Title: Visual Semiotics, Media Theory, and Cultural Analytics a Personal Journey ---- Tags: Article, 2024 ---- Top_image: 1.jpg ---- Side_images: 2.jpg ---- Download_link: visual-semiotics-media-theory-and-cultural.pdf ---- External_link: ---- Internal_link: ---- Text: This article reflects on my intellectual journey through the fields of visual semiotics, media theory, and cultural analytics. Inspired by foundational texts like Yuri Lotman's Structure of the Artistic Text and Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception, I initially sought to decode the structural elements and aesthetic impact of visual art. Over time, however, I realized the theoretical impossibility of constructing a universal visual semiotics due to the unique properties of artistic images. This realization redirected my focus toward the emerging dimensions of new media in the 1990s, culminating in my exploration of the aesthetics and paradigms introduced by digital tools and interfaces. In the 21st century, I turned my attention to the vast scales of digital culture facilitated by platforms like Instagram and Google, establishing the Cultural Analytics Lab in 2007 to develop computational methods for analyzing visual culture. By leveraging computer vision and artificial intelligence, I sought to examine the immense visual datasets that shape contemporary media environments, bridging traditional semiotic inquiries with modern computational approaches. This work, as detailed in Cultural Analytics (2020), interrogates whether these methods can achieve the semiotic imagination’s goal of understanding cultural artifacts or if their scale and complexity reveal the limits of such ambitions. Ultimately, this article underscores the ongoing interplay between technological methods and the enduring mysteries of artistic meaning and human experience.