Indigenous visual cosmology as ritual communication system: a semiotic analysis of Senyawa’s Vajranala album artwork

Visual communication research has traditionally emphasised information transmission models, often neglecting the role of ritualised visual systems in sustaining shared cultural realities. This study examines Vajranala, the album artwork of the experimental group Senyawa, as an indigenous visual communication system that preserves and rearticulates cosmological knowledge within contemporary media contexts. Employing Barthes’s semiotic framework and Carey’s ritual model, this qualitative multimodal analysis investigates the album’s cover, inner sleeve, and label as components of an integrated visual system. Monumental forms, anthropocosmic figures, vertical axes, cyclical symbols, and spatial hierarchies are analysed at denotative, connotative, and mythic levels to elucidate how cosmological meaning is visually structured and stabilised. Contextual grounding for the semiotic analysis is provided through interviews with key creators and experts. The findings indicate that Vajranala can be read as a ritual communication system, wherein meaning emerges through patterned visual repetition rather than linear information transfer. Cosmological concepts of time, spatial order, and human-cosmos relations are maintained through symbolic participation rather than didactic explanation. Relational and ecological meanings arise implicitly as outcomes of indigenous visual cosmology. By conceptualising indigenous visual systems as communicative media logics, this study expands visual communication scholarship beyond representational models, demonstrating how non-verbal symbolic structures actively sustain cultural memory, identity, and value transmission in contemporary media. These findings highlight the importance of indigenous visual systems in shaping meaning in modern visual communication by framing the album artwork as a ritual system that sustains cosmological knowledge.