Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:

Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural sciences – such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoosemiosis.

Martha Rosler is an American artist. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives. However, she spent a formative dozen years in California, from 1968 to 1980, first in north San Diego county and then in San Francisco. She has also lived and taught in Canada. She graduated from Brooklyn College (1965) and the University of California, San Diego (1974). Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler’s work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport.

Her work and writing have been widely influential. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally and has taught art at Rutgers University, where she was a professor for thirty years, and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany.

She serves in an advisory capacity to the departments of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (all New York City). She is on the board of the Van Alen Institute, in New York City, and is a former board member of the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, New York. She is a regular lecturer at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.