Narrative Emergence in Visual Media: A Generative Model of Linear and Non-linear Structures

This paper introduces a two-layer theoretical framework that articulates how narrative meaning emerges from relational configurations between visual units in contemporary painting, sequential imagery, and installation-based practices. While existing narrative theory has largely focused on linguistic or temporally extended media, the mechanisms through which static or spatially distributed images give rise to narrative experience remain insufficiently formalized. In particular, the roles of informational gaps, perceptual drift, and medium translation in shaping interpretive processes have rarely been addressed within a unified structural framework.To address this problem, the paper proposes two complementary conceptual models: the Unit-Based Narrative Potential Model (UNPM) and the Narrative Generating Device Model (NGDM). UNPM formalizes linear narrative emergence through adjacent-unit interactions, using formal notation to make explicit the relational conditions under which narrative potential is activated.NGDM extends this logic into a non-linear network structure, modeling narrative emergence as an effect of multiple relational vectors operating across a visual system rather than along a single sequential path. Together, the two models form a hierarchical and complementary framework: UNPM functions as a linear special case embedded within the broader relational architecture of NGDM, which generalizes local adjacency into a distributed field of interpretive relations.Rather than functioning as an empirically testable predictive system, the proposed framework adopts the formal language of modeling as an analytic and heuristic device. Its contribution lies in clarifying structural relationships that often remain implicit in discussions of visual storytelling, particularly the integration of linear and non-linear narrative dynamics and the explicit inclusion of viewer interpretation as a constitutive variable.By positioning narrative emergence within a relational and non-linear space, this framework offers a cross-disciplinary point of reference for thinking about visual media across art practice, comics, and image-based narrative systems, while deliberately occupying a boundary position between scientific modeling and theoretical analysis.