The Aesthetiscope: A Theory of Aesthetic Reading



The Aesthetiscope: A Theory of Aesthetic Reading

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Abstract

We describe a novel computational model for the assessment of textual aesthetics personalized to an individual’s psychological type. Aesthetic perception of narrative is viewed as some weighted sum of the deliberations of five modes of semantic analysis: thinking, feeling, sensorializing, intuiting, and culturalizing. We have implemented the proposed multi-perspectival model of textual aesthetics, and integrated it with a computational model of color psychology; together, they form the nexus of an art installation called the Aesthetiscope. The Aesthetiscope is exhibited as a wall of colorful squares which modulate to achieve an aesthetic resonance between a textual story and the person standing before it. For instance, encountered with a sensory-oriented person, the installation visualizes a “sunset” using dark purple swatches with splashes of warm hues, which come from a remembrance of actual sunsets; but encountered with a feeling and intuition-oriented person, warmth, beauty, and serenity are concluded, bringing about brighter, warmer, more intense colors, constituting an “inner” sunset.

On Aesthetic Perception

What is aesthetic experience? Why do we apply the term so broadly to characterize events seemingly as different and diverse as viewing art, reading fiction, eating food, and listening to music? How does the perceiver interact with the perceived during an aesthetic experience? These questions are important if we are to design interactive systems that hope to resonate aesthetically with an experiencer.

The aesthetic and the art questions have been thoroughly vetted in the literatures of philosophy, psychology, critical theory, and more recently, in neurophysiology. Every account of aesthetic and art first and foremost recognizes that art is something which engages a perceiver in meaningful interpretation, or as art formalist Clive Bell says, “Art is significant form.” But what is meaningful or significant? In Poetics (350BCE), Aristotle describes art as that which depicts truth, and our pleasure in art deriving from our recognition of the likenesses of art to true things. By Aristotle’s account, art is significant and meaningful because it reveals some truth to the perceiver, which ultimately, is subjective for the perceiver. An important question is what form this “truth” about the subject of artistic depiction should take. Does truth encompass what is denoted by art, or what is connoted by art? Roland Barthes, a twentieth century literary critic and structuralist, argues that truth is both the denotation and connotation of art, and suggests that all of images, music, and text are interpreted primarily through our culturally dictated vocabulary of signs (1978).

But art does more than simply reveal the truth (and this is what sets it apart from craft), it motivates a perceiver to find an emotionalized truth hidden within an artwork (Collingwood, 1958). And it is more than strictly emotions that is being engaged in art, it is a fully sensorial experience that engages the visual, aural, olfactory, taste, and tactile. Barthes, for example, suggests that not only is there a poetics of reading, but there is also an erotics of reading; and neurophysiologist Semir Zeki suggests that imagery of, inter alia, color, form, motion, faces, and body language have an aesthetic primacy in human neurobiology which figures largely into aesthetic experience (2000).

To synthesize together the ideas we have visited so far, aesthetic experience seems to be a very energetic, high-bandwidth event, having been variously described as the finding of denotative (rational) truths, connotative (evocative) truths, cultural truths, emotional truths, and sensorial truths. Exactly what constitutes a truth is a matter of interpretation, which is admittedly subjective, as it engages a perceiver’s unique identity, memory, beliefs, and context. Without trying to answer the art question definitively, as a starting point into our presentation of the Aesthetiscope, we hope to begin from a pragmatic working definition. Aesthetic experience is the engagement of a subject into a high-bandwidth experience of recognizing partially hidden truths, through various cognitive-perception modalities including thinking, intuiting, culturalizing, feeling, and sensorializing. Jung in his theory of psychological types (1921) postulated a similar ontology of perception. According to Jung, the self-conscious faculty called Ego has four fundamental ways of perceiving and interpreting reality: Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition. Our working definition of aesthetic perception includes an additional culturalizing dimension, which incorporates Barthes’ thesis that cultural structures like values can also color perception.

