Art as research in semiotic technology : The case of David Hockney’s digital art

[Extract] In this chapter we will discuss the question of art as semiotic research generally (see also van Leeuwen et al. 2013) but focus specifically on art as research on semiotic technologies, which we define as digital technologies for the production of texts and other semiotic artifacts that come with built-in preferences for certain ways of using semiotic resources such as text formats, layout, color and movement. In the past few years, semiotic technologies have become of increasing interest to semioticians (see Poulsen et al. 2019 for an overview) and also to artists, as we will see in this chapter, where we will focus in particular on David Hockney’s use of digital technology to create landscape paintings.