SEMIOVOX 3Q2024

Broadcast by Josh Glenn, Posted September 28, 2024

I’m cofounder of the semiotics-fueled branding consultancy SEMIOVOX, editor of the consultancy’s eponymous website, and I’m the “convenor” of SEMIOFEST SESSIONS. Here’s a round-up of what we’ve been doing for the past three months…

Also see: SEMIOVOX 2022 | SEMIOVOX 2023 | SEMIOVOX 1Q2024 | SEMIOVOX 2Q2024.

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

SEMIOVOX’s methodology provides insight and inspiration — to brand and organization strategy, marketing, design, innovation, and consumer insights teams, as well as to their agency partners — regarding the unspoken local/global “codes” that help shape perceptions of and guide behavior within product categories and/or sociocultural territories.

During 3Q2024, our projects included (but were not limited to) the following.

Scene from the videogame Red Dead Redemption 2 (not the client)

WESTERN NOIR CODES. Via Labbrand Paris, Ramona Lyons and I collaborated on an audit of Western Noir codes — on behalf of an action-adventure videogame franchise. This involved closely analyzing many Western, revisionist Western, and noir movies and shows. (Semiovox’s sister agency, Consumer Eyes, conducted consumer research.) Content creation.

SOPHISTICATED WHOLESOME CODES. I conducted an audit of Sophisticated Wholesome codes — on behalf of a videogame company developing a stylized game. This involved closely analyzing many videogames, movies, TV series, vinyl figurines, and more. Game character and world design.

CIVIL WAR & OLD WEST CODES: Via Labbrand Paris, Ramona Lyons and I continued to collaborate on an audit of Civil War and Old West codes — on behalf of an action-adventure videogame franchise. This involved closely analyzing many Civil War-, Reconstruction-, Western-, and revisionist Western-themed movies and shows. (Semiovox’s sister agency, Consumer Eyes, conducted consumer research.)

TEACHING & SPEAKING

This Fall semester, I returned to RISD as an adjunct critic in the Masters of Industrial Design (MID) program. I’m co-teaching two sections of GRADUATE THESIS MAPPING & NARRATIVE.

(Here’s my faculty page.)

Shown above: RISD MID students conceptualizing their thesis projects.

Ichigo Kurosaki, a fictional decoder from BLEACH

In September, I hosted a Semiofest Session on the topic of FICTIONAL DECODERS. (See SEMIOFEST SESSIONS, below.) The sessionists had previously contributed to the DECODER series, here at SEMIOVOX.

SEMIOFEST SESSIONS

I’m cofounder of and “convenor” for SEMIOFEST SESSIONS , a monthly-ish series of online get-togethers — put on under the aegis of Semiofest — intended not only to share best practices among, but to nurture collegiality and friendship within the global semio community. Here’s the 3Q2024 lineup:

JULY: LIMINALITY POST-PORTO (II). The theme of Semiofest Porto, in May, was LIMINALITY. The conference was a great success… but we all wanted more! So Susanna Fránek invited Christo Kaftandjiev, Ashley Mauritzen, and Marie Lena Tupot to chat with us about: Heroic Myths of Transition in Mass and Marketing Comms, The Crisis of Western Masculinity, and Gender as the Epitome of Liminality. This was the second of two liminality-themed post-Porto sessions.

SEPTEMBER: FICTIONAL DECODERS. Encountering a talented “decoder” in a work of fiction is entertaining, and for semioticians it can also prove inspiring. So I invited Becks Collins, Whitney Dunlap-Fowler, Eugene Gorny, Rachel Lawes, Chirag Mediratta, and Antje Weißenborn to discuss a few favorite decoders from literature, movies, TV shows, and anime too!

SEMIOVOX.COM

I’m the editor here at SEMIOVOX, our consultancy’s eponymous website. Here’s what we published during 3Q2024.

