Ticket Machine Queue: Town Hall Station; Sydney. 2005 ( Gillian Fuller)

Transit Semiotics documents and analyses how semiotics or ‘meaning machines’ operate in the global space of flows – a space dominated by logistics and control. In particular, it examines those spaces where individuals are controlled and their movements anticipated in advance by a predetermined logic that locks them into sets of prescribed behaviours. What is compelling about such spaces to a semiotician and investigated in detail in this book is the fact that in these locales semiotic techniques are no longer merely oriented toward the coherence of messages but also extend to the organization of multi-sensorial experience.

Situated at the intersection of cultural theory/architecture/new media research, this monograph offers a theoretically sophisticated and empirically based intervention into contemporary debates on affect, and post- and non-representational theories alive in architecture/urban studies, cultural studies and mobility studies today.

Transit Semiotics provides a book length analysis of how the mass mobilization of bodies, objects and ideas changes the how meaning systems operate. In other words, this book argues that the techniques and contexts of meaning making are changing profoundly and that new methods and vocabularies are required to understand these new mixings of meaning and matter and information and bodies.

The book conducts its argument this by analysing four key sites where the regimes of movement and regimes of signs intersect;

1. (Chpt 1. The Arrow) Airport Signage and Control
2. (Chpt 2. The Queue)Queues and Logistical Organisation of Bodies and Data
3. (Chpt 3. The Tube) Screen, Windows and Terminal Architecture
4. (Chpt 4. Prosthesis) Wireless Technologies and Urban Navigation

Each chapter has been subject to ‘ethnographic’ semiotic analysis, supported by series of original images. The argument advanced through the case study chapters will be framed by an Introduction, ‘Its meaning, but not as we know it’.

I'll start posting some of the documentation on the blog shortly ( Jan 2010)