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This article focuses on a few recent publications, all of them devoted to a new semiotic intepretation of Pasolini's theoretical works on cinema. It provides a short summary of the ancient debate between Pasolini and semioticians, then offering an overview of those recent publications. Later, it discusses the indications we can draw from them about the state of art of semiotics, in order to put the basis for future researches even despite the epistemological different positions. The article is a preliminary work that places itsef within a wider attempt to apply Pasolini's theoretical contributions, re-read from today's semiotic point of view, to digital cinema.

Some cultural elements immediately recognizable and repeated in various contexts maintain a productive capability and repeatedly capture the audience's interest. These elements can be defined as cultural icons.

The article identifies three properties of cultural icons: the recognizability, the ability to generate a community, the tendency of being "reworked". The latter recalls Eco's thought that, in order to become "iconic", a text must be "dismembered" and enjoyed one piece at a time. Later, Eco identified two new requirements: a completely furnished world and the abundance of intertextual archetypes. Our aim is to clarify the nature of these archetypes and the distinctive features of the world represented by the iconic texts. Lastly, we examine the Model Reader of these texts, which seem to invite the readers to play with them,

Philippe Breton's appealing theory (L'utopie de la communication) places the birth of the communication society in the Forties of the last century, and recognises it as a post-traumatic value, come to light following the horrors of World War II. The cybernetic scientists, Breton's book main characters, actually insisted on proposing a notion of information which is able to reduce the communication ambiguities. The model is the machine, indifferent towards the irrational tendencies of humans. The man itself needs to become transparent and fully communicating in order to guarantee the social self-regulation. Informal artists are motivated by the same concerns and by the same interest in communication, but through the expression of an alternative model: the conversation - actually an indefinite and informal form. The uncertain and vague artistic forms of the period can be seen as an invitation to an open dialogue. As long as the typical utopian season of the immediate post-war period lasted, communication has been inserted within the production process and put at the consumer culture disposal. Then the informal disappeared, replaced by Pop Art, which has put under the spotlight the new protagonists of history: the serial object and our relationship with it.

First answer to Andrea Bernardelli's starting article about Eco and the forms of serial narration.

In the Andean world of peasant agriculture, wisdom--which is not knowledge--is love, nurturance, symbiosis, conversation, reciprocity, and dance. In the Aymara language, Ukhamakiwa ('that is the way things are') is [...]