Mapping Screenlife’s Semiotic Space: an analysis of the codes employed in the movie Searching...

Abstract

Screenlife is an audiovisual format developed throughout the last decade, which combines codes from both Cinema and new media, producing audiovisual works in which the diegetic space is located entirely within computer and smartphone’s screens. By articulating the concepts of semiosphere and the analysis of cultural texts from Yuri Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics, the concept of intermediality from Agnes Pethő’s Media Archaeology, and the idea of interface as theorized by Alexander Galloway, this paper proposes a mapping of Screenlife’s semiotic space, delineating its central and peripheric codes, as well as identifying the movement of different codes within this space. To do so, we analyse the codes employed in the movie Searching, in order to locate it as a cultural text inside this space, as to draw upon the intermediatic relations that transcodify elements from classical cinema to Screenlife.