Linking Form and Concept in Images

Artificial Intelligence works on some things that are so fundamental to creating information artifacts that in some ways it represents the only thing other than the internet that matured the true importance of digital computing. Anything that an electron can provoke can be presented through the brute effectiveness of an on/off switch, and computers can manage that at microscopic levels at the speed of light.

Visualization, then, is simply a matter of how hard the computer can work. No matter what data it confronts, computation experiences nothing like complexity; it experiences only endurance. But what it tries to do is always a reaction to instruction, and instruction comes from people.

The most important thing to understand about an instruction is that it is about a way to do something , not a description of a result. As a formula, an instruction to compute the value of "pi" -- divide the circumference of a circle by the diameter of the circle -- is breathtakingly simple but the result is staggeringly complex. This suggests why a computer, which can handle instructions that are thousands of steps long, can generate information of virtually immeasurable complexity.

In our natural experience of data that we sense, our minds are comparable in capability to the supercomputers of AI when it comes to generating rich outputs. In effect, the mental output is "ideas". Then, in order to transmit ideas from one mind to another, we communicate. The communications are called "expressions" because their transmission means they are pushed out of the mind. Any instance of expression is called a "statement".

Seeing is that we call our ability to comprehend what we sense from looking. When we look at information, we interpret how its appearance tells us what the mind behind the statement intended to express.

Below, the graphic is a way to describe how any visual statement might relate to an experience that has generated a mental awareness of something. It proposes that there are four fundamental types of expressions: the idea (the mental formulation of something drawn from sensed data), a version of it, an instance of it, and a condition of it. This description also asserts that multiple types of expressions may combine as contributors to a given type of statement, For example, an indicative statement includes both an idea of something and a version of it. Also, a symbolic statement contains both an idea of something and a condition of something.

Within such overlapping, there is also the dynamic of one thing provoking the next -- a symbolic statement may be a case where the condition of something spawned an idea of something else.

As people who visualize things, we can always consider beforehand what our intent and opportunity is to shape and communicate information in communication. We can proactively consider what we want to emphasize, and why. And with this same perspective on identifying imagery, we can interpret existing visualizations analytically, taking stock of what kind of influences it seems to want its statements to exert. Said differently, the visualization contains within it the cues about what it wants us to pay attention to more or less.