Having established a foothold in the aesthetic question with this working definition, we use this fruitful discussion to motivate and inform our presentation of the Aesthetiscope, a colorful art installation which explores how a multi-perspectival model of aesthetic perception (thinking, feeling, sensorializing, intuiting, and culturalizing) can be used to engage a person in aesthetic experience.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows. First, we present an overview of the intentions of, and interactions produced by the Aesthetiscope. Second, we discuss the novel mechanism of aesthetic textual analysis which interprets a text by generating its connotations and entailments within each of several interpretive frameworks, spanning the rational, cultural, visual, intuitive, and sentimental. Third, we reveal how the aesthetically analyzed text is mapped into a color display using various psycho-physiological heuristic frameworks for color expression. We conclude by discussing some redesigns we have made to the Aesthetiscope and reflecting upon the comments we have received from those who have visited the installation.

The Aesthetiscope

The Aesthetiscope is an interactive art installation whose wall of color reacts to portray the relationship between some idea (a word, a poem, a song) and a person standing before it (based on her psychological type: a realist, a dreamer, a neurotic). Figure 1 shows the Aesthetiscope’s rendition of the aesthetic of six different stories, from the point-of-view of a perceiver with the Intuitive-Sentimental psychology type. Each idea, for example the word sunset, is rich in association for a person. Perhaps he remembers in his mind what a sunset looks like. Or a sunset makes him think of other ideas like warmth, fuzzy, beautiful, serenity, relaxation. Perhaps it reminds him of some past event in his life. The contextual sphere of these personal associations form the Aesthetic about the idea. And the experience of that aesthetic is called its pathos. We wanted to choose a medium through which pathos could be convincingly portrayed, and so we chose colors because they are a complete micro-consciousness of pathos, like taste and smell.

The framing of this particular art installation is meant to explore the questions of 1) how the aesthetic of a story can be captured through semantic analysis; 2) how a computational model of aesthetic can account for aspects of the perceiver using psychological typing; 3) how an abstract color display can render a certain aesthetic; and 4) how visualizing the aesthetic of a story using an abstract art piece can improve the bandwidth of an aesthetic encounter. The rest of this section discusses some of the most important non-technical aspects of the Aesthetiscope, while the following two sections gives much technical elaboration.

Modes of Perceiving the Aesthetic

The Aesthetic is hard to articulate because it is usually experienced it as an undeconstructed gestalt. Any analysis of Aesthetic needs to be sensitive to its complexity -- the multi-dimensional nature of connotation. The Aesthetiscope analyzes each idea through a multi-perspectival linguistic analysis of connotation. The realms of analysis are "Think," "Culturalize," "Sensorialize," "Intuit," and "Feel." Each of these realms brings to bear a different perspectival vocabulary to the pathos description of an idea. "Think" generates rational connotations and entailments of the idea. "Culturalize" looks at the cultural entailments of the idea through the lens of a particular culture. "Sensorialize" takes the idea as a source of imagery, bringing to bear our collective visual memory of objects, places, and events. "Intuit" is an exercise in automatic free associations with the idea as a cue. "Feel" takes a sentimental stance toward the idea, connecting it to a word of feelings. The results of these analyses are mapped to a world of colors through psycho-physiological color surveys based on the work of Berlin & Kay (1969), Goethe (1840), and naturalistic sampling of color essences from photo collections.

Representation of the Perceiver

The notion of the aesthetic, of course, is specific to an individual, and a main thesis of the work described in this paper is that aside from the influence of personal memories and experiences on the aesthetic (which we have not yet addressed), a person’s psychological type is the greatest determiner of a person’s aesthetic. The psychological type determines how a person perceives the world, and in our case, perceives the aesthetic described by a word or narrative. In our system then, the user model of the perceiver is given as a particular scheme for weighting the five modes of perception – think, culturalize, sensorialize, intuit, and feel, which we will represent using an ordered five-tuple of values. For example, a Rational-Sensorial Perceiver (realist) might be represented as (T:90%; C:10%; S:90%; I:10%; F: 10%), and an Intuitive-Sentimental Perceiver (romantic) as (T:10%; C:30%; S:10%; I:90%; F: 90%). Other archetypical perceivers include Rational-Intuitive (neurotic) Perceiver, and Cultural-Rational Perceiver.

