Digital semiotics, Viktoria Binschtok’s latest exhibition at Klemm’s, presents a body of new works from her eponymous series. Building on her ongoing exploration of digital culture, the series blends various photographic techniques and image sources, ranging from digital collages to enigmatic still lifes. Bringing to the forefront coded symbols of our increasingly visual communication in the digital age, Digital semiotics opens up a form of photography that conveys nonvisible connections in a networked world. In doing so, it reflects the entanglement of online and offline realities.

The starting point for Digital semiotics is the symbolic language of digital communication: emojis, phrases, or acronyms that operate as hybrid forms between writing and image. The series comprises a group of photographs that work together to form an associative index. These symbols represent objects, fruits, or body fragments, but their meaning is dynamic and shifts in communicative use. The ever-growing repertoire of these contemporary artifacts is a barometer of social developments as well as processes of belonging and differentiation.

To communicate with symbols has long been a form of codifying messages. Emojis follow that tradition. Overall, their logic is quite straightforward: banal images are given new meaning to produce communicative diversity. They equal emotional data, since their function is to express emotions. The plasticity of emojis has given rise to endless evasion techniques and crafted camouflage strategies. Their simplicity makes them the perfect container to convey hidden meanings, for they are less likely to capture attention, revealing themselves only to those who can see beyond their surface.

Since digital communication is embedded in platforms whose algorithms structure visibility and reach, many pictorial symbols have developed into visual codes that creatively circumvent filter mechanisms. In a way, these symbols themselves become messages, referring to something they don’t actually show. The transition from symbol to code does not follow any fixed logic, however: it can be based on visual similarity, phonetic proximity, or an implicit agreement between sender and receiver. At this point, seeing becomes an act of deciphering.

Ultimately, this is the itinerary of encryption that Digital semiotics embodies. Reflecting precisely on this opacity, Binschtok presents a wide repertoire of symbols, from various online slangs that can stand for forbidden, political, empowering, or even banal things. Using the medium of photography as a free projection surface, detached from indexical references, she formalizes abstract phenomena such as algorithmic search processes or digital sign systems into a visual realm. Her images do not provide a simple translation, but rather reflect the ambiguity of these codes and their potential to both connect and separate us.