Archives

  • The cultural explosion of AI: Navigating the intersection of artificial intelligence, society, and culture from a semiotic and interdisciplinary perspective
    Vol. 8 (2025)

    Volume VIII of Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication (2025) edited by Kristian Bankov and Federico Biggio, brings together thirteen articles on how artificial intelligence is reshaping meaning, culture and communication. The collection opens with a co-authored primer bridging semiotics and machine learning, followed by a Peircean reading of the architecture of large language models and a pragmatic comparison between human and machine sense-making. Other contributions examine text-to-image generation through Susanne Langer’s aesthetics, and the first part of a computational-semiotic study of facial recognition, continued in Volume IX. AI creativity is explored in extended reality, while a cognitive-science perspective links 5E cognition to narrative, and an economic analogy describes the “semiotic inflation” produced by machine-generated content. Biosemiotics extends the discussion to animal communication. Several articles address education and practice: a mixed-methods study of ChatGPT in higher education, AI in second-language acquisition, a consumer survey on attitudes towards AI-generated content, and the transformation of the fashion industry. Across these perspectives, none of the authors grants AI human-like interpretative agency; instead, AI is treated as tool, interlocutor, producer of signs and catalyst of cultural change.

  • Conceptualizing Digital Reality through Metaphors: Semiotic and Interdisciplinary Perspectivе
    Vol. 7 (2024)

    Volume VII of Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication (2024), edited by Kristian Bankov and Federico Biggio, brings together ten articles on how metaphors shape the ways we understand, design and inhabit digital worlds. The collection opens with an analysis of the “blue brain” as visual shorthand for artificial intelligence and its supposed autonomy and cognitive depth, followed by an empirical study of visual metaphors in high-tech product advertising. Another contribution traces the evolution of generative media, from early computer art to AI-driven systems, through its signs, metaphors and modes of experience. Semiotic mediation is explored as a tool for the digital empowerment of older adults, while the database is examined as a metaphor for the construction of taste in AI-assisted gastronomy. Further articles analyse metaphors of subversion in surveillance art photography, and the mythical, technomagic aquatic metaphors of digital aesthetics as an empowerment of the female and oneiric imaginary. The volume also considers metaphors of digital reality in public service announcements and in a city’s identity built through social media campaigns. It closes with a multimodal and intermedial analysis of metaphorical constructs in Blade Runner 2049.

  • Digital Transformation of Education: Semiotic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
    Vol. 6 (2023)

    Volume VI of Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication (2023), edited by Kristian Bankov, brings together eight articles on how digital technologies are reshaping learning, teaching and the subjects of education. Two contributions address entrepreneurship education: one analyses the benefits of gamification through the EntreComp framework of entrepreneurial competences, while the other presents an empirical study of students’ attitudes towards digital tools, showing a continued preference for traditional methods. A postphenomenological essay explores the fusion of students with their technologies, from smartphone-mediated “cyborg” learners to immersive classrooms. From a legal perspective, another article examines the gap between communication, infrastructure and the application of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation where children are concerned. The volume also includes a study of how fashion influencers build their image on Instagram as a new educational and cultural format, and a gendered, transmedial semiotic analysis of the myth of Carmen. It closes with two applied studies: an eye-tracking experiment on interactive cinema in audiovisual literacy, and a reflection on language education and digital citizenship through Juri Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere. The editorial adds a critical reflection on artificial intelligence in higher education.

  • Translation and Transformation in Audiovisual and Digital Culture
    Vol. 5 (2022)

    Volume V of Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication (2022), edited by Evangelos Kourdis and Kristian Bankov, brings together ten articles on how cultural works, narratives and images are translated, remediated and transformed across media. The contributions examine intermediality as artistic experimentation and political resistance in Jean-Luc Godard’s late films, and the “cinefication” of museums, using Tate Modern’s promotion of a Picasso exhibition through trailers and social media. Others trace the transmedial afterlife of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in films, games, music and fan culture, and analyse digital identity through the avatars of the Chinese idol show Dimension Nova. One article studies Dr. Li Wenliang’s Weibo page as a “wailing wall” of online mourning, censorship and collective memory. Further papers explore how the body and senses of the Middle Ages are reworked in TV series, films and video games, and how digital derivations of the Mona Lisa reveal the persuasion of likeness in digital images. The volume closes with three studies of cinema: the representation of maids in Greek films of the 1950s and 1960s, the film adaptation of Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux, and the colourisation of Greek classic films as intersemiotic translation.

  • Semiotics of Digital Gastromania
    Vol. 4 (2021)

    Volume III–IV of Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication (2020/21) appears as a double issue: the COVID-19 pandemic brought academic activities to a halt and slowed the collection of materials, so the two annual volumes were combined. Titled Semiotics of Digital Gastromania and edited by Kristian Bankov and Francesco Mangiapane, it brings together nine articles on how digital media have made food and cooking one of the defining topics of contemporary culture. The contributions examine “veganism 2.0” and the forms of life promoted by its online communication, and the hashtag #foodporn as a fetishised sharing of food images. Another article analyses how food influencers build trust with their followers, while a study of the Italian Facebook group Cucinaremale explores “cacogastromania”, the playful sharing of everyday culinary disasters. Two papers offer systematic models for analysing food blogs and gastronomic programmes on Italian television. The volume also addresses the role of imagination in the evolution of taste, and food films as vehicles of national identity, nostalgia and emotion for foreign and domestic audiences. It closes beyond the strictly culinary, with an analysis of the augmented-reality app IKEA Place as an example of “virtual tryvertising”, an experiential marketing strategy for empowered customers.

  • Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication

    Cultural Transformations of Love and Sex in the Digital Age
    Vol. 2 (2019)

    Volume II of Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication (2019), edited by Kristian Bankov, brings together eight articles on how digital technologies are reshaping intimacy, desire and sexuality. The contributions examine the semiotics of the face in online dating, asking whether digital idealisation threatens its aura, and offer a typology of the representation, enactment and economy of love and sex in video games, from early titles to immersive VR. A study of advertising compares a sex device promoted through technological rhetoric with a technology retailer that sells through sexual imagery. Other papers analyse how dating platforms turn the search for love into an endless search for options driven by the “fear of missing out”, and how Tinder users use tourist imaginaries to build their sex appeal. A critique of gay chat and dating apps such as Grindr shows how community capital is turned into an individualised product of consumption. The volume also includes a reading of feminism and pornography through Juri Lotman’s Culture and Explosion, and closes with “The Pleasure of the Hypertext”, a reflection on desire and pleasure in hypertextual culture.

  • Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication
    Vol. 1 (2018)

    Volume I (Spring 2018) is the pilot issue of Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication, edited by Kristian Bankov. The journal was first planned as a biannual publication, hence the spring numbering, but it later became annual, with each volume devoted to a single theme. This first issue has no specific topic: it presents a broad programme for the semiotic study of digital culture, with interactivity proposed as its central principle. Its eleven articles are organised in four parts. The first addresses knowledge and identity, examining how personalisation algorithms force out serendipity, how a mock-nationalistic YouTube web series revisits the “imagined community”, and the shift from “me” to “we” on social media. The second explores aesthetic and interactive practices: the digital reconstruction of Istanbul as memory in the film A Touch of Spice, “apeiron” narratives in today’s mediascape, corporate discourse on Instagram, formalism and digital literary research, and the Indian sari between online and offline space. The third turns to corporate communication, with a typology of Facebook brand-page users and a study of digital communication in the regulated tobacco industry. A philosophical reflection on the effects of social media closes the issue.