Semiotic Smugglers

Most of people when they hear the word “smuggler” will probably think of someone selling cheap cigarettes across the border. Maybe some Al Capone type importing alcohol in Prohibition-time USA. Some others might think of fictional characters the like of Han Solo, smuggling Jedi across the Empire, or the Onion Knight, the fingerless hand of a couple of Kings in Game of Thrones. Few, if any, would think of middle aged professors of semiotics.

 

 

It is true that cultural smuggling is a thing, especially when confronted with authoritarian states. In Kaunas, Lithuania, there is a statue dedicated to the book-smugglers that were crossing the border of Soviet Union in order to provide books in Lithuanian – a language that was prohibited by the Soviet State in favour of Russian.

It might be unsurprising, then, if our story of semiotic smuggling happened in another Baltic state under Soviet rule: Estonia. By the 1970s, Tartu had become one pf the Owrd's most important hubs of semiotic studies (“a singular Mecca-like field for us 'pilgrims' laboring in the domain of semiotics” as Sebeok will later write). The discipline was deemed by Soviet authorities as bourgeois, based on the (questionable) claim that it was in contrast with Marxism materialism. Several semioticians, then, abandoned Moscow for a more low-profile location: Tartu, in Estonia.

The newly born Tartu-Moskow school of semiotics still had a few problems with censorship. Using the word “semiotics” was absolutely out of question, so they started to use “sign systems studies” instead. Still today Tartu semiotic journal has that name even if it conserves, in the cover, a massive trolling of soviet censorship. Tartu scholars, aware that censors weren't very cultivated people, had the brilliant idea for writing the forbidden word on their journal anyway: they simply wrote in in ancient Greek. The censors wouldn't recognise the alphabet and so they would avoid any sanction.

Authorities still kept Tartu scholars under surveillance and Juri Lotman, the most well-known semiotician of the time, had is house searched several times.

This was making it hard also communicating with the exterior: every publication that they wished to translate and to publish in the West had to be checked and approved by the censors, which was making it very hard to disseminate Tartu-Moskow school theories. The permission for participating in conferences abroad was also rather difficult to get.

Thomas A. Sebeok

You can imagine, then, how many suspicions were raised when an American professor, Thomas A. Sebeok, who was in Estonia to attend a congress on Finno-Ugric studies, was informally invited to attend Tartu's Semiotic Summer School (called Summer School on Secondary Modelling Systems, always for censorship reasons). This was a great opportunity for Tartu-Moskow scholars to get out some of their works, as well as for the West to learn what research was going on down there. Sothe 18^th August 1970 Sebeok and his wife were driven from Tallin to Tartu by a KGB agent. As he later remembered:

“While in Tartu, a number of colleagues handed me manuscripts to convey to the West. Most of these were intended for publication in Semiotica; some were meant for delivery to other editors. Such scholarly papers (the only kind I ever accepted) were entrusted to me to sidestep nightmarish Soviet bureaucratic restrictions. I was aware of the illicit nature of such dodges and the risks if I were caught, but bowed to abet them because of my refusal to condone censorship of intellectual property of any kind. Too, many of the pieces by authors, such as the ones I list in fn. 7 below, that would soon come out in Semiotica, would scarcely have appeared in English otherwise and, very likely, would have remained unknown to all but a very limited readership.”

Sebeok, then, find himself entrusted with a series of papers to illegally smuggle to the other side of the Iron Curtain. He knew for sure that his luggage, as all outgoing baggage, would have been searched in the Tallinn harbour. He therefore decided to ask advice to Paul Ariste, the organiser of the Finno-Ugric Studies conference and, most importantly, the friend that had managed to get the permission for Sebeok to come to the Baltic States and even to leave Tallin one day and reach Tartu. Sebeok imagined that Ariste would have advised him against an action that was potentially harmful for the authors of the manuscripts as well as for Sebeok and his wife themselves. At the contrary, Ariste serenely told him not to worry, that he would have taken care of everything.

We can only imagine how Sebeok must have felt, waiting in line while the passengers ahead of them were having their baggages thoroughly searched. His bag full of illicit manuscripts was about to be searched too: what would have happened to them? When finally a Russian officer summoned him, he was ready for trouble. He slowly placed his baggage on the counter, but before the official could do anything the door busted open: it was Ariste. The professor was carrying and enormous bouquet of flowers that he promptly offered to the astonished Mrs Sebeok.

