This paper aims to study the changes of gesture between portraits and portrait photography in the modern era of East Asia, where traditionally ancestral portraits have been enshrined and treasured with high esteem. During the pre-modern period, a portrait was required to preserve ‘a likeness to an object' so that it was considered to represent essential features of the object. Major goal of such portraits is to indicate virtuously ideal figures and to utilize them for the purpose of education, religion, and recording. As the conventional East Asian paintings have placed special importance on expressing a likeness as well as its spirit of the object, “Jeonsin-Sajo” [伝神写照 (a theory suggesting that portrait is what transmits spirit by eye)] and “Ilho-bulsa” [一毫不似 (a theory suggesting that if the portrait is different from the actual person even a single hair, it becomes a whole different person)] have strongly influenced the painting traditions. To be specific, the word “Sajo” is to describe a shape of an object and “Jeonsin” is to draw spirit, which is hidden within an object, so that “Jeonsin-Sajo” is a style of painting that expresses the object's spirit by shape. On the other hand, the word “Ilho” means a single hair that represents the mind of deceased ancestor. On the contrary, such portraits present less movement and the lack of emotion. East Asian sitters, in most cases surrounded by empty background, suggest no particular lively gesture. During the pre-modern period, however, there are several specific characteristics derived from the Chinese portraits, which face the frontal view with the hand position of one on the knee and the other holding a belt on the waist, on the chair covered with the whole tiger skin, and with the placement of the shoes on the platform, which is similar to the shape of Chinese character “Pal” [八(the number eight)]. On the other hand, the Korean portraits are strongly opposed to the pose of hands, which prefer the folded ones, so that they are interpreted not to describe the self-expression and arrogance conducted by the pose of the hands and the frontal view. Compared to the Chinese and Japanese ones, the Korean portraits particularly served for memorial service and ancestor worship ceremony. However, the chair covered with tiger skin, which signifies social wealth and pride, and the placement of shoes in the shape of “Pal”, were widespread until the early modern age of Korea. The photographic portraiture imported by the Western missionary, eventually had a large impact on the East Asian portraits as well as the visual culture of Korea, China, and Japan in the modern period. Hence, the changes of gesture in terms of photography were adjusted and modified by the preference of East Asian society.

The paper tries to explore the potentialities of a cultural semiotics of images through both a comparison with other semiotic approaches and through the example of a specific analysis: a cultural semiotic study of De Chirico's painting Torino printanière. The traditional Greimasian approach to the semiotic analysis of images, it is argued, fails in explaining how their meaning depends on the cultural contexts of their production and reception. Likewise, the traditional Echian approach underestimates the fact that ideally cooperative spectators are nowadays more an exception that the norm: as a consequence of the globalization and digitalization of images, more and more people lack an adequate “encyclopedia” to interpret images they are confronted with. The paper therefore claims that a cultural semiotics of images is urgently needed, and contends that the school of Moscow/Tartu can provide many suggestions about how to conceive it. According to Jurij M. Lotman's theory, indeed, images must be interpreted in relation to their semiosphere, a hypothesis ― formulated through the meta-discourse of semiotics ― about how a culture produces and manages meaning both inside such culture and in relationships with what such culture considers as external to it. However, the paper points out, in Lotman's theory the semiosphere is not only a repository of texts, but also a mechanism that produces them. As a consequence, semioticians can both study a semiosphere in order to understand the meaning of an image, and analyze an image in order to understand the meaning of a semiosphere. The paper concludes that only the synergic approach between micro-semiotic and macro-semiotic analysis ― including the methods of post-greimasian semiotics ― is able to formulate solid hypotheses not only on what images meant at the moment of their production, but also what they mean when they are received in a completely different semiosphere, by people whose visual culture is sometimes radically different from that of the image's original context.

