Seeing Meaning: Series Preface

The Seeing Meaning series traces how images and animations generate meaning as a relational, embodied, and evaluative phenomenon. Departing from symbolic models of semiotics, which dominate linguistic analysis, the series positions visual media as iconic-relational systems: their forms correspond directly to perceptual experience, and their meaning emerges through the alignment of viewer, temporality, multimodality, and value.

The series unfolds across six systematic posts:

1. From Text to Image: Reframing Meaning Beyond the Symbolic
   Establishes the foundational distinction between symbolic (language) and iconic-relational (visual) semiotics. Visual meaning is not mediated through lexicogrammar but actualised in perception; the field of the image functions analogously to grammatical systems, structuring experiential, interpersonal, and textual relations pre-symbolically.

2. Immersion and Perspective: Locating the Viewer in the Visual Field
   Examines how images and animations situate the viewer. Perspective and immersion transform observation into participation, making the viewer a co-constituent of meaning. Spatial positioning, alignment, and embodied engagement are semiotic principles in their own right.

3. Time in the Image: Temporality, Transformation, and Flow
   Analyses how static, sequential, and animated media encode temporal potential. Temporality structures attention, orchestrates relational coherence, and integrates narrative and perceptual flow. Temporal alignment acts as a connective tissue linking immersion to multimodal integration.

4. Multimodality and Embodied Integration
   Shows how meaning emerges from the coordinated interplay of shape, colour, motion, spatial depth, and sound. Multimodal patterns are relational and emergent; they structure attention, rhythm, and affective response through embodied perception.

5. Visual Metaphor and the Encoding of Value
   Explores how images instantiate metaphor and evaluative significance. Perceptual elements function as value-tokens, actualising moral, emotional, and aesthetic layers through relational, temporal, and multimodal context. Meaning is not symbolically mapped but relationally construed.

6. A Relational Semiotics of Visual Media
   Synthesises all dimensions into a coherent framework. Visual meaning is emergent, enacted, and embodied: immersion, temporality, multimodality, and evaluative construal operate interdependently. The systemic model positions the viewer as integral to the semiotic event, and establishes principles applicable to interactive and virtual media.

Core Insight

Across the series, meaning is not a representation imposed upon perception; it is actualised relationally, through the alignment of perceptual structures, temporal flow, multimodal interaction, and evaluative construal. Images and animations function as fields of relational potential, realised in the participatory engagement of the viewer.

This series offers a systematic framework for analysing visual media with the rigour of SFL, extended into iconic-relational semiotics: a toolkit for understanding how perception, attention, and evaluative alignment co-constitute meaning.