Deutsch-italienisches Semiotisches Kolloquium. At the threshold of the second to the third millennium, postmodern philosophers, cultural critics, media theorists, and poststructuralist semioticians are discussing the crisis of representation. In a world of delusions, illusions, simulacra, and virtual realities, but also of constructed realities and of deconstructed textualities, the means of representation, the signs, seem to dissolve and become autonomous semiotic agents in the ongoing process of infinite semiosis. The crisis of representation is the apprehension of a world in which the signs have lost their power to represent anything. Words become deprived of their referent, images are no longer anchored in reality, the media become more and more self-referential, and the result is a world of virtual or hyperrealities.
Texts begin to lose their structural autonomy and ramify in a network of hypertextualities.
Closely related is the debate about the decentering of the semiotic subject. The idea of the autonomous subject seems to be threatened by discovery of the evolutionary and genetic determination of humans as well as by the ever increasing participation of semiotic machines in human processes of communication. The apocalyptic scenario of a posthuman age is symptomatic of the visions of those who fear this variant of the crisis of representation. And yet, the discourse is divided. While cultural critics and postmodern philosophers evoke the scenario of crisis, cognitive and computer scientist have been concerned more and more with research in models of mental or artificial representations of the world in human minds, computers, robots, or even in the minds of artificial lives.