Visual Information Construing: Bistability as a Revealer of Mediating Patterns

Abstract

Positing that information is a process, this chapter brings together different concepts to describe the informational process, from difference (Bateson) and diaphora (Floridi) to pattern (Bates) through to aspects, viewpoints and outlooks (Mugur-Schächter). Examples of the visual experience of bistable images show how these concepts come together to support coalescence, which is proposed as the key stage of visual sense-construing. Lictions (i.e. bonds, echoes, strengths, etc.) interlink data knitted together to support, at a higher epistemological level, a template of compatible patterns within a same “horizon of relevance”. The formation of such a template constitutes meaning-making, by naturalized coalescence or rationalized contiguity, and socially normalized sharing procedures.