Paul Ariste

“At the top of his voice, he proclaimed what an honor it was for his country to have had two such distinguished and gracious American visitors in attendance at the Congress. While holding up the line behind us, the noisy hurly-burly fomented such befuddlement and delay that the impatient officer hurriedly waved us, with our untouched luggage, through to board the ship. I thanked Ariste warmly, saying goodbye. I never saw him again.”

Finally, thanks to Sebeok's courage and Ariste's distraction skills, the manuscripts were safely smuggled outside Estonia and published on the West. Who would have imagine that being a semiotic professor could be so adventurous?

I come to know this history of semiotic smuggling thanks to my friend Taras Boyko, to which I'm grateful. He's conducing an extensive and fascinating research on the history of the Tartu-Moskow School. I highly recommend his work, you can find some of his papers here and here.

Sebeok's recollection of his adventures in Estonia can be found in a very interesting and funny paper entitled “The Estonian Connection” and published on Sign Systems Studies 26.

PhD!
Well, it's done: I am, at last, a Doctor of Philosophy =)

Do I feel proud? Relieved? To be honest, I do not know, yet. I haven't really, fully, realised that it is over, yet.
I feel happy, though, because it has been a wonderful journey that led me to travel across the World, to meet many amazing people and to discover a lot. I'm grateful for that.

curious about my dissertation? Check here!

Now, of course, the big step into academia awaits. It has been a while that I'm applying to post-doc positions and to research fellowships in Europe and beyond. I got some rather encouraging feedback, which is always welcome, but still no job offer. If you hear about any interesting vacancy, then, do not hesitate and let me know! =)

Now, I will try to get a couple of days at the sea, here in Turkey, but Kaunas and the World Congress of Semiotics are approaching and I better prepare some slides...
Hope to see many of you there!

Sunspring: can AI write screenplays?

In the last couple of days many are talking about Sunspring, a short film whose screenplay has been written by a neural network (for more details see arstechnica). This means that someone fed an AI with the scripts of may sci-fi films, gave some fundamental instructions and let the AI create an imitative text. The result was a quite surreal screenplay, that was turned into this short film:

After watching the film, take some time to read carefully the script, shown at the beginning of the video. After all, that is the only part actually created by the neural network (together with the lyrics of the song).
It is immediately evident that the AI is not the author of the short film. This is generally true for the scriptwriter of any film - the latter are always texts with multiple authors (cast, director etc.) - but even more in this case. The cast and the crew of Sunspring made a huge work of interpretation to make the screenplay work. They've drawn isotopies, changed wrong pronouns and tried to give a visual existence to sentences like "taking his eyes from his mouth". It is these interpretations and the acting (that charged emotionally random sentences and transformed them into a dialogue) that make the film (kind of) meaningful. In other words, the people who worked at the film provided to the film what Eco called intentio auctoris, the author's intention.The director himself stated that thank to the work of the cast "somehow, a slightly garbled series of sentences became a tale of romance and murder, set in a dark future world".

The result is still an open text, that requires the audience to put together the loosely connected parts of the film and make sense of it (it is the so called intentio lectoris). This is also what gives the feeling of being confronted with an "artistic" film: it is open to many different interpretations and therefore it is able to generate new meaning (which is, roughly, Juri Lotman's definition of artistic text).

Finally, there is the intentio operis, the meaning that rises from the text itself. If we focus on the screenplay itself this may be particularly interesting. The text was built upon recurrent paths found by the AI (that calls itself Benjamin) in similar texts. 
We could argue that what neural networks do is to try to find out what is that makes an "architext" (Genette's word for a genre). In particular, Benjamin had to find out what are the features of a screenplay (1st architext) and what are the characteristics of science fiction (2nd architext).

On the one hand Benjamin's screenplay follows the structure of other screenplays: action, dialogues, indication of who is saying/doing what and so on. Apparently the rules of this stylistic architext were easy to reconstruct for the neural network, which followed them strictly and with success.

