“Shout the word semiotics across a room today, and the room will very likely shout back at you, ‘What do you mean, semiotics?’ It is a good question and at the same time, according to semiotics, a uselessly subjective question, for semiotics is the study of meaning itself — or rather how images and words (like semiotics, for example) come to mean anything at all. Put another way, semiotics is about how we derive meaning from context. Brown University semiotics program produced a crop of creators that, if they don’t exactly dominate the cultural mainstream, certainly have grown famous sparring with it.”