Scientist - performers - audiences. Different modes of meaning-making

This paper provides a brief overview of the emergence of dance in the field of cognitive neuroscience and sustains the importance to understand-ing how dance is conceptualised in other disciplines in order to design valuable future research employing dance. It is proposed that recognising the distinct modes of meaning-making will undoubtedly affect and advance the scientific progress understanding by modes of meaning-making the phenomenological difference in how a dancer relates to a movement phrase from how a scientist or a choreographer watches, interprets, and experiences a dance phrase. The overall message is that the different modes of meaning-making requires consideration in scientific studies where a new generation of artists-scientists is needed, driven to excel in both, data handling and artistic purposes.//Abstract in Spanish:Este artículo proporciona una breve descripción de la aparición de la danza en el campo de la neurociencia cognitiva y sostiene que es importante entender cómo se conceptualiza la danza en otras disciplinas para diseñar in-vestigaciones futuras que la empleen. Se propone que reconocer los distintos modos de creación de significado afectará y avanzará el progreso científico entendiendo por modos de creación de significado la diferencia fenomenológica en la forma en que un bailarín se relaciona con una frase de movimiento de cómo lo hace un científico o un coreógrafo. El mensaje general es que los dif-erentes modos de creación de significado requieren consideración en estudios científicos donde son necesarios una nueva generación de artistas-científicos, impulsados a sobresalir tanto en el manejo de datos como en los propósitos artísticos

Non-human Intention and Meaning-Making: An Ecological Theory

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97550-4_12Social robots have the potential to problematize many attributes that have previously been considered, in philosophical discourse, to be unique to human beings. Thus, if one construes the explicit programming of robots as constituting specific objectives and the overall design and structure of AI as having aims, in the sense of embedded directives, one might conclude that social robots are motivated to fulfil these objectives, and therefore act intentionally towards fulfilling those goals. The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of this description of social robotics on traditional notions of intention and meaningmaking, and, in particular, to link meaning-making to a social ecology that is being impacted by the presence of social robots. To the extent that intelligent non-human agents are occupying our world alongside us, this paper suggests that there is no benefit in differentiating them from human agents because they are actively changing the context that we share with them, and therefore influencing our meaningmaking like any other agent. This is not suggested as some kind of Turing Test, in which we can no longer differentiate between humans and robots, but rather to observe that the argument in which human agency is defined in terms of free will, motivation, and intention can equally be used as a description of the agency of social robots. Furthermore, all of this occurs within a shared context in which the actions of the human impinge upon the non-human, and vice versa, thereby problematising Anscombe's classic account of intention.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

I cried to dream again:discovery and meaning-making in walking simulators

This paper proposes a reclaiming of walking simulators as rich, self-contained, layered, and complex game worlds that pull their audiences in and engage them through experiential aesthetics and the mechanics of exploration. In order to do so, we will be focusing on the relationship between environment and narrative in two notable examples of the genre - Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) and Proteus (Ed Key and David Kanaga, 2013). We will argue that, similar to immersive, site-specific performance, the (island) setting enables story, constricts and conditions movement, generates atmosphere, and immerses the player in an experiential, self-contained world. Furthermore walking simulators engage their players in an immersive environment by allowing the fulfillment of the environment’s action potential (Di Benedetto, 2012). We will draw from literary, games and performance studies, namely Kincaid’s typologies of Islomania (“island as dream state, the object of desire, the ideal”) and Insularity (“the island as prison or fortress that holds us apart from the rest of the world”) (2007, 463), Di Benedetto’s argument for action potential in set design (2012), and Jenkin’s properties of environmental storytelling (2004). Dear Esther and Proteus are islands in that they are self-contained spaces with their own rules and regulations. They are also places on the fringe of mainstream gaming culture that elude the rules and norms of the ‘mainland’ and push the boundaries of what games can do. The peaceful, single player, first person, nonconflictual, non-competitive gameplay enabled by the island setting enhances affective, narrative, spatial, and kinaesthetic involvement (Calleja, 2011:38). The tension that arises from this duality – the island being highly desirable but at the same time inaccessible – is what has fueled the creative interest of generations of artists (Kincaid 2007). Placing the story on an island provides the designers with an easy solution to limiting the gameworld. It is also a good way of tapping into the player’s cultural references that will influence their experience and reception while also creating genre-specific expectations from the player. The world of the game is easier to accept because islands have particular units of space and time, the presence of any object on an island could be easily justified, and elements of magic or the supernatural could potentially exist there unbeknownst to the mainlanders. Islands have a different logic in that they are paradoxically both a safe space and a space that can be very hard to escape. The limited mechanics in terms of possible actions reinforces the game-as-dream-state interpretation in both games, but it is the combination of limited mechanics and individual aesthetic design choices for each particular game that positions Proteus as Islomania and Dear Esther as Insularity. This paper is a starting point for a bridging between walking simulators and immersive performance, in using the environment dramaturgically to generate meaning. Both art forms design a complex experience; they draw the participant into a self-contained, sensory and experiential world and cast her in a double role as both observer and performer. Walking and exploration are the essential mechanics for placing the body (be it physical or virtual) within the designed fictional world. The Island as limitation and, simultaneously, imaginative stimulus is a functional metaphor that illustrates both Machon’s notion of in-its-own-worldness (2013) and Calleja’s fluid, bi-directional concept of incorporation (2011)

