gave in Sofia last Septmeber, official beginning of my work on semiotics of toys...

Next step: a semiotic analysis of the substance of expression of the toy-language that I'll present in Teramo at the annual congress of the Italian Association of Semiotic Studies (AISS).