Details of the Installation

The Aesthetiscope is currently installed in a “living room of the future,” and is projected onto one of the room’s walls. The grid of color square is 16 wide by 9 tall, flanked by black on top and bottom, with a glimmer added to the colors refreshing at 24 frames per second, lending the piece a cinematic quality. Each inhabitant of the room has an RFID tagged wristwatch, which retrieves her personal perceiver settings (stored as a five-tuple, as discussed above). When she stands in front of the Aesthetiscope, the system’s RFID reader senses the presence of the perceiver, causing it to customize its visualizations to the perceiver’s personal settings. One current limitation is that there is no mechanism for arbitrating between multiple perceiver settings if there is more than one person in the audience.

The Aesthetiscope installation can visualize the aesthetic contained in poetry and music. An inhabitant can “load” a book or poem to be visualized by placing the physical book or poem onto the coffee table. As shown in Figure 2, placing a book of poetry onto the coffee table causes poems in the book to be displayed on the projection, against the aesthetic backdrop created by the Aesthetiscope. Alternatively, whenever a song is loaded in the room’s media server, metadata attached to the song retrieves the song’s lyrics, and those appear visualized on the projected display.

The current setup is admittedly basic, but works well enough for us to begin exploring some interesting questions. The next two sections examines the two components at the technical nexus of the Aesthetiscope: 1) a novel multi-perspectival semantic analysis engine, and 2) a computational model of color psychology.

Aesthetic Textual Analysis

Much of the AI narrative understanding literature subscribes to the thought that there exists a single rational method of interpreting text, and that resultant interpretations and inferences can always be reconciled into a single consistent world model. One branch of research notably departing from the mainstream trend is concerned with creative reading (Moorman & Ram, 1994) According to the cognitively motivated theory of creative reading, textual understanding involves imagination, the suspension of disbelief, and the projection of inexact memories onto read situations; all this, as opposed to the invocation of rote rules for inference in classical approaches. This approach is much more amenable to the task at hand of aesthetic reading – reading for personal aesthetic truth, and not purely for information.

A Theory of Aesthetic Reading

Our thesis is that different people are predisposed to different ways of perceiving the world, and thus have different ways of reading for the aesthetic. Everyone has a different notion of what is important and beautiful about a story. Some favor reading for rational truths (what is the informational value of this story?), some are sensitive to cultural interpretations (e.g. my culture says that this racy poem is amoral), some focus on the visual memories evoked by a text (e.g. I see a boat in an ocean covered in night), others intuit the text by allowing their minds to roam by freely associating with the literal text, and still others focus on the sentimentalities of the text. Each of these represents a different perspective on what is important and beautiful about a narrative. Our theory of aesthetic reading then, is that the aesthetic interpretation of text is the result of some weighted sum of the deliberations of five fundamental modes of understanding text: thinking, culturalizing, sensorializing, intuiting, and feeling; the proportional weights given to each mode vary according to a person’s predisposed psychological type. For more context on the aesthetic as it pertains to narratives, a primer can be found elsewhere (Liu, 2004).

Five Realms of Perception

In computing this theory of aesthetic reading, we implemented five different semantic connotation engines, each operating under a different realm of perception. Each takes as input some raw story text, and returns a weighted vector of concepts expressed as natural language phrases. To compute the gestalt aesthetic interpretation, the weight sum of the five vectors is taken. Before reading further, we offer two caveats: 1) the understandings achieved by each of the semantic connotation engines are rather shallow, often reducing a story to mere text, and 2) the computation of the gestalt as a weighted sum is so basic that we do not suggest at all that this simple scheme is cognitively plausible; however, as we discuss in the following section, the process of blending color squares into a single abstract image allows for a coherent gestalt to appear despite this limitation.

Below, we briefly discuss the implementations of each of the five realms of perception.

Thinking. The rational entailments of a story are computed using Liu and Singh’s ConceptNet commonsense reasoning framework (2004). ConceptNet 1) takes as input a whole narrative, 2) parses the narrative into a linear sequence of events, 3) maps those events into the nodes of its semantic network which consists of 100,000 everyday world concepts and 1.6 million semantic edges (causal, spatial, and social), and 4) uses spreading activation to compute inferences about the narrative, including spotting the main topics, and making temporal projections about next events triggered by the narrative. ConceptNet is ideal for computing rational entailments because its knowledge represents some form of common consensus (between 11,000 web contributors to the project) about how things and events affect each other in the everyday world. For the interested reader, (Liu & Singh, 2004) contains examples of the types of common sense inferences made by ConceptNet.

