interfaces

As media, computer-based systems are sign systems lending themselves to human interpretation

Hjelmslevian structuralism

glossematics of Hjemslev, Greimas and Halliday

he struggle to make sense. Although he had found the European (Saussurean) dyadic signs easier to apply in practice, it was the American (Peircean) triadic sign (first introduced in this context by Nadin in 1988), which he ended up returning to again and again.

ogether with Frieder Nake and Mihai Nadin, Andersen conducted one of the prestigious Dagstuhl Seminar

Performance: la acción de los espectadores/lectores/usuarios es fundamental en las narrativas transmediáticas. Los fans son prosumidores que no dudan en producir nuevos textos e introducirlos en la red para enriquecer las conversaciones.

So transmedia storytelling is an amazingly compelling method of conveying messages, concepts and themes through narrative that makes use of multiple media platforms

Analyzing hypertext as a sign system is not a mere extension of the semiotic project for the sake of completeness; rather, this approach promises insights that can help to make that medium a more useful, intuitive, rich and productive one: ”As opposed to any form of sequential closed communications, hypermedia requires means for and ways of generating an infinity of meaningful interpretations. A non-linear structure is, after all, a graph constituted from nodes and links. The semiotic level of such nodes and links is quite abstract, but without a good understanding of these communicational entities, we will never exercise an efficient command of the process of generating the infinity of meaningful interpretations”

Philosophers from Hobbes to Derrida have pointed out that there is no stopping the generation of meaning by contiguity, and spatial adjacency allows uncontrollable contiguities. While physical space allows for unintended adjacencies, in a standard node-and-link hypertext, nothing is officially next to anything else until a link is created.

Derrida who positioned writing as being prior to speech defines writing not as the activity of writing, but as the movement of differentiation of sign systems (différance).9 Language, like any other code, constitutes itself as a texture of differences: ”Difference and opposition are the cognitive foundations of semiosis and therefore the precondition for every semiotic coding. This is a process which leads to an unbounded referring of signs. Writing in Derrida’s sense creates networks by ’spacing of speech’ and can be interpreted as a metaphor of the human mind”

The semiotic space I impose on hypertext has more to do with Lotman’s ”semiosphere”, a pansemiotic space outside of which the existence of semiosis is impossible

his movement is the movement of différance, only available as a trace which can be elucidated in interpretation. The virtual presence of many voices is interwoven in these intertextual relations. As Barthes puts it, ”the text is not a line of words but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”