A long-term participant in the Semiotics Seminar of the late Göran Sonesson, Dr. Fred Andersson is an expert in pictorial semiotics, working in Finland in the past decade. Luckily, he will be in Lund on this date, and he has promised to give an accessible as well as relevant presentation on the subject, along the lines of the title. All are welcome to the link from 15:00 with cameras on, or to H402. Note: let Jordan know if you plan to join the post-seminar at Valvet by Sept 29, Monday.

Much academic reasoning about visual representation has been unnecessarily limited by the tacit assumption that a picture typically frames one single portion of space at one singular moment in time. The technological and historical reasons for the dominance of this norm are easy to explain. The optical principle for how a scene can be naturalistically captured in the “dark room” of Camera Obscura was known by Muslim philosophers, put into practise by Florentine painters in the Fifteenth century, and automatized with the invention of the modern camera. It has since totally dominated global visual culture and mass-produced media. 

If we widen our horizon to encompass pre-modern and non-western cultures we can see, however, that unity of space in time in pictures is the exception rather than the rule. Historically and interculturally, there is not one single or absolute pictorial space. How the inscription of objects, actors and events on a surface should be interpreted has often been less dependent on clear visual framing, which has often been lacking, and more on the spatial, indexical and textual context of the inscription. The current phenomenon of generative visual AI is based, however, on mapping the statistical probability of pictorial pixel patterns in relation to semantic labels activated by “prompts”. Technologically and discursively, visual AI is determined by the notion of singular spatiotemporal units that can be reduced to framed grids. It would then be of common interest for visual culture studies (including art history) and cognitive semiotics to observe how this technology affects and limits the cognition and representation of semiotic relationships that cannot be reduced to surface aspects of optical projection – “putting the AI craze into perspective”.

Squire, Michael. "Framing the Roman Still Life". In Squire and Platt (eds.), The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History, 188-255. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2017. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316677155.006

Westberg, Gunnar & Kvåle, Gunhild. “The generic uniqueness of AI imagery: A critical approach to Dall-E as semiotic technology”. In Discourse & Society 36, 4 (2025): 575-598. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265241274788