Special section: The face in the sphere: towards a cultural semiotics of the visage

The Special Section presents contributions addressing and reviewing the main theoretical and methodological hypotheses of Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics in relation to a particular object: the face. As ERC Project FACETS is unveiling, faces hold a special place and play a central role in the semiosphere. They are sign-producing devices, widely circulating in the semiosphere as physiognomy, representation and evocation. Moreover, faces are some of the most represented objects in human historyTechnology has evolved in parallel with the social history of the face and new digital techniques for face recognition and representation constantly add new meanings to the semiosphere. This Special Section addresses the presence and the meanings of the face, with keen attention to the digital semiosphere and links these to the blurring of cultures and paradigms in the contemporary semiosphere. The objective is to offer a deeper understanding and a set of innovative tools for practical analysis of semiotic mechanisms of culture that would afford new insights into contemporary cultural dynamics related to face and face representation, presenting several examples taken from the present-day digital semiosphere.