Mulitstability

"Metapictures"  by Mitchell is all about "pictures about pictures". While reading, I found the term "multistability" to be very interesting. Multistability, as Mitchell says, is a phenomenon where images primary function is "to illustrate the co-existence of contrary or simply different readings in the single image" (Mitchell 45). "My Wife or My Mother-in-law" and "Duck-Rabbit" are both pictures that act as multistable images. These image are two images that are placed together in a such a way that they look like one image. 

Mitchell goes on to say that "multistable images are not metapictures in the formally explicit way... they display the phenomenon of 'nesting,' presenting one image concealed inside another image, but, like the Steinberg, they tend to make the boundary between first- and second-order representation ambiguous" (Mitchell 48). Multistable images hide one image inside another in a way that causes the lines of one picture to be blurred by the lines of the other.  

The key to multistabilty is self-reference. The self reference of multistability connects to metapictures which are "pictures that refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is" (Mitchell 35).  The basics of multistability is that it is self-reference. It deals with pictures within other pictures that basically feed off of each other.  You need one to have the other and by having both you have one. 

Mitchell says that self reference is elicited by multisatbility and because of that "it as as much to do with the self of the observer as with the metapicture itself" (Mitchell 48). The audience is very important in cases of mulitstable images because it depends on the viewer to see one or both images. Mitchell then goes on to saying that the observer's dialogue is "embedded in specific discourses, disciplines, and regimes of knowledge" (Mitchell 48). The experiences and perception of the observer is going to determine the "dialogue" that takes place; what the viewer sees is based on there perception.