Image and text. Animal face selfies

In this talk, I will discuss a marginal type of image found in popular culture, which I call "animal face selfies". These are selfies that produce a particular effect of a face of an animal. I examine this effect as a complex semiotic phenomenon: the intersection of human interaction with other animal species and with other humans, the conceptual and interpersonal semantics of the image, and the transformation of the concept of a portrait as a result of photographic technologies and practices in social media. I see such research as a practice of "dense context" semiotics, which allows us to imagine that the meaning of an image emerges in a wide field of experience – from biology to social technologies.

In my disciplinary identity, I am a semiotician. At the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University, I teach several different subjects in semiotics and literature, which are my main interests.

(Photo by Aistė Šivytė)