All scientists agree that Africa, the continent of the longest inhabitation, is the “Cradle of Humankind”. In this regard, the South African site of Swantkrans Cave, a World Heritage Site by Unesco, is considered the territory where Homo erectus, the “first” man stood up and walked, this is where the Man became bipedal. If I brought this idea to my status as researcher “Companies” and language and if I assemble these two fundamental changes “man up” that “works”, this is probably the first attempt to subscribe to the “territory” of the human vitality. This is also where the same man committed the first expression to identify themselves around fire and through the vis-à-vis orality of its environment. This paper aims to comprehend the political sociology of identity rather than the effects of the development of the sociology of complexity and the identity of complexity of imazeghen, by raising following issues: 1) orality and Amazighité 2) regionalization of Amazighité 3) Amazighité and territoriality 4) what is the communicative dimension of orality?

This paper aims to elucidate what photographic meaning is with reference to 'punctum,' the central term introduced in Barthes' Camera Lucida. Separated from structuralist model, the project in the book seems to rely on a sort of phenomenology that is for private writing. However, a number of methodologies were implied in Barthes' writing and among them are Peirce's semiotics and Lacan's psychology. What is revealed here is how Barthes seeks the photographic meaning in terms of indexical feature of photographic signification and traumatic experiences the punctum of a photograph provides.

For last fifty years, studies on the history of writing have changed various sides: among the domain of linguists, many of them increased in the graphic aspect. Reviewing back to the ideas of Saussure on writing as a transcript of the language, studies of writing turn to its symbolic and spatial dimension. While all human sciences have participated in this revision, especially philosophy and ethnology, we probably see the backlash of the development of new image technologies, although they consist of languages and mathematical writings.

Solid relationships between aesthetics and ethics are always discussed, as so are many complex ramifications between the sensible and the intelligible. The question comes to enrich a third term which is often set back from these basic polarities: the aesthesia, the world of the senses, sensations, which are intended to cooperate. Schematically, it creates a fundamental relationship among aesthesia (sensations), aesthetic (forms) and ethics (values), which governs the approach of the sensible world and directs a complex issue such as the representation taste, the taste sensation, emotion gourmet, in terms of communication. It is understood that the heart of the semiotization process of taste, served by new technologies which are defined as aesthetic, must deal with strategies of the indexical representation in connection with the aesthesia and the sensations of taste. The simplest way is to articulate the purpose of aesthesia, assuming that the logic of representation is deployed in the registered aesthetics in order to represent the flavor and the form of system with guaranteed consistency and uniformity in the figurative strategies. However, it is not able to think a possible system to articulate aesthesia, synesthesia, hyperesthesia, and anesthesia with aesthetic resources outside of food life forms ethically at this time.

Like in all human relationships, the care relationship happens in a space-time environment where there is an encounter between the care giver and the care receiver. Care relationships mobilize all our senses and require a singular physical contact, thus, the hand becomes a technical mediation as well as symbolic of human communication. This article aims to comprehend the sensory, perceptible and symbolic dimensions that are involved in this perceptible experience from a cross-disciplinary point of view of the Information and Communication Sciences (ICS). Questioning the areas of the care relationship with a multidimensional view, characteristic of the ICS, can permit to suggest new viewpoints and to lead towards other ways of seeing proper to this research. We are coming into the era of a new confluence between the ICS and the sciences of health and care.

This paper discusses a possible paradigm shift within the field of intercultural communication. Distinguishing cross-cultural and intercultural approaches from historical and epistemological standpoints, it echoes the need expressed by scholars to develop a new model for examining intercultural interactions. Arguing that nation-centric studies have difficulty accounting for the complexity of communication processes taking place between foreigners, the author suggests that communication science and a “semiopragmatics” approach to interpersonal interactions can be used to reconceptualise the relationship between cultures, identities and communication, taking into account the mediating role of the contextual factors specific to the encounter itself.

Dealing with Smart Information (Intelligence of Information) the purpose of this paper is to enlighten the various paradigms of information. First we propose a definition of information including its heterogeneous and scientific aspects both at the same time. Second, we place the concept of information in its context, reaffirming there is no information without the concepts of information user, data and knowledge. Then we conclude by the sketch of new paradigms and by offering two ways of future research in actor-centered information theory.