Culturalizing. Semiotician Roland Barthes’ structuralist theory of culture is that each culture can be represented as a sign system (1964), where each sign correlates to some set of signifieds, and the nature of the correlations is dependent upon the value system of each culture. For example, the sign “sex” signifies something negative and taboo in a religious culture, but not in a more socially progressive culture. Using this simple representation of culture, we have begun to compute cultural models for some broad cultural groups like American pop culture, Catholic culture, American feminist culture. We do so using the What Would They Think? system (Liu & Maes, 2004), which is capable of compiling together a model of a person or group’s attitudes toward various subjects (in our case, toward signs) by automated analysis of a corpus of texts compiled on the person or group. What Would They Think? works by detecting that certain topics are talked about in a consistent tone of voice; for example, “movie stars” in American pop culture, signifies “wealth,” “glamour,” “good,” “popular” etc.

For the particular implementation in the Aesthetiscope, we use only the cultural model for American pop culture. The model is extracted from a text corpus we compiled consisting broadly of news articles from a variety of popular periodicals such as People Magazine, MTV News, etc. In future work, we hope to detect the cultures possessed by the perceiver and to dynamically load those cultural models to drive cultural interpretation of a story.

Sensorializing. By sensorializing text, we mean that the reading of a narrative triggers the remembrance of past visual imagery, sounds, smells, etc. The current implementation addresses only visual imagery, but there is no reason why other sensory modalities could not be addressed in the future to produce a fully synesthetic experience.

From keyword-annotated stock photography collections totaling over 30,000 images, we have mined out the essential color palettes of various objects and events in the world, like “taxis” (they are yellow, at least in New York), “weddings” (lots of black and white), etc. These constitute a corpus of visual color memories. The output of the “sensorializing” analysis are phrases like “color of taxi,” “color of wedding.” In the color rendering phrase (discussed in the next section), these phrases are resolved as their corresponding color palettes, which are in turn incorporated into the visualization produced by the Aesthetiscope.

Intuiting. Intuiting, unlike Thinking, or Sensorializing, involves no remembrance or reasoning. As memory researcher Tulving put it, intuition is reflexive and instantaneous, it is simply “knowing” (1983). One way of measuring the intuitions around concepts is by recording free associations. Psychologists Nelson, McEvoy & Schreiber have compiled together decades worth of research into a corpus of free association norms (1998). For example, in the corpus, the concept “traffic” triggers “car,” “light,” “jam,” “sucks,” “stop,” “noise,” etc. Of course, we must realize that this measurement of intuition is specific to a certain population of people during a certain temporal period; nonetheless, we believe this corpus of free associations to be of high quality for our purposes.

We use this resource at face value in the Intuiting process. From a story, we extract out a weighted vector of the nontrivial concepts contained in it and calculate all the free associations to these concepts. We can interpret the set of these free associations resulting from a text as divergent thoughts provoked by the story.

Feeling. We compute both the surface and deep sentiment of a narrative by combining the Emotus Ponens textual affect sensing system (Liu et al., 2003), and Peter Roget’s lexical sentiment classification system (1911). Emotus Ponens parses a story into events and evaluates the affective connotations of those events (thus it is sensing the affect of the deep structure of text). For example, “getting into an accident” connotes fear, anger and surprise. Roget’s 1911 English Thesaurus features a 10,000 word affective lexicon classifying groups of words under affective headwords. We compute with this classification system to evaluate the surface linguistic sentiment of a story. Combining the affect sensing capabilities of Roget and Emotus Ponens, the Feeling process projects an input narrative into a space of affective keywords.

Psychological Color Rendering

Having completed an aesthetic analysis of the text, we are still faced with the challenge of mapping a vector of natural language concepts into the space of colors. Many theories have been put forth regarding the psychological entailments of colors, and the color entailments of psychological states, including the cross-cultural color surveys of Berlin & Kay (1969), and the psychological color mixing theory of Goethe (1840). What we have done is to synthesize these theoretical conclusions into a computational model of the psychological color space.

