Art, algorithm and ambiguity. Aesthetic ambiguity with regard to metacognition based on visual semiotics, visual rhetoric and Gestalt Psychology

The present dissertation develops a typology of aesthetic ambiguity (which is understood as noticeably intentional and therefore as a sign) that can be used for the analysis and production of visual art, on the basis of semiotics, perceptual psychology / Gestalt psychology, linguistics (as knowledge representation using semantic networks based on the metalanguage MultiNet) and image rhetoric. Aesthetically ambiguous art is redefined as the algorithms from image-rhetorical operations on objects made by cognitive grouping; these algorithms as operations on objects allow, for example, comparative analysis according to criteria of innovativeness and metacognitivity as well as experimentally varying production within the framework of empirical aesthetics. Based on etymology, 'aesthetic ambiguity' is redefined as 'driving of attention on at least two sides', i.e. as the division of attention through the opposition of at least two cognitive groupings, which is developed in the artwork. To describe these cognitive grouping possibilities that are opposed in the aesthetically ambiguous work, cognitive grouping criteria are developed for three semiotic fields, namely for: A) syntactics/ perception (as detecting groupings/ gestalts by use of similarity criteria and contiguity criteria from Gestalt psychology), B) semantics/ conception (as detecting object criteria according to MultiNet) as well as C) pragmatics/ 'actioception' (as understanding situation criteria according to MultiNet); through these cognitive grouping criteria of three semiotic fields, the guidance of attention and the aesthetically ambiguous division of attention through the artwork can be described on the basis of a semiotic information theory.

For the area of operations, 42 types of contamination (opposition: cognitive grouping a versus cognitive grouping b) and image-rhetorical deviance (opposition: order a versus deviation/deviance b from this order) are identified in the field of aesthetic ambiguity at the beginning of the dissertation which are then tested in the following chapters through production and analysis; in addition, six metacommunicative functions of aesthetic ambiguity are formed based on the theory of Roman Jakobson for the purpose of pragmatic analysis. The 42 operational types of aesthetic ambiguity can also be used for art didactics (redefined as design of new artworks and redesign of existing artworks). The arthistorical chapter of work analysis using graphic decomposition into ambiguously opposed mental partial images can also be seen as a comparative art history based on the criteria of aesthetically ambiguous innovation and metacognition; this chapter is semiotically divided into seven parts, since the three sub-areas of semiotics (syntactics, semantics and pragmatics) are thought of in a model of a semiotic Borromean knot as three overlapping circular areas, the four overlapping areas of which are per se predestined for ambiguity. Art-specific use of aesthetic ambiguity is defined as the creation of an atelic content.