SEMIOVOX 3Q2025

Broadcast by Josh Glenn, Posted September 29, 2025

I’m cofounder of the semiotics-fueled branding consultancy SEMIOVOX, editor of the consultancy’s eponymous website, and I’m founding coordinator of the monthly SEMIOFEST SESSIONS. Here’s a round-up of what we’ve been doing during 3Q2025.

Also see: SEMIOVOX 2022 | SEMIOVOX 2023 | SEMIOVOX 2024 | SEMIOVOX 1Q2025 | SEMIOVOX 2Q2025

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

SEMIOVOX’s methodology provides insight and inspiration — to brand and organization strategy, marketing, design, innovation, and consumer insights teams, as well as to their agency partners — regarding the unspoken local/global “codes” that help shape perceptions of and guide behavior within product categories and/or sociocultural territories.

During 3Q2025, our projects included (but were not limited to) the following.

BEVERAGE UPLIFT CODES (USA): On behalf of a multinational beverage company, we analyzed US energy drink, better-for-you soda, soda pop, and RTD coffee codes. A combination of semiotic analysis and (via our sister agency, Consumer Eyes) concept development. Innovation, brand positioning, marketing optimization, pack design.

BEVERAGE UPLIFT CODES (GERMANY): On behalf of the same multinational beverage company, we analyzed German energy drink, better-for-you beverages, soda pop, and RTD coffee and tea codes. Innovation, brand positioning, marketing optimization, pack design. We greatly appreciated the efforts of our project partner in Germany, Marion Polauck of Polauck Semiotics.

GIVE IT UP

For over 15 years, Rob Walker and I have investigated (anthropologically) what objects mean — and also (semiotically) how they mean what they mean — via fun, engaging story telling projects, both fiction and nonfiction. After the 2023 publication of Lost Objects (Hat & Beard Press), which developed out of our 2017–2021 nonfiction PROJECT:OBJECT endeavor, we took a brief hiatus from our collaborations.

The goal of our latest project, GIVE IT UP, was to explore what (and how) objects can mean to us, share our objects’ stories with one another… and develop tactics for letting go of our meaningful stuff.

This was our first place-based and interactive project. We staged it this August and September in Kingston, New York. It was a lot of work, and a lot of fun!

We recruited 11 interesting Hudson Valley denizens to participate:

Writer, Lit Hub podcaster, and bookstore manager Drew Broussard was willing to be persuaded to give up his… WOODEN SCIMITAR
Writer and artist Karlie Flood was willing to be persuaded to give up her… BROKEN BARRETTE
Author and music critic Will Hermes was willing to be persuaded to give up his… HUMILITY PLAQUE
Midtown Kingston Arts District (MKAD) Board of Directors president Maggie Inge was willing to be persuaded to give up her… EVENING BAG
Writer and editor Halimah Marcus was willing to be persuaded to give up her… NYC BICYCLE
Journalist, filmmaker, and writer Annie Nocenti was willing to be persuaded to give up her… THUMB-PUMP OILER
Writer and photographer Julian Richards was willing to be persuaded to give up his… UNDEVELOPED FILM
Camp Kingston founder Samuel Shapiro was willing to be persuaded to give up his… BIRCH BARK
Musician and author Adam Snyder was willing to be persuaded to give up his… PROTECTOGRAPH
Rondout Valley Middle School librarian and author Emma Tourtelot was willing to be persuaded to give up her… MARRIAGE DISH
Community organizer and Good Neighbor cofounder Adriana Wong was willing to be persuaded to give up her… LOVE-LOST NECKLACE

Karlie Flood’s Broken Barrette on display at the wine bar Brunette. PHOTO CREDIT: Bridget Badore

Their significant objects and stories were on display in 10 Kingston venues from Aug. 15th–Sept. 1st.

During this period, the general public was invited to persuade our participants to give up their objects. We received nearly 75 thoughtful responses, and passed these along to the project’s participants.

From Sept. 3 – 10, all objects were put display in a group exhibit at the cafe / bar / social space Camp Kingston.

Rob Walker (left) and I interview Maggie Inge about her object… and the most persuasive response to her story. PHOTO CREDIT: Bridget Badore

The most persuasive responses were announced at the project’s literary event / party on Sept. 10th, at Camp Kingston. Josh offered commentary on the typology of object-meanings (totem, talisman, tardis, etc.), and Rob commented on the responses we received to the object stories. The well-attended event was (or so we’ve been told) emotional, amusing, and entertaining.