On the other hand, the AI also had to recognise what features are typical of sci-fi. As Oscar Sharp, the director of the film, points out "There's an interesting recurring pattern in Sunspring where characters say, 'No I don’t know what that is. I’m not sure,' (...) They're questioning the environment, questioning what’s in front of them. There's a pattern in sci-fi films of characters trying to understand the environment". 
Additionally there is the use of a certain keywords such as "spaceship" and "stars" even if it happens always out of context. There is also a certain measure of conflict and romance - that becomes more evident in the film because is recognised and stressed by the authors. Despair is also featured, when the character named H points a shotgun in his mouth and when he cries looking at his backpack (?).

Much of the meaning stored in the text, therefore, is the result of the imitation of the rules of these two architexs. This brings us to the last question: in what measure Benjamin is an author?

For Sharp and Goodwin (the AI specialist that built the network), Benjamin is something in between. It is not a "real" author because it would have to be able to create something original, while Benjamin only remixes statistically relevant elements of what others have written. We could argue, however, that that's what every author does, exploiting elements from its own encyclopaedia (for semioticians it's the sum of all its previous knowledge) and combining them through linguistic and stylistic rules that he or she reconstructed from the use made by other authors. Where is the difference, then?
The difference is that Benjamin - despite its human name and the ease with which we tend to consider it an individual - is something automatic, which means, it doesn't know what it is doing. Meaning-creation is also a matter of interpretation, operated primarily by the author itself. 
Benjamin however is not able to make sense of what it reads and even less of what it writes. That's why its text lacks so much in coherence, and that's why it is the film-makers and the audience that have to draw their own isotopies in order to give a meaningful axis of the process (the chronological, cause/effect development of the text) to the statistically selected elements of the system (the parts of the text that the AI retrieved from other screenplays).

Benjamin is not an author, then, even if it can be used as one. It could, however, be an extremely interesting tool for semiotic analysis and, in particular, a way to point out structural commonalities between huge amount of texts. It could be a valid help to semioticians that would like to support they qualitative analysis with quantitative data.

 New book: Urban Gamification

Today, one year has passed since the workshop "Mettiamo in Gioco la Città" was organised by my colleagues from CIRCe and myself (you can find all the materials online, videos, photos, pics, abstracts... alas only in Italian). After the success of the workshop, we decided to continue the project and to dedicate a book to the challenging topic of urban gamification. For a happy coincidence, today is also the day in which that book is being published!

This work is part of the series "I Saggi di Lexia" and contains chapters by Ugo Volli, Peppino Ortoleva, Gabriele Ferri, Agata Meneghelli, Mauro Salvador, Massimo Leone, Fabio Viola, Vincenzo Idone Cassone, Simona Stano, Federica Turco, Gabriele Marino, Elsa Soro, Eleonora Chiais, Alessandra Chiappori and Marta Milia.

Here a brief preview in English:

In the last few years the boundary that separates play and everyday reality is becoming more and more thin and permeable. The importance of playfulness in society is greater than ever. This phenomenon, called ludification, seems to answer the need to resemantise (i.e. to give a new meaning) times and spaces that the digital era made indifferent and de-structured. Play appears to be able to give structure, rhythm and direction to time and space - in other words, to make sense of them. Therefore the city - the quintessential human environment, the place of experience and of the construction of autobiographies - undergoes acts of urban gamification, practices that aim at re-writing the city by the means of play. The latter is a powerful tool to act on urban areas: it is able to trace paths, to give value to places, to transform citizens into players. Ranging from flash mobs to urban games, from locative technologies to street art, playfulness invade the cities, bringing along new strategies, new values, new ways of being citizens and new interpretations of the urban areas. This book offers a collection of papers from scholars, experts and professionals that approach urban gamification in all its nuances, using the tools of semiotics, philosophy, media studies and, last but not least, game design.

 

Why study Semiotics.

I was asked to write a few lines on why I decided to study semiotics, and why this discipline is worth studying. Here a few reasons I come up with.

I personally started to study semiotics for the wrong reason. I needed 5 ects in “Philosophy” and, as I had a very bad professor of philosophy in high school, I didn't want to engage a course on the topic. Among the exams that I could choose, however, there was an exam of Semiotics of Culture by a certain Massimo Leone (a name that, at the time, didn't tell me anything). I knew almost nothing about semiotics, but I thought it was worth a try. Little I knew that that course would have changed my life.

