2022 Vol. 13 №4

The article explores one of the modern trends in the semiotic analysis of the city and urban environment — the study of the cultural code of the city. In the contemporary aca­de­mic discourse, the importance of studying the cultural code of the city is growing not so much as a phenomenon but as a system of decoding and cognizing each specific city in its own con­text. This aspect is closely related to the analysis of the problem of enhancing urban identity and local patriotism, as well as identifying the unique cultural meanings of the city as part of exp­loring its image in the external environment. As the basis for the study of the cultural code of the city, it is proposed to consider the following factors encoding of urban environ­ment: a) nature and climate, b) texts, where the city is conceptualized and presented in litera­ry context, c) historical events associated with the city, d) spatial characteristics, e) symbolic relationship with famous individuals (“geniuses of place”). The process of coding is inf­luenced by other features of the city, which form economic, culinary, tourist, digital and other codes of the city, and their decoding can be carried out both on the everyday level and on the expert (academic) level. The author identifies the main ways of expressing, capturing and communicating the city’s cultural code in signs of different origin.

Since the sixties of the twentieth century, different algorithms for using poetic texts in the transformation of urban space have emerged. Poetic discourse is being increasingly contextualized in space, whose role in the contemporary cultural system and specific tasks of urbanism has been growing. In the urban context, poetry may acquire different forms — street performances, advertisements, murals and other types of visual poetry. It may turn the city into a venue for a festival of urban poetry. The poetic text interacts with urban objects (monuments, train stations, airports, bus stops, and benches), including QR codes and other technical means. The article explores the process of integrating poetic texts into urban space using the example of the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Spain and countries of Latin America. Urban poetry contributes to overcoming the linearity and elitism of the poetic text, shifting the emphasis from verbal to the visual or performative component of the text, and strengthening the function of the addressee. As a result, poetry acquires an applied character. The city becomes an instrument of mediated poetic communication and can be used for the representation of the city.

The article attempts to determine the conceptual foundations for analyzing the influence of the artistic design of the temples of medieval Vladimir on the formation of the urban sacred space. The study aims to use the example of Vladimir during the reign of Andrei Bogolyubsky and Vsevolod III to substantiate the city-forming significance of exterior sculptural programs as a visual text that encodes the key parameters of the semantic organisation of urban environment. Hermeneutic presuppositions and initial cultural conditions for such an analysis are formulated. Based on the visual semiotics of Umberto Eco, it is shown that the external temple decoration of Vladimir acts both as an aesthetic object and as a semiotic construction. In line with the logical semantics of Gottlob Frege, the denotative (meaningful) and connotative (semantic) levels of coding and decoding of sacred visual texts of Vladimir cathedrals are defined. The basic references of the central image of the exterior plastics — the biblical David, as well as those narratives that are determined by these references are classified. The mechanism of localisation of universal religious narratives is shown through the distinction between text and subtext. Thus, the role of external temple decoration in constructing a sacred urban topic is determined. As a result, the possibility of interpreting the temple decoration of medieval Vladimir as a visual text is substantiated, which, firstly, expresses the implied meanings associated with specific images through code and context, and, secondly, translates these meanings into the environment, forming the cultural space of the city.

The article describes the personality of Ivan K. Aivazovsky, a man of 'frontiers' who lived in a polyphonic city where Russian, Armenian and Turkic were spoken. The message of the article is the following: Aivazovsky was not only a gifted artist but also a diplomat, a responsible and upstanding citizen who appreciated the values of the city and was concerned about its problems, Armenian community and people. Aivazovsky changed the social space of the city, the (infra)structure and the image of Feodosia. The marinist was a man of culture, for whom money was important only as a form of donation and charity, ennobling the city and generating a new urban text and urban syntagmas. His works were a product of Feodosia, but at the same time, the painter’s personality was shaped by the city/sea. It was this combination of talent and the spirit of the place that synergised transnational culture: the periphery of tsarist Russia produced the central texts of the imperial policy of cultural memory.

This paper suggests a sociolinguistic approach to typographic landscape analysis. Typography is discussed as a semiotic resource with meaning-making potential. The paper argues that typographic variation provides dynamic indexical links to social practice. It obtains its ‘social voice’ and becomes an integral part of the social context in which it is perceived as typical and able to generate particular socially loaded meanings. This research is in line with contemporary social semiotics, interactional linguistics, and discourse studies and is based on typographic meaning as a key notion providing the basis for social actors’ ideological ascriptions. Typography and typographic meaning formation are discussed within modern Russian urban space. It is argued that urban area enables addressing agency and interaction aspects of social communication. The city space provides access points for observing, shaping and interpreting meanings in the social context. As cases in point, the paper discusses the typefaces such as Antiqua font used in pre-revolutionary Russia, lettering imitating the font of Soviet newspapers, Handwriting font, and Stencil font and their em­bed­dedness in current socio-cultural practice. The analysis uses advertising, social and com­mercial texts. The findings indicate that typography should be considered as a social meaning which results from indexical connections of a sign and the context it is used in. Semio­tification of space allows observing stronger reflexivity and, therefore, metapragmatic activity of communicants.