The main purpose of this work is to provide a semiotic ontology for redescription of active cognitive externalism, recently developed by the paradigm 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended cognition). In our approach, distributed cognitive systems (DCSs) are described as semiosis, signs in action. We explored the relationship between semiosis and cognition, as conceived by C. S. Peirce, in association with the notion of distributed cognitive system (DCS). We introduce Peircean externalist approach with an emphasis on the notion of temporal distribution of semiosis, and describe DCSs, and their elements, as "sign in action". To develop this argument, we describe an example of DCS -- verbal-musical improvisation of repente, repentismo, or viola singing. It is a phenomenon of verbal-musical improvisation that takes the form of a challenge in versified oral poetry. We describe the phenomenon as the embodiment of the formal structure of a cognitive task and an inferential process. This embodiment corresponds to a semiotization of the repente performances as DCSs. The temporally distributed tendency of repentismo organizes the DCS as a system that performs metasemiotic experiments on the action of signs.

The notions of "multilevel", "level of description and organization" are quite familiar for the studies of complex systems. Examples include physico-chemical, biological computational, socio-economic, historical, and cultural systems. Poems are complex phenomena and can be described as multilevel hierarchical systems. Different levels of description of a poem correspond to different sets of components, structures and processes (e.g., context, lexicon, syntax, prosody, rhythm, typography) that asymmetrically restrict each others. We suggest the notion of "multilevel translation" to characterize an operation whose focus is a solution of a situated problem. The operation involves selection and re-creation of a hierarchical multilevel system of constraints. This perspective allows us to approach the translation of a poem as the solution of a multilevel, situated and ill-defined problem. We describe the steps of this operation, and we exemplify it by the translation of the poem "The Expiration", by Augusto de Campos.

We explore Peirce's pragmatic conception of sign action, as a distributed and emergent view of cognition and exemplify with the emergence of classical ballet. In our approach, semiosis is a temporally distributed process in which a regular tendency towards certain future outcomes emerges out of a history of sign actions. Semiosis self-organizes in time, in a process that continuously entails the production of more signs. Emergence is a ubiquitous condition in this process: the translation of signs into signs cannot be inferred from the properties of the components of a semiotic triad alone, but has to take into account a complex interaction between a micro-semiotic and macro-semiotic level of description. This interaction can be understood as an interplay of potentialities and tendencies, or upward constitutive determinative relations and downward selective determinative relations. According to this view, emergence is a central defining condition of processes of meaning. Ballet is a sign in action. The emergence of classical ballet is a self-regulatory process, in which a system of different kinds of cognitive artifacts (musical, bodily/motor, spatial/architectonic) and agents obtained a stable semiotic relation throughout many phases of development between the 16th and the 19th Century. One case is the development of the verticality of dance in classical ballet as a semiotic relation connecting proscenium arch stages, dancing bodies, and audiences. This development is micro-semiotically determined by the spatial constraints of the proscenium arch stage, and macro-semiotically determined by a historical construction of the dancing body as a sign within a network of semiotic chains, such as the intersemiotic regulation of body of the dancer by principles coming from painting. This is not only the emergence of actual meaning, but also the emergence of an open-ended field of potential and general meanings, an autonomous tendency of development. To say that ballet, as sign action, emerges, is to say that cognitive artifacts such as dancer's bodies, stages and audience's point of view, musical compositions, costumes, all sorts of supporting institutions, etc, constitute a niche for sign action, interacting according to tendencies of development that didn't exist before.

This paper presents, describes and analyses two photobooks: Palast der Republik and Domesticidades. We claim that, because of their highly iconic features,they can be regarded as epistemic artifacts (models) since they reveal information about their objects, as well as about their own morphological properties. The analysis focuses on the (i) kind of relations the photobooks establish with their respective objects (we claim that it is a mainly-iconic relation) and (ii) on the semiotic couplings that can be found in them – a type of interaction between semiotic resources (such as photographs, maps, written texts, illustrations, among others). We contextualize this analysis in relation to both a semiotic and an intermedial background. Further, we claim that the epistemic role of such artworks is directly related to their material and structural features that constrain the possibilities of manipulatio nand reasoning upon them. We conclude by presenting some of the information tha twas revealed by the manipulation of these photobooks, claiming that the semiotic-artefactual approach to models can be an epistemically interesting conceptual frame to think about artistic artefacts.

VIA is a mobile art project (video-dance and computational music) semiotically translated to photographic media by means of formal constraints derived from selected properties of Rio de Janeiro’s predefined downtown routes. Under the constraints of street buildings and the morphology of the routes, questions regarding the influence of the bodily movements of the urban space led to the creation of a dance typology. This typology is related to pedestrians in the area and to the structure of the buildings spans where the performance happened. The dance movements captured in the videos were restricted and regulated by the physical environment and its main features. Here, an intersemiotic translation of a mobile art project to a photographic essay is presented and described. It strongly relates, and tentatively explores, both an artistic research praxis and a theoretical discussion. The essay explores an analogous semiotic effect from the VIA project on the photographic essay as a result of this investigation.

''Quarenta Clics em Curitiba" is a rare, almost unprecedented, collaborative photobook of Brazilian literature. Its structure - with loose, unnumbered pages - hinders any attempt of reading them in an already established sequence. Because it prevents the creation of privileged focus of attention, since its many possible sequences suggest different narrative structures, the book "recreates" on the reader the feeling of a procrastination through the city, immersed in trivial events. We present this complex intermediatic phenomenon, and analyze briefly some examples of the "dense coupling" between verbal poetry of Paulo Leminsky and the photography of Jack Pires.