A Psychological Color Model

Our color space is an extension of that proposed by Munsell (1905), and has the following dimensions:

• Hue (e.g. green, brown, blue, purple, red)

• Temperature (e.g. hot, warm, cool, cold)

• Chroma (e.g. colorless, off-primary, primary)

• Saturation (e.g. low, medium, high)

• Value (e.g. dimmest, dim, medium, bright)

• Harmony (e.g. discordant, harmonious)

These dimensions are not orthogonal and so they overlap each other in dominion, however, they provide a broad descriptive vocabulary with which we can characterize colors flexibly. We have manually annotated an affective lexicon consisting of 100 frequent emotion keywords, and 180 Roger sentiment headwords (e.g. excitability, pleasure, pain, vulgarity, cowardice) with the descriptive vocabulary of Hue, Temperature, Chroma, Saturation, Value, and Harmony, according to the prescriptive color psychology theories of Berlin & Kay, and Goethe. A sample annotation is given below:

Inexcitability = harmony-harmonious, temperature-cool, hue-blue, chroma-colorless, saturation-medium, value-dimmest

Using this model of color psychology, the concepts vector outputted by the aesthetic textual analysis subsystem are mapped into color space. Of course, not all of the concepts are affective keywords, e.g. traffic light, wealth etc. To force these into color space, we use ConceptNet’s PropertyOf and PartOf relations. For example, ConceptNet knows that a “traffic light” has the properties: “red,” “yellow,” and “green;” and that “wealth” has the property “desirable” which we can in turn map into color space using our psychological color model. Finally, the output of the Sensorializing analysis consists of phrases like “color of taxi,” “color of wedding,” which are mapped into color space by recalling the memories of the color essences of those objects and events using the corpus we collected from stock photography collections.

Gestalt Effects

Having collected together a palette of remembered colors (from Sensorializing) and color descriptions (using the psychological color model we have developed), some color descriptions will emerge as salient. The most salient of these descriptions will affect the gestalt of the whole palette. For example, Chroma-primary causes the whole palette to shift to more primary colors, while Harmony-discordant causes the color squares to be rendered into the artwork using a jagged layout where similar colors are scattered across the grid rather than clustered. Gestalt effects are visible in Figure 3, which depicts the aesthetic visualizations of the words “sunset” (top-row) and “war” (bottom-row), as interpreted by a Rational-Sensorial Perceiver (left-column) versus an Intuitive-Sentimental Perceiver (right-column). The lower-left panel renders imageries of war as discordant, whereas the upper-left panel renders imageries of sunset as harmoniously blended.

Discussion

After our initial installation piece, we gathered a plethora of encouragement, and suggestions from those who have experienced it, including psychologists, designers, colorists, and hundreds of others. Since then we have redesigned the presentation of the Aesthetiscope to incorporate their suggestions. In this section, we would like to briefly discuss some of our redesigns and reflect upon the competencies and incompetencies of the installation.

Letting the Eye Blend the Image. Initially, a two pixel black border separated the color squares. We heard multiple suggestions of removing this border so that colors could sit right next to each other, allowing the eye to properly blend the squares into a whole abstract image. Upon doing so, we realized that it unleashed a Pandora’s box of problems, because without the border, contiguous blocks of similar colors seemed to form shapes! Initially, we had not considered the gestalt effects of laying out the color squares to either induce or prevent these emergent shapes, but now it was clear that we have to incorporate the layout into our model. In the current system, the nature of the layout, be it jagged to smooth, is a key aspect of the aesthetic being communicated.

Contextualizing the Abstract. Some designers commented that although the abstract color piece was beautiful, it was not always clear how it is that the system was choosing particular colors, and what those colors were supposed to mean. Responding to this, we decided to expose what the system was thinking, its perceptual process. Choosing randomly from the vector of concepts outputted by the aesthetic textual analysis, those concept were made to pop up within random color squares for short bursts of time. A sort of “peek-a-boo” trace, if you will, with phrases for “sunset” like “feel awe,” “think dark,” and “intuit romance.” This design feature gave the perceiver a sense of where the system is coming from, and was well-appreciated in the next iteration of the Aesthetiscope.

Breathing Life Into the Image. Initially, the image was static, but we heard comments that it became much more engaging after we animated it. Each color square waxes and wanes in value and saturation, controlled by a Gaussian spring model; the gestalt effect is that the image glimmers and “breathes.” The engaging effect of perturbation is also observed by Ken Perlin, who, in adding some noise to a 3D model of a human face, observed that people found the new image to be much more lifelike (1997).

