The visual metaphor and "emergent properties"

In a recent paper on visual thinking I was trying to describe the relationships of elements on on a surface (e.g. painting) or aural patterns (music) as a type of complex system. The relationship that the we have to the painting or music is both unique and universal at the moment of perception.

The emergent property of a complex system of pigments and structure is that special feeling that one gets when viewing art or listening to music. We can create a diagram as a metaphor  that may demonstrate an emergent property, as a cognitive model.

To be clear, the dotted line is not a property at all, it’s actually just a curved vector, but it has some communicative power to suggest that when two forces collide a third and greater “result” is the conclusion. This diagram is only a metaphor for an emergent property. These visual metaphors are still powerful and can communicate complex ideas and as such have an important role to play in the composition of a gigamap.*

* carefully designed visual artefacts that take on the form of richly detailed, large scale images (static or dynamic) representing various levels of textual and visual information.