In brief, if I should say why it is a good idea to study semiotics I would propose three simple key words: deconstruction, structural analysis and ideological objectivity. They are, of course, simplistic, but they should be enough to introduce the three features that make semiotics unique. First of all: deconstruction. When approaching a subject or studying something it is always a good idea to start by trying to demolish all the prejudices and the certainties that we might have previously established. Semiotics, dealing with meaning, signs and narratology, is up to the task. It's powerful analytic tools are able to explicit – and thus defuse – many rhetoric discourses. Ideas such as “authenticity” and “novelty” or oppositions such as “culture vs nature” are shown as what they are: inherently artificial semiotic constructions. This should not lead us to some sort of nihilism, but on the contrary, help us to admire the marvelous complexity of semiosis, the inextricably intertwined nature of signs, the industrious ability of human beings to build up semiospheres. Understanding the semiotic nature of our ideas, concepts and values doesn't diminish their value, but it spurs us to understand that their importance is, indeed, relative and that they're not “carved in stone”.

Secondly: structural analysis. I know that the word “structural” is out of fashion, today. Post-structuralism has been seen (at least oversees) as a criticism to structuralism, and today many scholars prefer biological metaphors with a positivist flavor, or images evoking “nets”, “webs” and “connections”, undoubtedly influenced by the medium (if we can call it such) that is reshaping our lives: the World Wide Web. However, I think that this old fashioned concept has still much to offer. Firstly, because, without it, meaning inevitably falls behind a wall of ineffability or, even worse, is reduced to a reductionist neurological-scientific model unable to explain the complexity of human behavior. A structural approach to signs and texts – and even to cultures – is able to reconstruct, at least partially, how these semiotics devices are constituted and, therefore, how they work. Fortunately semiotics offers many tool to analyze many different aspects of human existence from the perspective of meaning, by reconstructing their structure (not only in a structuralist way). The French School provides the tools to analyze signs and texts, Umberto Eco's work (and, before him, Peirce) to investigate how the reader react to the text, Sociosemiotics (Landowski and, from a certain point of view, Fontanille) the tools to shed some light on how semiotic activity affects society and, finally Semiotics of Culture (mainly the Tartu-Moskow Semiotic School) helps us to trace and understand the way texts (and/or modeling systems) shape and are shaped by culture and by its hierarchies and dynamics. In other words, semiotics is able to operate in all the plans of immanence (from signs to cultures) and to describe them all with an unique metalanguage. There aren't many other disciplines that could claim the same!

Finally, ideological objectivity. This last key concept is, in fact, a product of the other two. Keeping in mind that true objectivity is, of course, impossible, semiotics allows us to overcome our inevitably restricted point of view and to look “down” at the world with renewed eyes. Once our prejudices dismantled and our certainties deconstructed, armed with the proper tools, we can finally approach different cultures – and even our own – free from the restraints of our narrow point of view. As Eco claims in his a theory of semiotics - semiotics can be a valid tool to defuse the ideological discourses and promote the critical ones.

Helsinki, Semiotics and Existentialism.

This spring semester (the last, alas, of my PhD Studies!)  I'm studying and working at Helsinki University, in Finland.

The city is beautiful - breathtaking under heavy snow - and the University one of the World's top 100, which is nice. They don't have a mayor in semiotics, unfortunately, but my discipline is well represented in the Faculty of Arts and especially among musicologists. The leading scholar in my field, here, is Eero Tarasti, prominent figure in Finnish culture and, in the '70s, student of many of the structuralism forefathers - Greimas, Levi-Straus, Foucault...

2016 is his last year before retirement, unfortunately, which means that I'm very lucky to be able to attend his farewell lectures. 

 In the picture: me, my beard and Eero Tarasti's portrait.

Tarasti has worked a lot on semiotics of music, which, although fascinating, is not particularly useful for my research. In the last years, however, he also developed a new semiotic theory called existential semiotics, that addresses also some issues that are of central importance fro game studies (like corporeality, norms and rules, appearance and many others). While I start to finally write down my dissertation, I will also try to learn something ore of this new exiting theory from a first hand source...

Other than that, the University is a dream for every visiting doc student, here just a couple of its perks:

-graduate students are considered like staff, meaning that you get actually helpful people helping you with all the bureaucratic stuff.

 -great places to live in. Thanks to the above point you are allowed to live in researcher's residences like TöölöTowers, which, although not more expensive that any other place in Helsinki (which is a damn expensive city), are a warm, new, clean and friendly new home, with breakfast included and sauna twice a week.

