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This paper introduces the notion of speculative semiotics as a scientific project within the larger umb- rella of speculative studies. The paper first provides a brief account of the projects of “nuclear semiotics” that investigated how to communicate across long periods of time. These efforts are then connected to the traditions of speculative design and design fiction, whose roots can be traced back to situationism and to Italian radical design. The synergy between semiotics and speculation is articulated around four main dimensions: communication with the future, communicating in the future, semiotics as a tool for speculation and speculation as an object of semiotics. To solidify its proposal, the paper presents a small semiotic speculation related to machine learning and image generation and an overview of the papers presented in this special issue. The conclusions reiterate the potential of this approach and outline a simple roadmap for the development of speculative semiotics.
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Speculative Semiotics

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The article proposes that society should allow any information about the exact locations of radioactive waste repositories to be forgotten and to pass on to further generations only the knowledge about the fact that radioactive waste repositories do exist and about methods of radiation measurement. This is to prevent politically relevant knowledge from being exploited. A biological option is recommended for radiation measurement: in order to make nuclear radiation perceptible to humans, animals should be bred that react to radioactive irradiation with skin discoloration. This animal species should exist as part of the ecological niche of humans, and its role as a radiation detector should be anchored in cultural tradition by introducing a suitable name (e.g., ‘ray cat’) and by proverbs and myths. If someone unknowingly enters a radioactive waste repository, they shall be war-ned by iconic-indexical signs. A representation of a human body part (e.g., an ‘eye brea-king into pieces’) should serve as a visual signal and a siren powered by radiation ener-gy, whose volume and sound correspond to the intensity of radiation, should serve as an acoustic signal. However, the authors are skeptical about the likelihood that these signs will actually be understood by the addressees and accepted as a warning.
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Living detectors and complementary signs: cats, eyes, and sirens

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Evolutionary history, writes Peirce, teaches us that the future influences the present: it conditions it, puts it into question, and places it in a state of planning. To be in evolution, as well as to feel part of a history, means to project oneself, to form an idea, a prefiguration, of what we could be in a future state, no matter how distant.
The logical form of every design and the inventive process is <italic>abduction</italic>, in particular projective abduction, which proposes as the object of discovery an object or event that has yet to be realized. In this sense, abduction can also be defined as the <italic>semiotics of the possible</italic>. Is it possible to outline an abductive design method?
My contribution aims to discuss how abduction, and with it, everything that contributes to the formation of an <italic>inventive habit</italic>, can be considered as the ineliminable step of every design process. This is the case of Speculative Design, which has had the credit of introducing the notion of possibility into design thinking.
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The Abduction of the Future <italic>Between inventive thinking and speculative design</italic>

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Drawing on the field of nuclear semiotics, this article critically discusses the classic problem of marking the location of a deep geological repository to communicate – in the distant future – its presence and potential threats to intruders. The article is divided into two parts. The first part reviews some site-marking solutions that have been proposed in the nearly 40 years of nuclear semiotics’ existence. These solutions are analyzed through the lens of semiotics of space and memory, highlighting different ideas about the purposes of site-marking, ranging from the idea of communicating a warning message to that of transmitting a memory. The second part addresses these strategies of memory transmission by examining some recent “speculative experiments” that use art to convey information about nuclear repositories to future generations. This part of the article examines artistic proposals submitted to a competition organized by ANDRA (the French Agency for Nuclear Waste).
</abstract>

Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies

How to remember a place to forget? The semiotic design of deep geological nuclear repositories, from long-term communication to memory transmission

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In the first part of the article, biosemiotics will be presented in its historical and theoretical dynamics. New areas of research that have emerged in the speculative field of biosemiotics, such as ecosemiotics, will be explored. In all its developments, biosemiotics, which identifies semiosis with life, excludes inorganic matter from any semiotics processes. However, the inorganic world is a fundamental part of the biosphere, especially if we consider the emergence of life. In order to include inorganic matter within semiotic processes of the biosphere we will use James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis reinterpreted in the light of semiotics. If we use the hypothesis of planet Earth as a living system in its complexity and if we consider that every living system is intrinsically semiotic, then inorganic matter must also participate in semiotics processes. In this sense, the semiotics of the inorganic world reveals that it participates in a sort of non-human agency. This type of speculative semiotics engages semiotics processes that are constitutive of matter and that can be read as the story of the planet itself. In conclusion, I will propose a <italic>physiosemiotics</italic> as semiotics of matter.
</abstract>

From biosemiotics to physiosemiotics. Towards a speculative semiotics of the inorganic world.

