Welcome to this pesentation of new research by Juan Mendoza-Collazos, who completed his PhD in cognitive semiotics in Lund in 2022, and now has a position as Associate Professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia. The presentation will be on zoom, but many of us will be in H402 for the seminar. So join is in the room, or on zoom, from 15:00 for introductions.

The rapid proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the creative fields has sparked an intense crisis. Unmediated reliance on GenAI often induces a "shortcut" in the creative process: it bypasses critical intermediate stages of cognitive abstraction and conceptualization, delivering immediate, highly polished visual results that lack grounded, traceable semiotic equivalences to their referents. There is a critical lack of empirical data testing how the use of GenIA in the arts and design affects the semiotic alignment between initial source and final form, threatening the quality of grounded semiotic equivalences between source and target artifacts 

The Intersemiotic Translation Method (ITM) (Mendoza-Collazos 2025) could address this problem, by integrating ITM with a GenAI workflow and by empirically evaluating semiotic equivalences through cognitive and biometric measures. ITM introduces a systematic strategy for research-creation in the arts and design. The method functions by analyzing the underlying meaning structures of a source artifact—such as a painting, poem, or musical piece—and translating them into a completely new target artifact, such as an industrial design artifact.  In my talk, I will describe an experimental study that seeks to complete a first loop of phenomenological triangulation (Mendoza-Collazos, 2022), by evaluating how different levels of AI mediation impact the user's responses during the perception of translated artifacts. 

Mendoza-Collazos, J. (2022). Agency and artefacts: A cognitive semiotic exploration of design. PhD Dissertation, Lund University.

Mendoza-Collazos, J. (2025). Intersemiotic translation as a systematic form-giving method. Nueva Revista del Pacífico [Submitted].