The Aesthetiscope: a Theory of Aesthetic Reading

The Aesthetiscope: A Theory of Aesthetic Reading

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Abstract mately, is subjective for the perceiver. An important ques- We describe a novel computational model for the assess- tion is what form this “truth” about the subject of artistic ment of textual aesthetics personalized to an individual’s depiction should take. Does truth encompass what is de- psychological type. Aesthetic perception of narrative is noted by art, or what is connoted by art? Roland Barthes, viewed as some weighted sum of the deliberations of five a twentieth century literary critic and structuralist, argues modes of semantic analysis: thinking, feeling, sensorializ- that truth is both the denotation and connotation of art, and ing, intuiting, and culturalizing. We have implemented the suggests that all of images, music, and text are interpreted proposed multi-perspectival model of textual aesthetics, and primarily through our culturally dictated vocabulary of integrated it with a computational model of color psychol- signs (1978). ogy; together, they form the nexus of an art installation But art does more than simply reveal the truth (and this called the Aesthetiscope. The Aesthetiscope is exhibited as a wall of colorful squares which modulate to achieve an is what sets it apart from craft), it motivates a perceiver to aesthetic resonance between a textual story and the person find an emotionalized truth hidden within an artwork standing before it. For instance, encountered with a sen- (Collingwood, 1958). And it is more than strictly emotions sory-oriented person, the installation visualizes a “sunset” that is being engaged in art, it is a fully sensorial experi- using dark purple swatches with splashes of warm hues, ence that engages the visual, aural, olfactory, taste, and which come from a remembrance of actual sunsets; but en- tactile. Barthes, for example, suggests that not only is there countered with a feeling and intuition-oriented person, a poetics of reading, but there is also an erotics of reading; warmth, beauty, and serenity are concluded, bringing about and neurophysiologist Semir Zeki suggests that imagery brighter, warmer, more intense colors, constituting an “in- of, inter alia, color, form, motion, faces, and body lan- ner” sunset. guage have an aesthetic primacy in human neurobiology

which figures largely into aesthetic experience (2000). On Aesthetic Perception To synthesize together the ideas we have visited so far, What is aesthetic experience? Why do we apply the term aesthetic experience seems to be a very energetic, high- so broadly to characterize events seemingly as different bandwidth event, having been variously described as the and diverse as viewing art, reading fiction, eating food, finding of denotative (rational) truths, connotative (evoca- and listening to music? How does the perceiver interact tive) truths, cultural truths, emotional truths, and sensorial with the perceived during an aesthetic experience? These truths. Exactly what constitutes a truth is a matter of inter- questions are important if we are to design interactive sys- pretation, which is admittedly subjective, as it engages a tems that hope to resonate aesthetically with an experi- perceiver’s unique identity, memory, beliefs, and context. encer. Without trying to answer the art question definitively, as a The aesthetic and the art questions have been thor- starting point into our presentation of the Aesthetiscope, oughly vetted in the literatures of philosophy, psychology, we hope to begin from a pragmatic working definition. critical theory, and more recently, in neurophysiology. Aesthetic experience is the engagement of a subject into a Every account of aesthetic and art first and foremost rec- high-bandwidth experience of recognizing partially hidden ognizes that art is something which engages a perceiver in truths, through various cognitive-perception modalities meaningful interpretation, or as art formalist Clive Bell including thinking, intuiting, culturalizing, feeling, and says, “Art is significant form.” But what is meaningful or sensorializing. Jung in his theory of psychological types significant? In Poetics (350BCE), Aristotle describes art as (1921) postulated a similar ontology of perception. Ac- that which depicts truth, and our pleasure in art deriving cording to Jung, the self-conscious faculty called Ego has from our recognition of the likenesses of art to true things. four fundamental ways of perceiving and interpreting real- By Aristotle’s account, art is significant and meaningful ity: Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition. Our work- because it reveals some truth to the perceiver, which ulti- ing definition of aesthetic perception includes an additional culturalizing dimension, which incorporates Barthes’ the- Copyright © 2004 held by the authors. sis that cultural structures like values can also color per- All rights reserved. ception.