An Attempt to Introduce Shapes. Some designers wondered about using different sized squares or shapes in lieu of the homogenous grid of squares. We have been experimenting with different shapes, but it has exposed us to new design problematics. When a color splotch is contained within a larger color splotch, a new psychological effect is introduced. As demonstrated in the work of some abstract Fauvist painters, a rich color layered upon a thinner color can lead to a perception of gravitating inward, and the inverse arrangement leads to an even more psychological effect. If the inner splotch is placed centrally on top of the outer splotch, that is a different evocation than if were placed on the periphery. These are just two examples of the new complexities introduced by heterogenizing the shapes. Until we can develop a more complete grammar of color and shapes and their psychological consequences, we must continue to use the homogenous grid of squares.

Where Gestalt Succeeds and Fails. We are thrilled by the apparent consensus from those who have visited the installation that a gestalt aesthetic seems to emerge from the abstract display. Even though the perceptions of the five realms of analysis are summed up so naively into a single color palette, the eye and mind seems to be able to pull out a single aboutness from the palette that the system could not have anticipated. Of course, the gestalt parameters of the rendering process helped, but even when perception was purely based on visual memories (so not gestalt parameters were in play), the eye seemed still able to find that undeconstructed essence of the abstract display.

In fact, the gestalt seemed to be weakest when Thinking was the main perceptual modality. One possible explanation is that visual imagery, intuitions, and feelings just blend better and more intuitively than rational thoughts. And people are not used to blurring thoughts; the nature of rational thinking is that it is highly focused, disciplined, and occurs in serial rather than in parallel (hence, thought process, train of thought). Or maybe Rationality is just not very aesthetic.

Works Cited

Aristotle: 350BCE/1998, Poetics, trans. by K. McLeish. London: Phoenix

Roland Barthes: 1964/1968, Elements of Semiology. publ. Hill and Wang

Roland Barthes: 1978, Image-Music-Text. Noonday Press.

Clive Bell: 1987, Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay: 1969, Basic Color Terms. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

R.G. Collingwood: 1958, The Principles of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

J.W.v. Goethe: 1840/1970. Theory of Colours, trans. C. L. Eastlake. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

C. G. Jung: 1921/1971, Psychological Types, trans. by H. G. Baynes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hugo Liu: 2004, Articulation, the Letter, and the Spirit in the Aesthetics of Narrative. Proc. of the 2004 ACM Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism, and Context.

Hugo Liu & Pattie Maes: 2004, What Would They Think? A Computational Model of Attitudes. Proc. of the 2004 ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 38-45

Hugo Liu & Push Singh: 2004, ConceptNet: A Practical Commonsense Reasoning Toolkit. BT Technology Journal 22(4). pp. 211-226. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman, Ted Selker: 2003, A Model of Textual Affect Sensing using Real-World Knowledge. Proceedings of ACM IUI’ 2003. pp. 125-132.

Kenneth Moorman & Ashwin Ram: 1994, A function theory of creative reading. The Psycgrad Journal. Technical Report GIT-CC-94/01, Georgia Institute of Technology.

A.H. Munsell: 1905, A Color Notation, Boston.

D.L. Nelson, C.L. McEvoy & T.A. Schreiber: 1998, The University of South Florida word association, rhyme, and word fragment norms.

Ken Perlin: 1997, Layered Compositing of Facial Expression. ACM SIGGRAPH 97 Technical Sketch.

Peter Roget: 1911, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. Retrieved from etext/10681

E. Tulving: 1983, Elements of episodic memory, New York: Oxford Unversity Press.

Semir Zeki: 2000, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford Press.

Copyright © 2004 held by the authors.

All rights reserved.

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Figure 1: The Aesthetiscope, set to Intuitive-Sentimental Perceiver, renders the above portraits of (clockwise from upper left) “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost, “A Song of Despair” by Pablo Neruda, and the words “God,” “mourning,” “fear,” and “envy.”

Figure 2: The Aesthetiscope installation. Poems from the book on the coffee table are visualized on the ambient projection using David’s (the one standing up) personal perceiver settings.

Figure 3: The aesthetic visualizations of the words “sunset” (top-row) and “war” (bottom-row), as interpreted by a Rational-Sensorial Perceiver (left-column) versus an Intuitive-Sentimental Perceiver (right-column)..

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