Rob and I are grateful to: the project’s participants, the story respondents, the participating venues, and to our Kingston team: Karlie Flood, Bridget Badore, Tommy Sullivan, and Susan Roe. To learn more about the GIVE IT UP project, check out its website / newsletter.

PS: Books chronicling the PROJECT:OBJECT team’s material-culture investigations include: Josh and Rob’s LOST OBJECTS (Hat & Beard Press, 2022) | Rob’s THE ART OF NOTICING (Knopf, 2019) | Josh and Rob’s SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS (Fantagraphics, 2012) | Rob’s BUYING IN (Random House, 2008) | Josh’s TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007).

SEMIOFEST SESSIONS

I’m the founder and co-convenor (with Adelina Vaca, as of late 2025) of SEMIOFEST SESSIONS, a monthly-ish series of online get-togethers — put on under the aegis of the biannual Semiofest conference — intended not only to share best practices among, but to nurture collegiality and friendship within the global semio community. Here’s the 3Q2025 lineup:

JULY: SEMIOTICS & GENDER EQUALITY. How can semioticians challenge outdated frameworks around gender roles while amplifying diverse voices in the world of communications? Gabriela Pedranti invited Melanie Tobal, Daniela Di Bella, and Gianlluca Simi to discuss diversifying creative teams, advocating for representation that genuinely reflects the diversity of societies, and more. The goal was to introduce tools and resources for semioticians who are inspired to reshape narratives around gender and diversity in marketing and advertising.

SEPTEMBER: NARRATIVE SEMIOTICS. Narratives influence our beliefs and actions, even our perception of reality. So when it comes to influencing global perceptions, driving social change, and consolidating symbolic and political power, it’s crucial to use the tools offered by narrative semiotics. Serdar Paktin has invited Sarah Dodge and Laura Jordan Bambach to unravel the semiotic strategies behind impactful narratives across diverse domains—social activism, design, advertising, marketing, politics—thus allowing us to grasp their profound implications.

Coming in 4Q2025:

I will host a session on CASE STUDIES | Coco Wu will host a session on DOING SEMIOTICS IN ASIA.

All SEMIOFEST SESSIONS here.

SEMIOVOX.COM

I’m the editor here at SEMIOVOX, our consultancy’s eponymous website. Here’s what we published during 3Q2025.

Being a semiotician can be somewhat an artistic, therapeutic, and even semi-autobiographical expression, as we’re constantly reflecting on our own relationship with ourselves and the world through our work. We’re wired for self-examination as semioticians — so it’s important to stay conscious of our biases and ‘confessional’ tendencies. While we have the professional license to embrace our unique perspectives, our role is to address business goals. It’s neither about complete self-censorship nor turning our work into a diary, but about channeling our perspective with discernment to shape business strategy and affect wider cultural conversations.
Caranissa Djatmiko

MAKING SENSE is an ongoing series of Q&As dedicated to understanding what makes semioticians tick. I’ve asked my commercial-semiotics colleagues from around the world to answer a set of leading questions. Here’s the 3Q2025 lineup:

Coming in 4Q2025:

All MAKING SENSE installments here.

The Kellogg’s rooster symbol always arrests my attention because of a tradition in my family that it was one of us who came up with it and donated it to the brand. My late mother’s aunt, Nansi Richards, was a harpist so famous in Wales that she toured expatriate Welsh communities all around the world. On one of these tours she was introduced to the guy who had invented the cornflake. She told him in passing that the Welsh word ‘ceiliog’, which sounded very much like his surname, means ‘cockerel’, and that it might be appropriate to stick one of those on his boxes of breakfast cereal.
Malcolm Evans

PHOTO OP is a global series that reveals the sorts of things that we commercial semioticians notice when “off the clock.” We wrapped up the series in August. Here’s the 3Q2025 lineup:

Every year I try to do a week of “only reading” in a library. At those times, reading is a kind of marathon. I go through about 200 pages a day and try to cover a given scientific area in 5 to 7 days. It’s a dive, a luxurious possibility of immersing myself in a new technique, giving time to cohesive texts in a specific field. During these periods, I read full time, 6 to 8 hours a day.
Sónia Marques

MEDIA DIET is a new series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — our commercial semiotician colleagues, from around the world — whose “output” we admire. Here’s the 3Q2025 lineup:

Coming in 4Q2025:

Via the solo series CASABLANCA CODES, I’ve developed a thick description of Casablanca‘s codes and thematic complexes. The series wrapped up in August. Here’s the 3Q2025 lineup:

RICK: “As an antihero, the RICK paradigm straddles the line between the dominant discourse (associated with WAR and BUSINESS, in this semiosphere) and the counter-discourse (associated with PEACE and PLEASURE). He refuses to choose.”

