ABSTRACT
On the one hand, the dimensionality of contemporary inhabiting lies in the aspectuality of the physical, ontological, and phenomenal entity and, on the other hand, in its digitized and fulfilled synthesis in the ethereal zone of e-society, often vitalized by artificial intelligence (AI). In between, the sense of a hybrid, pulsating, creative, and extended world becomes manifest. Semiotics, as a discipline that specializes in the study of signs and the stabilization of fluid categories, is invoked to deal with the relationship and transition between these two magnitudes, giving foundation to and composing the mediation in which the processes of reading, writing, translation, and transduction from one sphere to the other take place: signification thus settles in the incorporation and unbundling of intersecting spaces, of physical-algorithmic magnitudes articulated individually and collectively in the interlude that such dynamism generates and propitiates. Take the example of the face: while the embedded face tends to give evidence of the material substance whose form it conveys, the virtual face, on the other hand, tends to be the speaker for a transient dematerialization destined initially to occupy the ephemeral state of binary language and then, at times, to slide into that of disappearance. While the digital images of faces perpetuate, proliferate, and, ephemerally, are sometimes illusorily forgotten, the data attached to them instead establish tangible material mechanisms. Physical-algorithmic extension, which also includes shaping by AI, is therefore of interest to us from various points of view concerning mainly its heterogeneous and multifaceted entity: we would like to understand what gradients, intensities, and varieties of physical-algorithmic bodies we know; how they are generated and developed; what kinds of corporeality they include or exclude; and, above all, in what spaces such syncretism takes place, how they are grafted into the real and digital territory, and how their habitability is constituted.
