Instead of other thing.
Semiotics on extremes.

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Paraphrasing the semioticians of the Mi group: "I can be deceived by an iconic sign but then it is no longer for me a sign of an object but the object itself". Or as Umberto Eco writes: "The true and complete iconic sign of the Queen Elisabeth should be the Queen Elisabeth herself", although, according to Eco, this kind of sign has no sense.

The author of these articles is interested in the iconic signs just in the moment to culminate the deceit, what he denominates super-icons, as well as the iconic signs that had hipotetically transgressed this limit, what he denominates ultra-signs (abundantly described in the science fiction genre).

He analyzes, in the context of super-iconicity, an image on the mirror of his wife and himself, a corpse hidden in an ancient photo, an small video of his daughter, the image obtained trough a projector of solids (an artwork by the artists João Maria Gusmão y Pedro Paiva), an amnesic man as the reincarnation into himself, the scenary where the terrorist organization ETA offers its messages, reconstructed by heart in an artwork by the artist Miriam Isasi, and the actress Hellen Mirren in her paper of a queen still alive. He proposes as ultra-signs to the human beings reproduced by Solaris, the inscrutable planet conceived by the science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem.

In the other extreme, the resercher situates something that in the context of the history of art is known as abstraction. If iconism depends on an object that looks like to its significant, in other words, the recognition of an object in other one, abstraction depends on the absence of an object in iconic sense. From this point of view, the author will try to explain expressions of abstraction as the Merlet's Scorpionfish (strange and expressive creature), a modern kitchen in the famous film "My uncle" by Jacques Tatí, a ionospheric phenomenon like the Aurora Borealis and artistic objects like a minimalist sculpture of Tony Smith, a Roberto Botija's photograph of a dead goat, or a cat in an impossible posture that was registered in one photograph of Ana Nieto.

The last of the objects that this researcher is studying is unusual: being, the whole universe, everything at all. Taken universe as a sign, the pertinent question would be ¿what class of sign we are talking about, an icon or an index? is universe a representation or an abstraction? Concerning this, the author uses an artwork of CVA (Juan Luis Moraza and María Luisa Fernández) that consists in an aluminium sphere of twenty centimeters diameter.