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Intended as a branch of synthetic biology, xenobiology aims to design and build non-standard life forms, that is to constructively venture into biological otherness. According to this creative and speculative character, it challenges the principles of synthetic biology itself, which is tied to a fundamentally reductionist approach. Xenobiology does not treat life as a closed code, but rather as a field of ontological innovation; in this sense, it evokes a biosemiotic paradigm that accounts for sense-making and non-anthropomorphic interactions.
Xenobiology, however, can also be intended as the “divergent” and most speculative part of astrobiology, namely as a theory of contact with extra-terrestrial life. According to this second meaning, it searches for and speculates on alien biologies. Building on these two meanings, the paper aims to outline a semiotic theory of otherness, or ‘xenosemiotics’, that shifts the focus from communication to morphogenetic information.
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Xenosemiotics. Toward an Alienist Materialism

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The goal of our research is to question the Global North’s narratives of the Future through alternative vernacular semiotic constructions. We will analyze the impact that American vernacular semioverses have on the possibility of generating decolonial figurations of alternative futures, based on the theoretical framework of what we call <italic>Xenofuturism</italic>. Having its roots in Latin America, Xenofuturism has two complementary aspects: the recovery of an active memory of decolonial deconstruction and the understanding of radical alterity. Within these semioverses, we will explore the Aymara cultural figurations for which the future is not ahead but behind, disorienting us from the present, the only temporal dimension in which we exist. In the ancestral cosmogony of the Bolivian-Peruvian Andean, where the Aymara culture stems from the idea of future-past, or that the past can be seen as future, is central. Temporal hybridity tears apart the linearity of Western time and outlines the emergence of figurations of the future that contain a density of temporal tensions in the present.
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Towards Xenofuturism. Decolonial Future Figurations from Vernacular Semioverses

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Published in 1958, The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance is one of the earliest linguistic speculations in the science fiction genre. Directly inspired by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it describes a complex, linguistic engineering experiment set up to transform the essentially peaceful nature of the inhabitants of the planet Pao, so that they might stand up to invaders from another planet. It does so through the creation and implementation of three new languages, as opposed to the one they already speak, to create a merchant class, technical class, and warrior class. While Vance’s extrapolation is excessively schematic, and certainly leans heavily on a concept of linguistic relativism that now sounds rather dated, other science fiction writers have explored in different ways the idea that language influences thought and perception of the world, beginning with Babel 17 by Samuel Delany, and Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (on which the film The Arrival by Denis Villeneuve is based). But of particular importance here is Mother Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin. Her novel is set in a dystopian, patriarchal future, where a group of linguists creates an artificial language, the Làadan, to better express women’s perception of life and as an act of resistance to the dominant male-centred culture, thus anticipating many themes in today’s debate on language and gender.
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The Linguistic Shape of Things to Come

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There’s no need to introduce the first speaker of this morning as he is, arguably, one of the most renowned semioticians in the world. During his brilliant career he has published extensively on the topic of virtual realities and he will present to us his latest research on the defining technology of our times: the Simulatron. Specifically, he will focus on the 2053 incident which took place inside the virtual world of <italic>SimuLife</italic> during which all the users lost the ability to use verbal language and thus inventively resorted to different semiotic forms of meaning-making to communicate and interact. A topic which is of extreme relevance for this 2062 World congress « Semiotics in the Metalife ». So, without further ado, I welcome and leave the floor to Professor Wright..
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Language and communication in future gamified virtual realities

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This paper presents and examines two hypothetical case studies picturing a near future where digital machines have transcended their merely instrumental constitution and participate in performances having religious resemblances. The paper Illustrate how and why a) certain shared activities between humans and ‘machines’ can be understood as ‘religious’ by following Fontanille’s Forms of Life and Wittgenstein’s nonessentialist approach to language; b) animism is the ontology that best describes such intimate and ‘nonutilitarian’ interrelations with digital forms of existence; c) in religious experiences with computational-based entities the type of discourse prevailing the most corresponds to the category of poetic language. In conclusion, both hypothetical scenarios strive to illuminate how the unfolding of poetic and animistic interactions with the computational medium provide experiences that can be ascribed to the notion of religion and, more importantly, how we are already moving towards such intimate religious entanglements with the digital context.
</abstract>

victoriavanessa.dossantosbustamante@unito.it

The animated machine: possible poetic intersections between religion and computational-based entities

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 7 (2024): Issue 1 (June 2024)

Volume 6 (2023): Issue 3 (December 2023)

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Volume 4 (2021): Issue 3 (December 2021)

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Volume 3 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

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Linguistic Frontiers

 Linguistic Frontiers is a peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on research and collaboration in linguistics, life science, mathematics, social science and the humanities, applying formal and experimental approaches from linguistic interdisciplines like quantitative linguistics, psycholinguistics, biosemiotics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, natural language processing and linguistic field research. The guiding ambition of Linguistic Frontiers is to fruitfully transfer and apply methods and topics between these fields of linguistic research. Linguistic Frontiers also publishes reviews of scientific publications, reports on conferences and research programs. We welcome host editors for special theme issues as well.　Subject areas of study include, but are not limited to:  general linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) quantitative linguistics, computational linguistics semiotics philosophy of language biosemiotics, biolinguistics, DNA linguistics cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics applied linguistics glottochronology, stylometry (critical) discourse analysis Linguistic Frontiers is published in English, but occasionally we accept special issues in other world languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German). Authors are requested to submit their papers in doc. format. We offer a double blinded review process with an average length of 3 months. Linguistic Frontiers is a continuation of the journal Czech and Slovak Linguistic Revue (CSLR) http://cslr.upol.cz/archive/, published in print and electronically at Palacký University since 2011. After 2018, CSLR with an extended international editorial board merged into Linguistic Frontiers and has been published by De Gruyter Open (now Sciendo) in electronic form only. Since 2021 we publish three issues per year (June, September, December).　  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.   Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 