-a very good library, with open access shelves, easy-to-find books and a great variety of books about semiotics, almost always present in the original language, English translation and Finnish translation.

-finally, for less misanthropist people than me, there are also a huge lot of student organizations and activities available.

Finnish people are mush less solitary than they claim and are generally very friendly. The amount of Italian speakers among them, moreover, never cease to amaze me.

And then, of course, maybe my favourite Finnish thing so far: the marvellous frozen Baltic sea...

Semiotics of Virality: For an Epidemiology of Meaning.

 The new call for papers for Lexia - Rivista di semiotica n° 24 is something Gabriele Merino and I have been working on in the past few months, under the supervision of Massimo Leone.

We believe that is time for semiotics to confront one of the most challenging concepts of the Internet era: virality. What communicative mechanisms, strategies and dynamics are hidden under this umbrella-term that seem to imply that Internet users are mere zombies, infected vessels of an external virus on which they have no control?

That's what we'd like to investigate in this new number of the prestigious journal of semiotics "Lexia" that we will be honoured to edit.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Full text PDF (w/ Italian, French, and Spanish translation): bit.ly/lexiacfpvirality

Lexia, the international, peer–reviewed journal of CIRCe, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication of the University of Torino, Italy, invites contributions to be published in issue n. 24 of the new series.

 The topic of the forthcoming issue is “Semiotics of Virality”.

1. Virality?
Users, media, professionals, and scholars talk more and more about “virality”, referring to online communication and, in particular, to social networks. This folk category is a vivid metaphor but lacks heuristic value. It describes what happens to texts that are said “viral” without shedding any light on their nature and functioning. They ‘infect’ social discourses, ‘spread like wildfire’, etc. But what are their features? How are they created? How do they propagate? How are they used? What effects do they have on users? Do they identify a homogeneous class? In addition, the image of contagion carries deterministic and reductionist connotations. It gives Web-users a passive role (‘infected’ subjects do not act, they are objects of action) and seems to endorse the hypodermic needle model (incompatible with the semiotic epistemology).
“Virality” is an umbrella term. It identifies an immensely heterogeneous set of texts and the dominant mode of their appropriation in the contemporary mediasphere. It turns the peculiarities of successful web-texts into something unspeakable and ineffable. Hence, it hinders the creation of specific tools for describing these texts, analysing them, and foreseeing their development. If randomness and accident play an inevitable role in these communicative processes, they are neither their only constituent nor the most important one. Defining a text as “viral” is almost meaningless. It merely tells us that it is rapidly spreading and gaining an important position, at a given moment, among online discourses.
Semiotics is the discipline that studies texts and their pertinence: it allows one to find connections beyond differences and to make distinctions within homogeneity. Hence, it should be able to pinpoint commonalities and singularities in the wide and manifold sets of texts that circulate in the Internet. The discipline of meaning relies on the most rigorous and versatile tools for analysing forms, usages, and transformations of both online practices and texts. So–called Internet phenomena, viral phenomena, and Internet memes represent one of the most fertile macro-areas for the semiotic analysis of online textuality, yet they have been almost completely ignored by the discipline.

2. The place of semiotics
Nowadays, semiotics seems incapable of keeping pace with the increasingly rapid reconfiguration of communicative and media systems, which nevertheless constitute its chief area of interest. A “semiotics of new media” exists, but new media such as Internet and social networks, not to mention their mobile and locative declination, have not been yet made the object of systematic inquiry. In other words, we do not have a “semiotics of Internet” as we have a “semiotics of painting”: namely, an applied semiotics, based on the general theory of signification but capable of taking into consideration the specificities of its objects of analysis. We are not claiming that a “semiotics of Internet” is necessary but that starting to systematically apply semiotics in order to study Internet would be highly desirable.
This semiotic standstill is not only caused by the unstable nature of the object of analysis (ever changing and updating systems, albeit anchored to- and integrated with- everyday life) but also due the discipline itself. Semiotic epistemology is not the problem. More likely, the issue stems from the methodological and analytic habits of semiotics: in particular, from the relationship of the discipline with technology, meant as a tool, not as an object. In other words, sociometric semiotics — that is, semiotics applying its principles and tools to verifiable and quantitatively relevant corpora — is yet to come. Semioticians have neglected a potentially fruitful area of study to the exclusive benefit of engineering sciences that, while embracing different paradigms and employing various tools, nevertheless find their common fetish in numbers and measuring practices: hence, the contemporary obsession with big data.
The possible role of semiotics within this scenario — which is getting more and more complex, selective, and hostile to approaches that are not immediately prone to be monetized — is twofold. On the one hand, semiotics features a consistent theoretical tradition and a strong, inter-defined, meta-language. On the other hand, it can deliver rich ethnographies and fine-grained qualitative analyses of any area of inquiry or corpus. As a matter of fact, semiotics is capable to take into consideration some fundamental dimensions of communicative processes and meaning–making practices that would otherwise be ignored by statistical tools and automatic analysis: humour, for instance, that is inevitably connected to a context, to the pragmatic dimension of a text, and to tacit, often highly specialized encyclopaedic knowledge.