Transduction and Meaning–Making Issues Within Multimodal Messages

This paper analyzes transduction as an action of transposing information from one mode to another within the communication process and its implications in terms of meaning and coherence of a multimodal message. First, I discuss the multimodal method and its conjunction with some key concepts such as: sign, meaning, mode, transduction. Secondly, I approach transduction as an essential method of translating messages across the media variety, describing my interdisciplinary approach – that brings together semiotics and communications – and proposing a framework of explanation for transduction in the field of advertising. Drawing from a previous model (Culache 2015), I illustrate the way transduction takes place and identify its meaning-making issues while introducing the concept of ‘dominant mode.

Mind, Cognition, Semiosis: Ways to Cognitive Semiotics

What is meaning-making? How do new domains of meanings emerge in the course of child’s development? What is the role of consciousness in this process? What is the difference between making sense of pointing, pantomime and language utterances? Are great apes capable of meaning-making? What about dogs? Parrots? Can we, in any way, relate their functioning and behavior to a child’s? Are artificial systems capable of meaning-making? The above questions motivated the emergence of cognitive semiotics as a discipline devoted to theoretical and empirical studies of meaning-making processes. As a transdisciplinary approach to meaning and meaning-making, cognitive semiotics necessarily draws on a different disciplines: starting with philosophy of mind, via semiotics and linguistics, cognitive science(s), neuroanthropology, developmental and evolutionary psychology, comparative studies, and ending with robotics. The book presents extensively this discipline. It is a very eclectic story: highly abstract problems of philosophy of mind are discussed and, simultaneously, results of very specific experiments on picture recognition are presented. On the one hand, intentional acts involved in semiotic activity are elaborated; on the other, a computational system capable of a limited interpretation of excerpts from Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass is described. Specifically, the two roads to cognitive semiotics are explored in the book: phenomenological-enactive path developed by the so-called Lund school and author’s own proposal: a functional-cognitivist path

Museum Learning via Social Media: (How) Can Interactions on Twitter Enhance the Museum Learning Experience?

Museums are rich sources of artifacts, people and potential dialogic interactions. Recent developments in web technologies pose big challenges to museums to integrate such technologies in their learning provision. The study presented here is concerned with the potential of how school visits to museums can be enhanced by the use of social media. The Museum of London (MoL) is selected as the site of the study and the participants were a Year 9 History class (13-14 years old) in a secondary school in Milton Keynes. It draws on Falk and Dierking’s (2000) Contextual Model of Learning and considers evidence of meaning making from students’ tweets and activity on-site. Observational data during the visit, the visit’s Twitter stream and post-visit interview data with the participants is presented and analysed. It is argued that use of Twitter, a microblogging platform (http://twitter.com), enhances the social interaction around museum artifacts and thus, the process of shared construction of meaning making, which can enrich the museum experience

Film documentary : nodding syndrome: an illness in the making

This film documentary is based on fifteen months of anthropological fieldwork in northern Uganda and shows the complexity of nodding syndrome and the many different narratives, explanatory models and coping styles regarding this affliction. In attempting to understand what nodding syndrome is and how it is experienced, we should look at the context in which meaning making takes place