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the record · 2005 · computational aesthetics

The aesthetiscope: visualizing aesthetic readings of text in color space

Hugo Liu & Pattie Maes (2005). Proceedings of the 18th International FLAIRS Conference (AI in Music & Art track), 74–79, AAAI Press.

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Aesthetiscope reads a word, poem, or lyric through five modules—Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, Intuition, and Culturalizing—then maps their associations into a glimmering 16-by-9 color field. ConceptNet supplies rational links; popular-culture text cultural ones; stock images remembered colors; free-association norms intuition; and affective vocabularies feeling. Sliders set each reader's contribution. Informal feedback from psychologists, designers, colorists, and hundreds of visitors shaped the installation: grid borders disappeared, source associations became briefly visible, and the image learned to breathe. Visitors seemed to prefer either intuitive/feeling or thinking/sensation mixtures, but personality type remained a hypothesis. This paper contains no controlled experiment; text is mostly a bag of local features, cultural sources are American, sensation is visual, and weights are manual.

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