3. Semiotics of virality
This issue of Lexia aims at filling a conspicuous gap in the literature, both in the semiotic tradition and, more broadly, in social sciences. The goal is to investigate the notion of “virality” in order to question it and go beyond it, thus outlining the guidelines for an “epidemiology of meaning”: a rigorous study of the meaning–making systems that regulate the creation, transformation, and spread of online contents.
Senior scholars and young researchers from different disciplinary fields are invited to submit their contributions on the topic of virality and its epistemological, theoretical, and methodological implications. Different perspectives are welcome, provided that they look at virality from a semiotic and communicational perspective. On the one hand, Lexia welcomes theoretically-oriented essays, exploring the current literature on virality and seeking to elaborate new models in order to further our understanding of the phenomenon. On the other hand, Lexia also welcomes analytically oriented papers, with the focus bearing on specific case–studies.

Bibliography - on.fb.me/1Ut7s1t

Here is the expected publication schedule of the volume:

June 15, 2016: deadline for contributions
July 15, 2016: deadline for referees
September 15, 2016: deadline for revised versions of contributions
December 15, 2016: publication of Lexia n. 24.

Contributions, 30,000 characters max, MLA stylesheet, with a 500 words max English abstract and 5 English key–words, should be sent to Gabriele Marino (gaber.en@libero.it) and Mattia Thibault (mattia.thibault@gmail.com).

Languages: English, Italiano, Français, Español [other languages if reviewers are available].

From the Strong with love:
a month at Rochester's museum of Play.

Since November the 16th I have the pleasure of working on my researches in a wonderful and rich environment: The Strong Museum of Play. 

The museum was founded in 1968 by Margaret Woodbury Strong, a prolific collector of everyday objects, especially dolls and toys, and today encompasses almost 10000 m2 of exhibitions, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, the National Toy Hall of Fame, the Brian Sutton-Smith Library (where I spend most of my time) and Archives of Play, the Woodbury School, the American Journal of Play, and  an awesome (alas not open to the public) warehouse full of toys, boardgames and artifacts, with an uncanny resemblance to the Indiana Jones' warehouse...

The Strong also offers three research fellowships, among which the "The Strong Research Fellowship" which I was honoured to be awarded with. 

The project I'm working on – which will be part of the PhD dissertation – aims at investigating the relationship between toys and meaning, focusing in particular on three different dimensions of the way this artefacts operate in a semiotic level: 

-The intentio auctoris: how toy makers, designers and companies try to and actually convey knowledge, meaning and cultural values through their creations; 

-The intentio lectoris: the semiotics aspects of the actual toy-play, that goes far beyond what the authors have imagined (see Sutton-Smith 1986) and make use of toys as means of self expression (see the works of Winnicott and Erikson) or as instruments to explore the world, both physical and semiotic. 

-The intentio operis: how the physical characteristics of these artefacts are able to influence and direct the way they are used and interpreted (see the works of Latour and Verbeek). 

A meaning-centered approach to toys, combining these three points of view, should be up to the task for an in depth analysis on toy-playto place side by side with those proposed by developmental psychology and social sciences. 

The topic, as some of you may know, isn't completely new to me, but the opportunity of analysing extensively different kinds of toys and toy catalogues, here at The Strong, is being fundamental for the advancement of the research! 

Ray Cats!

"Ancient tales, told by the elder, warn us not to approach new lands without bringing with us our loyal friends: the ray cats.

Old folk songs, hummed before sleep, tell us to hurry and run away, whenever our cats change colour.

Because the cats are our friends and will glow in the night to warn us from the nuclear wasteland."