MAKING SENSE WITH… is a series of Q&As dedicated to understanding what makes semioticians tick. I’ve asked my commercial-semiotics colleagues from around the world to answer a set of leading questions. Here’s the 3Q2024 lineup:

Coming up in 4Q2024:

DECODER is a 25-part series — the contributors to which are commercial semioticians from around the world — that explores fictional semiotician-esque action as depicted in books, movies, TV shows, etc. The series wrapped up during 3Q2024 with the following installments:

Paulina Goch-Kenawy (POLAND) on THE SENSE OF AN ENDING | Eugene Gorny (THAILAND) on SHUTTER ISLAND & FRACTURED.

2011: Cynthia Olavrria, star of Telemundo’s “Y Vuelo a Ti,” after making a deposit at a Chase ATM.

The CASE FILE series — the contributors to which are commercial semioticians from around the world — shares stories of things we were amazed and amused to learn, whether or not they proved useful to the client. Here’s the 3Q2024 lineup:

Coming up in 4Q2024:

In September, SEMIOVOX cross-posted a few installments from my HILOBROW series dedicated to 20th-century pop-culture frogs (which served at the time, in my analysis, as symbols of “too-muchness”). Here’s the 3Q2024 lineup:

MR. TOAD | CLASS CLOWN | MICHIGAN J. FROG | KERMIT.

Previous POP BESTIARY series: OWL | BEAVER. Also: MICKEY MOUSE.

SEMIOVOX continues to offer glimpses into various audits we’ve done via installments in the long-running series CODE-X. Series installments from 3Q2024 include:

Photo of Barragán architecture (Mexico City) shared to Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

In September, we added a final installment — MEXICAN PINK, by Mexico City’s Adelina Vaca — in our COLOR CODEX series, via which our semio colleagues from around the world has explored the unexpected associations evoked for each of us by specific colors found in the material world.

Also see: SEMIOVOX updates from 2022 | 2023 | 1Q2024 | 2Q2024.

MIT PRESS: RADIUM AGE

I’m the founding editor of the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE proto-sf reissue series.

In August and September, we reissued two titles:

Edward Shanks’ THE PEOPLE OF THE RUINS (1919–20), with a new introduction by Paul March-Russell (August 6). “A penetrating tale of near-future disillusion that gazes upon a future made by World War I. Shanks, in 1920, is us, now.” — John Clute. Cover illustration by Seth. See this title at the MIT Press website.
Francis Stevens’ THE HEADS OF CERBERUS AND OTHER STORIES (1926), edited and introduced by Lisa Yaszek (September 17). “The stories in this collection are richly evocative of their time’s vision for our possible future, and their influence on the genre continues to broadly underpin the language by which contemporary works now explore today’s futures.” — Suzanne Palmer. Cover illustration by Seth. See this title at the MIT Press website.

Also during 3Q2024, I worked with the MIT Press team to get our Spring 2025 titles — J.D. Beresford’s THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER (March 2025, with a new introduction by Ted Chiang) and John Taine’s THE GREATEST ADVENTURE (March 2025, with a new introduction by S.L. Huang) — ready to go to press.

The series’ Fall 2025 titles also moved into the production stream during this period. These are: Marietta Shaginyan’s YANKEES IN PETROGRAD (August 2025, translated into English and introduced by Jill Roese); and the anthology BEFORE SUPERMAN: SUPERHUMANS OF THE RADIUM AGE (August 2025, edited and introduced by yours truly).

More RADIUM AGE series updates: 2022 | 2023 | 1Q2024 | 2Q2024 | 3Q2024.

HILOBROW

HILOBROW is SEMIOVOX’s sister website. Here are a few semio- and cultural analysis-related series and posts from 3Q2024.

I’ve continued to add new installments in SCHEMATIZING, a series via which I’m attempting to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.

SEMIOPUNK is an irregular series dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s a sampling of the 3Q2024 lineup:

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ | SNOW CRASH | VURT

More HILOBROW updates: 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 1Q2024 | 2Q2024 | 3Q2024.

On to 4Q2024…

Tags: Josh Glenn, Semiovox

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