Select Wider: Biosemiotics and the Future of Sense-Making
Yogi Hale Hendlin
How might commercial semiotics learn to see and sense the world according to our animal bodies and ecological evolutionary psychology?
This keynote proposes that ‘selecting wider’ begins with a figure-ground shift: by attending to what is usually treated as background, meaning takes on new dimensions, the invisible becomes salient, and dominant objects recede into context. Biosemiotics, reconnects aesthetics to ethics and expands the semiotic toolkit, reframing commercial semiotics as an ecological practice – one that aligns market meaning with embodied perception, evolutionary attunements, and more-than-human worlds.
Yogi Hendlin
Environmental Philosopher and Public Health Scientist, Director – Feral Ecologies Lab, Erasmus University, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Biosemiotics and Advisor – Luminous
Yogi is an environmental philosopher and public health scientist, professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Yogi works with Luminous as an independent advisor on biosemiotics.
Yogi serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biosemiotics since 2021, after being awarded the Biosemiotics Achievement Award for best article in the journal. His academic research has appeared in journals such as Annals of Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal, American Journal of Public Health, Plos Medicine, and the US Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Yogi’s research is routinely picked up by international media and has appeared in publications such as Time magazine, The Guardian, BBC, and the Associated Press, and a longform interview on biosemiotics for the Essentia Foundation has garnered over 250,000 views.