This is not the beginning of a Fallout 4 side quest, even if it might look pretty similar, but a possible future imagined by the Human Interference Task Force. In the 80s the U.S. Department of Energy created a team of experts and asked them a simple question: how do you create a message that can still be meaningful after tens of thousandths of years?

More specifically, how can we communicate to the future humanity to avoid the areas that now we are using to store nuclear waste?

If the question is simple, the answer is not. The oldest written texts on Earth are only 5000 years old, and we are unable to read many of them. Who knows what sort of language will humanity speak in a dozen of millennia? What sort of culture will they have? Will they still be able to read? Will they have the technology to detect radiations or not?

The Human Interference Task Force come up with various answers, some of them pretty clever. My favourite is the one from semioticians Paolo Fabbri and Françoise Bastide. They argued that the most durable human product is culture: myths, religions, folklore, art and so on. So, if one wants to convey a message through ages it must engrave it on culture. The message will be modified and translated, but some of the main traits will forever be the same: let's think of Santa Claus or Harlequin!

The second step of the project was to individuate something that will probably still be part of human culture ten thousandths years from now, in order to use it as a vehicle of the message. That's when Bastide come up with the idea of cats. Cats are part of the human culture almost from the beginning, and they always have had very strong symbolic meanings - from the ancient Egyptians to Internet culture.

Fabbri and Bastide idea, then, was to create genetic modified cats that will glow and change colour if exposed to radiations: the ray cats.

Once created the ray cats, it is necessary to make an act of culture engineering and to convey the message "ray cat glowing = danger". In order to achieve this goal the semioticians suggest to create stories, songs, myths, objects that confirm this idea and, in a couple of generations: it's done! The message is part of the culture, now (Dawkins would say it has become a meme) and it will be retransmitted automatically though generations.

When the future humans will approach an area of nuclear wastes, seeing their cats glowing will remember them of all the old stories and songs that told how that is a sign of danger, and maybe they will stop and wonder if it is a good idea to continue in that direction.

The "ray cat" project was presented - not without a certain dose of humour - but it wasn't taken very seriously. Along with the other projects it was later published in German and... mostly forgotten (with the exception of us semioticians, of course!).

This, at least, until a couple of years ago journalist Matthew Kielty rediscovered the "ray cat project" and made it viral.

Since then the ray-cat has started to become a true cultural trope. They have entered the semiosphere and have been declined in several pop-cultural forms like t-shirts:

or music videos, see Don't change color kitty from Emperor X (full album):

This ray cats revival captured the attention of documentarists Benjamin Huguet and  Debanjan  Nandy that created the award-winning documentary La Solution Radiochat that won ANDRA contest "Looks on Nuclear Waste". You can see a preview here.

[UPDATE - The whole documentary in English is now available on-line on Vimeo]

As you can see from the documentary, some scientists are already working on creating glowing cats and so, who knows, maybe 20000 years from now people will look at cats with respect for their unnatural ability to help them avoid particularly radioactive spots in a post-nuclear world...

What I keep wondering, however, is: what if the first glowing turtle, found in September the 30th, is in fact, trying to give us a message? Where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the final result of an ancient act of culture engineering?

Underwater

Scrolling a meme website I stumbled upon this wonderful picture by Louis Boutan, the first underwater photographer:

My first though, went to the film "Tale of tales" (Mattero Garrone, 2015) in which John C. Reilly with a similar suit had to fight against a water dragon...

 The underwater fight, although not really epic, was rather enjoyable, mainly thanks to its aesthetics.
Boutan's picture, however, puts together many different aesthetics and ends up looking ancient, mysterious and somehow magic all at a time. The historic value of his photograph and its unusual subject both pale in comparison to its astonishing and marvellous appearance, capable of evoking unattainable sensations in an infinite semiosis whose interpretant remains hidden and unclear.

If, on the one hand, today video games have almost attained a pure photorealism, on the other hand it becomes more and more evident that the future of the media will be aesthetic regimes that will differ more and more from reality and exploit the true potentialities of non-photorealistic aesthetic regimes and of the technologies they employ.

If wonderfully looking games like Future unfolding and Cuphead are already about to happen, I wonder what we'll see when we will be finally able to integrate neural system's Deep Dreams into complex, eye-candy (and somewhat creepy) dreamlike games.