RENAULT: “Renault tells Laszlo, regarding Ugarte: ‘I’m making out the report now. We haven’t quite decided whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape.’ It’s a telling admission, from this semiosphere’s anti-antihero, that he has confused his ability to perceive the semiotic structure of the narrative in which he finds himself with the ability to author that narrative. A fatal flaw for any and all anti-antiheroes.”

Theo van Doesburg’s “Sfeer” (Sphere, 1916)

“Purple and azure, white, green and golden, / Sphere within sphere…”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The series SCHEMATIZING, which is cross-posted from our sister website HILOBROW, attempts to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a G-schema. Here’s the 3Q2025 lineup:

A SPIRITUAL DIAGRAM OF THE UNIVERSE | PERMEABILITY | THE GREAT UNITY.

More to come in 4Q2025.

“If he’s a poet, why’s he in jail?” demanded a suspicious voice.
Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders.
“Perhaps he writes free verse,” she suggested cunningly.
A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed form their eternal task of cheering prisoners — so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread.
Margery Sharp

The latest series in the POP BESTIARY project, which analyzes the evolving meaning of animals in 20th-century pop culture, is on the mouse. (Cross-posted from HILOBROW.) Here’s the 3Q2025 lineup:

MISS BIANCA | MRS. FRISBY | VLADEK

Coming in 4Q2025:

QUIMBY | PIKACHU

SEMIOVOX continues to offer glimpses into various audits we’ve done via installments in the long-running series CODE-X. Here’s a selection of CODE-X installments from 3Q2025:

We’ll take a hiatus from this series (which features nearly 400 installments), as of the end of 3Q2025.

Also see: SEMIOVOX updates from 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025.

MIT PRESS: RADIUM AGE

I’m the founding editor of the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE proto-sf reissue series. In August, we published Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age, an anthology that I’ve edited featuring Radium Age superhuman-themed stories and novel excerpts from the likes of Gertrude Barrows (aka Francis Stevens), George Bernard Shaw, Alfred Jarry, Marie Corelli, Hugo Gernsback, M.P. Shiel, Karel Čapek, Thea von Harbou, Jean de La Hire, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Lucy Sante reading from *Before Superman* at the book’s launch event in Kingston, NY.

Also in August, we reissued Marietta S. Shaginyan’s 1924 proto-sf novel Yankees in Petrograd (translated from Russian and introduced by Jill Roese).

More RADIUM AGE series updates: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 | 3Q2025

HILOBROW

HILOBROW is SEMIOVOX’s sister website. Here are a few semio- and cultural analysis-related series and posts from 3Q2025.

SEMIOPUNK is an irregular series, written by Josh Glenn, dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s a sampling of the 3Q2025 lineup:

Don De Lillo’s WHITE NOISE. Excerpt: “Murray finds deep significance in ordinary, everyday events and locations; channel-surfs the TV for signs of ‘American magic and dread’; and roams the aisles of the supermarket, soaking up ‘psychic data’ (one of the author’s proposed titles for the book) about the coercive and transcendental messages encrypted in product labels.”
R.F. Kuang’s BABEL. Excerpt: “Commercial semioticians have found a way to leverage the uncanny nature of meaning in language to our client’s benefit and our profit. So have Kuang’s silver-working translators. The difference being that while Kuang’s translators are exploiting the energy sparked in the meaning-gap between words in different languages, semioticians will tell you that innumerable meaning-gaps exist within any given language, or culture, or semiosphere.”
China Miéville’s EMBASSYTOWN. Excerpt: “Human language is a medium of signification, of meaning-making. Which, as has been discussed several time in this series, is (for semioticians in particular) highly pleasurable. This helps us to understand why the Hosts, for whom signs have always only offered access to unmediated reality, become dangerously intoxicated when the myriad possibilities of signifier/signified connections are revealed.”

Coming in 4Q2025:

THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA | GLASSHOUSE | THE DIFFERENT GIRL

More HILOBROW updates: 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 1Q2025 | 2Q2025 | 3Q2025

On to 4Q2025…

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SEMIOVOX 3Q2025

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

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