The Legal Semiotics of the Digital Face, special issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

How can semiotics and, especially, legal semiotics contribute to the understanding of how we make sense of such an important semiotic token as the face in the contemporary digital world? How have digital technologies changed our relationship with meaning-making and the face? How have digital technologies modified our own understanding of being in the world through a body and a face? The face is traditionally understood as the indexical (as part of our body), iconic (we live immersed in representations and remediations of our and others’ faces) and symbolic (we use it to signify ourselves and mark our presence) pivot of our identity. That is the case even when the face is present only in absentia and as a representation (when we modify, substitute, hide or delete it). New semiotic constructions, whose presence is exponentially growing in our everyday experience, such as “artificial intelligence” and “big data”, do challenge our traditional understanding of the nature, agency, and accountability of the face – let us think of face detection and face synthesis technologies – in different areas such as health, security, privacy, economics, education, entertainment, and social networks. Reflecting on the status of the face in the digital era is, therefore, an urgent philosophical and semiotic challenge, especially in relation to legal and normative systems.