132 Environments of intelligence
Abstract paintings, graphs of statistical distributions or displays of the
behaviours of exceedingly small, large or remote objects in a computer simulation, as visualisations of world affairs about whom no direct perceptual uptake of
information would be feasible to begin with, and where no analogy of the aforementioned kind would be in reach, will provide different kinds of information:
either natural information that is not accessible to direct perception, as in the case
of graphs or other scientific visualisations, or information that should be considered genuinely artefactual, in terms of relating to concepts presumably devised
by the item’s author, as in the case of abstract works of art. Here, indexical and
symbolic modes of reference, again in Peircean terms, will play a prominent role:
elements of some picture will be supposed to indicate rather than resemble or otherwise exemplify qualities of their referent, or they come to refer to their subject
matter by association or convention, and thus can only be interpreted within a
conventionally based framework of reference.
As outlined in Chapter 3, the primary cognitive achievement of pictures might
not be precisely that of being pictorial representations – understood literally, as
making present again. James Jerome Gibson (1979, Chapter 15) argued that the
notion of pictorial representation is misguiding, as the set of invariants captured
by the picture would be confined to a few channels of transmission, and hence
remain incomplete, and that the information they contain would be made available in detachment from the original context of presentation. This is not a purely
negative claim. What a picture, at least one of the iconic variety, can achieve is
to extract a limited subset of the information for visual perception that has been,
would have been or could have been present to the observer, and to display it in
a delimited optic array, which itself, for being so delimited (and not “ambient”),
is ultimately placed in a non-pictorial environment – while remaining within the
same framework of perception, namely visual perception, to which the same general principles apply. An iconic picture may be a partial record of perception, in
that it preserves some of the invariants, hence some of the information, by means
of which we perceive and act within our environments, and in that it presents that
partial, delimited information in a context in which it is not naturally present.
Conversely, what an abstract work of art and a visualisation of a simulation in
science can achieve is to present, in a delimited context, a specified set of information that would not, and perhaps could not, be available to visual perception
and place it in a non-pictorial environment. Instead, it will first make available to
visual perception what is depicted, as in a simulation, or it will supposedly alter
the observer’s perceptual and conceptual expectations, as many works of art are
designed to do. In either case, explicit conventions or implicit understandings
of how the pictorial form in question is supposed to refer to some world affair
will have to be in place – from objects or processes that would be observable
in principle but cannot be directly observed in practice, via theoretical entities
to conceptual structures that are not necessarily supposed to bear any empirical
reference. In some cases, visually pointing to the values of a variable or identifying and visualising patterns of relations within the target will be part of how
the picture in question refers to its subject matter, and hence imply an indexical
Abstract paintings, graphs of statistical distributions or displays of the
behaviours of exceedingly small, large or remote objects in a computer simulation, as visualisations of world affairs about whom no direct perceptual uptake of
information would be feasible to begin with, and where no analogy of the aforementioned kind would be in reach, will provide different kinds of information:
either natural information that is not accessible to direct perception, as in the case
of graphs or other scientific visualisations, or information that should be considered genuinely artefactual, in terms of relating to concepts presumably devised
by the item’s author, as in the case of abstract works of art. Here, indexical and
symbolic modes of reference, again in Peircean terms, will play a prominent role:
elements of some picture will be supposed to indicate rather than resemble or otherwise exemplify qualities of their referent, or they come to refer to their subject
matter by association or convention, and thus can only be interpreted within a
conventionally based framework of reference.
As outlined in Chapter 3, the primary cognitive achievement of pictures might
not be precisely that of being pictorial representations – understood literally, as
making present again. James Jerome Gibson (1979, Chapter 15) argued that the
notion of pictorial representation is misguiding, as the set of invariants captured
by the picture would be confined to a few channels of transmission, and hence
remain incomplete, and that the information they contain would be made available in detachment from the original context of presentation. This is not a purely
negative claim. What a picture, at least one of the iconic variety, can achieve is
to extract a limited subset of the information for visual perception that has been,
would have been or could have been present to the observer, and to display it in
a delimited optic array, which itself, for being so delimited (and not “ambient”),
is ultimately placed in a non-pictorial environment – while remaining within the
same framework of perception, namely visual perception, to which the same general principles apply. An iconic picture may be a partial record of perception, in
that it preserves some of the invariants, hence some of the information, by means
of which we perceive and act within our environments, and in that it presents that
partial, delimited information in a context in which it is not naturally present.
Conversely, what an abstract work of art and a visualisation of a simulation in
science can achieve is to present, in a delimited context, a specified set of information that would not, and perhaps could not, be available to visual perception
and place it in a non-pictorial environment. Instead, it will first make available to
visual perception what is depicted, as in a simulation, or it will supposedly alter
the observer’s perceptual and conceptual expectations, as many works of art are
designed to do. In either case, explicit conventions or implicit understandings
of how the pictorial form in question is supposed to refer to some world affair
will have to be in place – from objects or processes that would be observable
in principle but cannot be directly observed in practice, via theoretical entities
to conceptual structures that are not necessarily supposed to bear any empirical
reference. In some cases, visually pointing to the values of a variable or identifying and visualising patterns of relations within the target will be part of how
the picture in question refers to its subject matter, and hence imply an indexical