What makes a semiotician tick? SEMIOVOX’s Josh Glenn has invited his fellow practitioners in the field of commercial semiotics, from around the world, to answer a few revealing questions.

Mexico City…

SEMIOVOX

When you were a child/teen, how did your future fascination with symbols, cultural patterns, interpreting “texts,” and getting beneath the surface of daily life manifest itself?

ADELINA VACA

My early fascination with ancient cultures would show up in strange ways as a kid. I decided, to my mother’s exasperation, to replicate and wear a toga in public when I was 5; and I would steal and collect small Japanese objects such as spoons or tiny paper dolls from my parents’ trips to Japan. 

I had a phase with the ancient Japanese teeth-blackening practice, the Greek use of laurel as a triumphal crown, the Egyptian underworld, and hundreds of unintelligible Mayan glyphs. Most of these intense obsessions were short-lived, but they led me to my next topic in an unexpected way. I found Isaac Asimov’s popular history books on my godfather’s shelves, which in turn led me to a teenage romance with science fiction. 

In fact, my first semiotics teacher was Asimov. He explored the webs of meaning of: an imperfectly programmed robot, a chlorine-breathing alien, and a world-ruling AI, which when asked by technicians what god is, answers, “Me.”

My youthful hunger for ancient cultures matured into a love for current cultures, so I decided to major in communications, study photography, and become a nomadic reporter, travelling from one culture to the other. That didn’t quite work out.  

SEMIOVOX

Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.

ADELINA VACA

I enrolled in two Semiotics courses during college; it wasn’t love at first sight. I was immersed in Art History at the time and had developed a visual instinct for patterns; in that context, Floch [the French pioneer of applied semiotics] struck me as an architect of overly complex structures for analysing the obvious. However, I’d later come to admire his work. 

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

ADELINA VACA

For the past twelve years, I’ve worked at the De la Riva Group, a marketing research agency based in Mexico City — where one of my colleagues is the semiotician Alfredo Troncoso. Early on, I saw him apply sophisticated tools in intuitive ways; suddenly conversations and strategies were elevated, acquiring substance. I particularly remember him drawing a semiotic square on a napkin for an influential, well-educated group of Mexican politicians. As their faces beamed, I realized that the square itself was powerful enough to exile qualitative findings to the background. The square wasn’t his, Alfredo would tell me later, but rather Aristotle’s.

As Head of Anthropology at De la Riva Group, around 2016 I started noticing a disturbing trend. I was conducting and coordinating ethnographic fieldwork in more than 10 countries from the US to Argentina; talking with people about everything from migration to yogurt, to spirituality. But some interactions were becoming superficial; they lacked the gravitas of a good conversation. My first instinct was to “turn up the volume” of the tools I had developed so far, namely prototyping and a ludic approach to fieldwork. I arranged for the purchase of a food-truck/camper and sent it off on ethnographic road-trips throughout Mexico, cooking and serving community meals, offering yoga lessons, movie nights, and other sorts of meaningful interactions. This worked — we attracted informants, collected stories, crafted prototypes, and documented it all. 

However, whenever we introduced marketing material — whether an ad, say, or a new product concept — people started disengaging from the conversation. Meaninglessness would creep in. I turned my search for the source of meaninglessness into a study of meaning itself, at which point the semiotic toolbox became a natural choice. Before I knew it, semiotics constituted the base of most of my work — with ethnographic fieldwork landing and enriching it. I had become a street semiotician of sorts.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

ADELINA VACA

•  An instinct for finding substance and essence in small things. 
• Cultivating neutrality. Being able to suspend value judgements is a prerequisite for complex research that makes for great storytelling. 
• Synthesizing is the rarest skill of these, but it’s fundamental for not drowning in your own findings (and taking others down with you).

SEMIOVOX

What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?

ADELINA VACA

Charles Sanders Peirce and Jean-Marie Floch are a very solid duo for me — one inspiring and elevating, the other landing and rooting. 

• Peirce is a master of paradox and fluidity, which makes it powerful but hard to define. It’s easy to get lost reading Peirce, asking, is this a spiritual or scientific text? For him, there’s no science without faith, and the only way to think is through faith in your own inner representations. There’s a certain elegance and beauty to his ideas, and what I value most is his focus on the dynamics of thought rather than its solidity (and taxonomizing). 
• Floch is semiotics in action. His Semiotics, Marketing and Communication, the book I’d found so dry during my college years, eventually inspired me to apply semiotics without losing depth, complexity, or texture. His clarity in defining the structures of meaning has been an invaluable golden standard for my work.
• The Iliad features an early semiotician: Helen, who weaves a “great web” on her loom: a tapestry depicting horses, warriors, and battles as they happen. As she weaves, we read; and as we read, the battles are created. Is there a better example of the webs of meaning?

SEMIOVOX

When someone asks you to describe what you do, what is your “elevator pitch”? How do you persuade a skeptical client to take a chance on using this tool?

ADELINA VACA

I frequently talk about brands as stories, a useful way of starting a conversation around meaning and meaning-making. Well-woven stories can be powerfully paradoxical, while badly woven ones can be contradictory (was this a love story, or a horror movie?). Most clients can relate to the idea that relying exclusively on qualitative feedback can lead to brands trying to speak to everyone, thus meaning nothing to anyone. 

SEMIOVOX

What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?

ADELINA VACA

I love doing cultural collections around certain products across markets, contrasting the meaning(s) of tomatoes, say, or snacking, or money in different countries. Unilever and Netflix have particularly shared my passion for such cultural collections, and I’m quite grateful for that. I also enjoy code-finding in categories such as social media and alcoholic beverages. 

SEMIOVOX

What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?

ADELINA VACA

I’m inspired when brands tap into inherited stories, some of them thousands of years old. Nike, for example, can be a partial heir to narratives of victory that the Greek goddess Nike represented and signified, predating the brand for at least 3000 years, and that will likely continue once the brand isn’t there. In that sense, crafting meaning is a relay race. As Chris Arning says, no single person or brand owns meaning, and understanding that makes us better authors, paradoxically. 

SEMIOVOX

What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?

ADELINA VACA

Make yourself uncomfortable, cultivate the joy of being lost by travelling to weird places, watching weird movies, eating weird food. Learn to enjoy a liminal, confused state that keeps you open to fluctuating waves of meaning that can’t really be tamed, just navigated. 

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