Instead of something else.
Semiotics on extremes.

Spanish |

Contact |

Home page |

Paraphrasing the semioticians of the Mi group: "I can be deceived by an iconic sign but then it is no longer for me a sign of an object but the object itself". Or as Umberto Eco writes: "The true and complete iconic sign of Queen Elisabeth should be Queen Elisabeth herself", although, according to Eco, this kind of sign has no sense.

The author of these articles is interested in the iconic signs just to culminate the deceit, what he denominates super icons, as well as the iconic signs that had hipotetically transgressed this limit, what he denominates ultra signs (abundantly described in science fiction).

In the context of super icons he analyzes his own image in the mirror, a small family video, a corpse hidden in an ancient photo, the image obtained trough a solid projector, an amnesic as the reincarnation into himself, the memory reconstructed stage where the terrorist organization ETA offers its messages and the actress Hellen Mirren in the paper of a queen still alive. As ultra signs he proposes the human beings deprived of "aura" produced by the science fiction character Solaris, a far away odd planet conceived by the pole writer Stanislaw Lem.

In the other extreme the resercher locates abstraction. As iconism depends on an object that looks like its significant, in other words, the recognition of an object in one significant, abstraction depends on the absence of an object in iconic sense. From this point of view the author is trying to explain expressions of abstraction like Merlet's Scorpionfish, strange and expressive creature, a ionosferic phenomenon like the Aurora Borealis and artistic objects like a minimalist sculpture of Tony Smith, a Roberto Botija's photograph of a death goat or a cat in an impossible posture registered in an Ana Nieto's photograph.

The last of the objects this researcher is studying is unusual: being, the whole universe, everything at all. Taken universe as a sign, the pertinent question would be ¿what class of sign we are talking about, an icon or an index? is the universe representation or abstraction? Concerning this the author uses an artwork of CVA (Juan Luis Moraza, María Luisa Fernández) that consists in a 20 cm. diameter aluminium sphere.