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.

Turin…

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?

CRISTINA VOTO

It showed up as an early interest in the codes of everyday life. I paid attention to the way gestures, clothes, interiors, tones of voice, and rituals shaped social roles before anyone explained them. I was interested in how meaning attached itself to bodies through repetition, style, and expectation. Over time, that became an interest in surfaces as active and productive. A surface is a place where norms became visible, where authority took form, where gender was staged, and where some people seemed to fit more easily than others. Before I had the vocabulary of semiotics, I was already drawn to the question of how forms make subjects legible.

SEMIOVOX

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

CRISTINA VOTO

Semiotics gave me a precise way to think about mediation. It helped me describe how meaning is organized through relations, conventions, framing, and habits of interpretation. What attracted me most was its capacity to challenge the idea that things simply appear as they are. Semiotics starts from the fact that meaning is always shaped.

I was especially interested in approaches that could move across discourse, bodies, and technologies. That is one reason why feminist theory became so important to me. Teresa de Lauretis showed how technologies are tied to the production of subjectivity, especially through visual and narrative forms. Donna Haraway also became central to my thinking, even if she is not a semiotician in the strict sense. Her material-semiotic approach made it possible to think signs together with bodies, machines, scientific practices, and situated knowledge.

What mattered to me was semiotics as a way of understanding how meaning becomes embodied, technical, and political.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

CRISTINA VOTO

I ended up doing semiotics for a living because it gradually became the field in which several of my central interests could meet. I was working on questions related to images, archives, technology, and classification, and I realized that all of them raised a common issue: how subjects become legible, and how that legibility is produced within cultural and technical systems. Semiotics gave me a way to connect those questions without isolating form from politics.

It also became a professional path because it offered me an unusually open and international framework. Semiotics allowed me to move across languages, disciplines, and research contexts, to pursue doctoral work abroad, and to build collaborations between Europe and Latin America. In that sense, it shaped not only what I study, but also how I work. It gave me a transnational intellectual profile and made it possible to develop a practice that is theoretical, comparative, and attentive to the circulation of ideas across different cultural and institutional settings.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

CRISTINA VOTO

First, precision. A good semiotician has to notice how meaning is built through arrangement, repetition, omission, proportion, texture, and scale.

Second, sensitivity to power. Systems of legibility do not work equally for everyone. They distribute visibility, credibility, and normativity unevenly across gendered, racialized, classed, and disabled bodies.

Third, reflexivity. Every act of analysis comes from a position. 

Finally, a good semiotician should be able to move between small details and larger systems, from a minor visual choice to the broader structure in which it operates.

SEMIOVOX

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

CRISTINA VOTO

• Teresa de Lauretis’ Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Teresa De Lauretis brings feminism, cinema, and semiotics together in a way that makes clear that gender is produced through narrative structures, visual conventions, and positions of looking. Her work has been central to the way I think about identity, visibility, and the politics of representation.
• [Italian semiotician] Maria Giulia Dondero and [French semiotician] Jacques Fontanille’s The Semiotic Challenge of Scientific Images. This book has been essential for my work on technological and operational images. What I find especially valuable is the way it shows that scientific images are produced through choices, models, visual strategies, and specific forms of enunciation. This has been very important for the way I think about machine vision, biometric images, and technical systems of recognition.
• Umberto Eco’s Kant and the Platypus. This book has been very important to me because it brings together semiotics, cognition, classification, and interpretation in a particularly rich way. Eco is asking how we recognize something, how we name it, how categories emerge, and what happens when experience exceeds the concepts already available to us. That question has been very productive for my work, especially in relation to identity, typification, and the tension between singularity and classification. Kant and the Platypus shows that semiotics is also about the ways knowledge, perception, and categories are constantly being negotiated.

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?

CRISTINA VOTO

“I study how meaning takes shape in culture and technology. More specifically, I look at how images, discourses, and technical systems shape what becomes visible, intelligible, normal, or deviant. The value of semiotics lies in its diagnostic power. It can show where declared values and actual structures do not match. It can make visible the exclusions hidden inside apparently neutral categories. It can explain why certain forms persuade, simplify, flatten, or misrecognize. That is why it matters in cultural, institutional, and technological contexts.”

SEMIOVOX

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

CRISTINA VOTO

I am most interested in projects that deal with the production of legibility itself. That includes archives, visual taxonomies, machine vision, biometric systems, algorithmic classifications, and artistic practices that expose or reverse-engineer those systems.

These projects are rewarding because they bring semiotics into direct contact with operative environments. One is not simply interpreting an object after the fact. One is analyzing the processes through which subjects and categories are formed. In those contexts, an image can become an index, a record, a template, a measurable unit, or a proxy.

I am especially drawn to feminist and queer projects because they foreground opacity, instability, disidentification, and excess. They show that illegibility can function as critique, refusal, and invention.

SEMIOVOX

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

CRISTINA VOTO

One frustration is that semiotics is still often reduced to the interpretation of symbols, or treated as an overly closed formal method. Both views miss its broader relevance.

Semiotics is urgently needed for the analysis of contemporary infrastructures: platforms, datasets, archives, protocols, standards, machine perception, and automated classification. These are all environments in which meaning is produced and distributed.

I would also like to see feminist, queer, anti-racist, postcolonial, and disability perspectives become more central within semiotic theory itself. These perspectives are essential for understanding how categories become naturalized and how recognizability is distributed unevenly. The same is true of the canon. Thinkers such as Haraway and de Lauretis should be treated as central to contemporary debates on signification, technology, and embodiment.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

CRISTINA VOTO

I would like to widen the question: The history of semiotics should not be reduced to a choice between two canonical figures. Someone like Victoria Welby also deserves a more central place in that conversation 🙂

SEMIOVOX

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

CRISTINA VOTO

Learn to describe things carefully. Interpretation depends on that.

Read across fields. Semiotics becomes much more powerful when it is in dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, media studies, science and technology studies, visual culture, and critical race theory.

Pay close attention to the material side of signs. Meaning moves through bodies, interfaces, institutions, infrastructures, and technical systems.

And keep track of the small details that seem minor at first. A label, a framing choice, a repeated gesture, a category, a visual convention, a protocol: these are often the places where larger systems become visible.

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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).