
Debating in A Vacuum
“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, all one color. No key to where the pieces fit in.”
Untangling the webs of significance within which we've suspended ourselves.

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, all one color. No key to where the pieces fit in.”

"If analysis doesn’t restore the beauty, texture, or emotional vibration of an object, it becomes abstract."

On May 29th! A session honoring Malcolm Evans…

"Do not rely only on your intuition or gut, but make sense of them using concepts, models and instruments produced by semioticians."

"I enjoy this discipline's ability to open minds, reveal new possibilities and energise people."

"Even when a project isn’t explicitly semiotic, the principles guide how I approach my ethnographic and cultural work."

On April 24th! A session dedicated to semioticians' tattoos…

"The leading edge of culture emerges first in the sensorial and experiential before it can be articulated in more cerebral ways."

"It’s an almost compulsive need to keep asking why, again and again, without settling too quickly on answers."

"Semiotics is clever and brilliant. It doesn’t need to try so hard to sound clever and brilliant."

A session on the unique uses of emotion, color and dissonance in Latin America.

"Semiotic researchers tend to be good people — perhaps because they share a fundamental openness toward understanding cultures other than their own."

"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."

"Look out for signs, symbols, and patterns in everyday life — and tease out of them the ideas that they communicate."

A session on how semioticians grapple with the perplexing allure of the mythical.