Otakar Zichs invisible actors and creative minds

In his essay "Sémiotika sémiotika Otakara Zicha" (Otakar Zich's Semiotics, 1981), Ivo Osolsobě seeks to illuminate one of Zich's most troubling and mysterious terms: 'významová představa' (semantic image). For Osolsobě, it "is a complex, liminal, and interdisciplinary phenomenon about which a substantial body of studies has been written, though a majority of which only hardly touched the problem: a systematic treatise on the phenomenon is still missing." Nonetheless, Osolsobě succumbs to the theorist's temptation and ventures into the investigation of the term and, following Mukařovský's 'semiotization' of aesthetics, finds a relevant connection with C. S. Peirce's semiotic notion of 'interpretant' which, in Osolsobě's view, resonates with Zich's notion of the semantic visual image. Surprisingly (or mysteriously) though, Osolsobě does not find in Peirce's vast work any corresponding mirror term for Zich's signifying technical image. In my paper, I try to re-read Zich via Peirce and vice versa and suggest a potential solution for the notion which strangely fell overboard while being transported across the Atlantic.