Making Sense
"You notice when a system is addicted to an old myth it can no longer metabolize."
Making Sense
What makes semioticians tick? We asked members of the international community of semiotic practitioners to answer 10 questions. Here's a series overview, organized by region.
Making Sense
"If analysis doesn’t restore the beauty, texture, or emotional vibration of an object, it becomes abstract."
Making Sense
"Do not rely only on your intuition or gut, but make sense of them using concepts, models and instruments produced by semioticians."
Making Sense
"I enjoy this discipline's ability to open minds, reveal new possibilities and energise people."
Making Sense
"Even when a project isn’t explicitly semiotic, the principles guide how I approach my ethnographic and cultural work."
Making Sense
"The leading edge of culture emerges first in the sensorial and experiential before it can be articulated in more cerebral ways."
Making Sense
"It’s an almost compulsive need to keep asking why, again and again, without settling too quickly on answers."
Making Sense
"Semiotics is clever and brilliant. It doesn’t need to try so hard to sound clever and brilliant."
Making Sense
"Semiotic researchers tend to be good people — perhaps because they share a fundamental openness toward understanding cultures other than their own."
Making Sense
"You already have so much knowledge to draw on from your observations — things you’ve noticed, trends you’ve spotted, cultural knowledge unknowingly assimilated, years of training on method."
Making Sense
"Look out for signs, symbols, and patterns in everyday life — and tease out of them the ideas that they communicate."
Making Sense
"Being able to connect, or map ideas — across regions, eras, or cultural objects — requires a comparative way of looking."
Making Sense
"I regularly refer to myself as 'relentlessly curious.' The practice of semiotics is a marathon of mental focus."
Making Sense
"I like naming and describing what’s usually left unsaid, diving into the darker side of things, and uncovering how they show up (or do not) in communications."