A series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — our commercial semiotician colleagues, from around the world — whose “output” we admire.

Switzerland…

SEMIOVOX

What work of literature (old or new) would you recommend to someone trying to make sense of today’s world?

JENNIFER VASILACHE

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ll be honest, I first picked it up at a train station because I needed a good read for the ride, and the back cover promised a futuristic fable about artificial intelligence, robots, and doomed days. Very of the moment, I thought. It actually turned out to be nothing like what I was expecting.

The book is not really about AI-powered robots, it’s about love, loneliness, exclusion, and belief, seen through the raw and candid eyes of AI-powered robots. How they perceive the world in fragments, partial patterns, coded inputs. In that sense, robots are no different from us. We also build meaning through fragments.

What makes this book fascinating is that it doesn’t ask whether AI will replace humans by becoming “human,” but whether humans are actually as humane as we’d like to think. Such a big question, explored not through drama or spectacle but in Ishiguro’s quiet, poetic style. That contrast (the heaviness of the topic vs. the softness of the telling) is the reason why I find this book so refreshingly relevant and why it stayed with me.

SEMIOVOX

What’s the best movie you’ve ever seen?

JENNIFER VASILACHE

Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan. A true work of art. I was completely taken out of time for three hours and couldn’t look away. 

Isn’t it funny how Hollywood is clearly in a biopic moment right now? Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Kerr, Marty Reisman… And if the headlines are right, plenty more in the pipeline. What excites me about biopics is the meaning-making approach behind them: not just the creative angle chosen to unpack a person, but how they make sense of the icons themselves, the times they belonged to, and what we need them to mean now. 

From that angle, Oppenheimer is very ambitious. Every element of the movie reinforces and complicates the others, and ends up taking the audience deeper into the psychological unravelling of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He is a hero, a coward, a visionary, a destroyer all at once. The movie doesn’t glorify him through a single narrative arc but dismantles him, piece by piece, through perspectives, imagery, motifs, sound textures, editing rhythms, silences. That is a semiotician’s dream: a character that’s not given or explained but deconstructed through every possible system, and the movie truly makes you feel the vertigo of all that. It’s mesmerizing, exhausting, and I left the theater thinking that, at last, a movie had matched the complexity of its subject.

SEMIOVOX

What music — genres, particular artists and songs — do you listen to during a typical day?

JENNIFER VASILACHE

I rely on two kinds of music, at opposite ends of the spectrum: one that surfaces joy, and one that deepens focus.

French electro with a pop edge (think Daft Punk, Justice, Kavinsky) is my happy place. I don’t think it has much to do with my French roots (maybe it does?) but either way, it’s the kind of sound that goes straight into my body, heart, and soul. Whenever I need instant joy, I press play and the magic happens: my body’s moving, my thoughts are lighter, my energy is where I like it (high), my spirit is lifted. Body and mind happy and aligned.

When it’s time to get serious and really focus though, I turn to the big names in classical music. That’s where I find the purest form of mind reset. I’ve noticed that those grand movements and dramatic crescendos have the ability to expand my mind as much as they expand the room. I feel bolder both in my creative and strategic thinking. Maybe that’s exactly why those composers earned the title of geniuses: the complex structure behind their pieces is designed to take the way we think to another level and unlock dimensions we couldn’t reach on our own. At least, that’s how it works for me.

MEDIA DIET: GIANLLUCA SIMI (Brazil) | HIBATO BEN AHMED (France) | MARIE LENA TUPOT (USA) | EUGENE GORNY (Thailand) | YOGI HENDLIN (Netherlands / USA) | INKA CROSSWAITE (Germany / South Africa) | SÓNIA MARQUES (Portugal) | ĽUDMILA LACKOVÁ BENNETT (Czechia) | BRIAN KHUMALO (USA / South Africa) | JIAKUN WANG (Shanghai) | FRANCISCO HAUSS (China / Mexico) | ASHLEY MAURITZEN (England) | STEFANIA GOGNA (Italy) | BECKS COLLINS (England) | ANTJE WEISSENBORN (Germany) | MARIANE CARA (Brazil) | MARTHA ARANGO (Sweden) | PAULINA GOCH-KENAWY (Poland) | COCO WU (Singapore / China) | JOSH GLENN (USA) | JENNIFER VASILACHE (Switzerland) | ANDREA BASUNTI (England) | SARAH JOHNSON (Canada) | MARIA PAPANTHYMOU (Greece) | VICTORIA GERSTMAN (Scotland).

Also see these global semio series: MAKING SENSE (Q&As) | SEMIOFEST SESSIONS (monthly mini-conferences) | COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | COLOR CODEX | DECODER (fictional semioticians) | CASE FILE | PHOTO OP | MEDIA DIET | TATTOO YOU (semioticians’ tattoos).