Having established a foothold in the aesthetic question in his mind what a sunset looks like. Or a sunset makes with this working definition, we use this fruitful discussion him think of other ideas like warmth, fuzzy, beautiful, se- to motivate and inform our presentation of the Aesthetis- renity, relaxation. Perhaps it reminds him of some past cope, a colorful art installation which explores how a event in his life. The contextual sphere of these personal multi-perspectival model of aesthetic perception (thinking, associations form the Aesthetic about the idea. And the feeling, sensorializing, intuiting, and culturalizing) can be experience of that aesthetic is called its pathos. We wanted used to engage a person in aesthetic experience. to choose a medium through which pathos could be con- The rest of this paper is structured as follows. First, we vincingly portrayed, and so we chose colors because they present an overview of the intentions of, and interactions are a complete micro-consciousness of pathos, like taste produced by the Aesthetiscope. Second, we discuss the and smell. novel mechanism of aesthetic textual analysis which inter- The framing of this particular art installation is meant to prets a text by generating its connotations and entailments explore the questions of 1) how the aesthetic of a story can within each of several interpretive frameworks, spanning be captured through semantic analysis; 2) how a computa- the rational, cultural, visual, intuitive, and sentimental. tional model of aesthetic can account for aspects of the Third, we reveal how the aesthetically analyzed text is perceiver using psychological typing; 3) how an abstract mapped into a color display using various psycho- color display can render a certain aesthetic; and 4) how physiological heuristic frameworks for color expression. visualizing the aesthetic of a story using an abstract art We conclude by discussing some redesigns we have made piece can improve the bandwidth of an aesthetic encounter. to the Aesthetiscope and reflecting upon the comments we The rest of this section discusses some of the most impor- have received from those who have visited the installation. tant non-technical aspects of the Aesthetiscope, while the following two sections gives much technical elaboration.

The Aesthetiscope Modes of Perceiving the Aesthetic The Aesthetiscope is an interactive art installation whose The Aesthetic is hard to articulate because it is usually wall of color reacts to portray the relationship between experienced it as an undeconstructed gestalt. Any analysis some idea (a word, a poem, a song) and a person standing of Aesthetic needs to be sensitive to its complexity -- the before it (based on her psychological type: a realist, a multi-dimensional nature of connotation. The Aesthetis- dreamer, a neurotic). Figure 1 shows the Aesthetiscope’s cope analyzes each idea through a multi-perspectival lin- rendition of the aesthetic of six different stories, from the guistic 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 sam- pling 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 Figure 1: The Aesthetiscope, set to Intuitive- paper is that aside from the influence of personal memories Sentimental Perceiver, renders the above por- and experiences on the aesthetic (which we have not yet traits of (clockwise from upper left) “Fire and addressed), a person’s psychological type is the greatest Ice” by Robert Frost, “A Song of Despair” by determiner of a person’s aesthetic. The psychological type Pablo Neruda, and the words “God,” “mourn- determines how a person perceives the world, and in our ing,” “fear,” and “envy.” case, perceives the aesthetic described by a word or narra- point-of-view of a perceiver with the Intuitive-Sentimental tive. In our system then, the user model of the perceiver is psychology type. Each idea, for example the word sunset, given as a particular scheme for weighting the five modes is rich in association for a person. Perhaps he remembers of perception – think, culturalize, sensorialize, intuit, and feel, which we will represent using an ordered five-tuple of multi-perspectival semantic analysis engine, and 2) a com- values. For example, a Rational-Sensorial Perceiver (real- putational model of color psychology. ist) might be represented as (T:90%; C:10%; S:90%; I:10%; F: 10%), and an Intuitive-Sentimental Perceiver Aesthetic Textual Analysis (romantic) as (T:10%; C:30%; S:10%; I:90%; F: 90%). Other archetypical perceivers include Rational-Intuitive Much of the AI narrative understanding literature sub- (neurotic) Perceiver, and Cultural-Rational Perceiver. scribes 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 Details of the Installation consistent world model. One branch of research notably The Aesthetiscope is currently installed in a “living room departing from the mainstream trend is concerned with of the future,” and is projected onto one of the room’s creative reading (Moorman & Ram, 1994) According to walls. The grid of color square is 16 wide by 9 tall, the cognitively motivated theory of creative reading, tex- flanked by black on top and bottom, with a glimmer added tual understanding involves imagination, the suspension of to the colors refreshing at 24 frames per second, lending disbelief, and the projection of inexact memories onto read the piece a cinematic quality. Each inhabitant of the room situations; all this, as opposed to the invocation of rote has an RFID tagged wristwatch, which retrieves her per- rules for inference in classical approaches. This approach sonal perceiver settings (stored as a five-tuple, as discussed is much more amenable to the task at hand of aesthetic above). When she stands in front of the Aesthetiscope, the reading – reading for personal aesthetic truth, and not system’s RFID reader senses the presence of the perceiver, purely for information. causing it to customize its visualizations to the perceiver’s personal settings. One current limitation is that there is no A Theory of Aesthetic Reading mechanism for arbitrating between multiple perceiver settings if there is more than one person in the audience. Our thesis is that different people are predisposed to dif- The Aesthetiscope installation can visualize the aesthetic ferent ways of perceiving the world, and thus have dif- contained in poetry and music. An inhabitant can “load” a ferent ways of reading for the aesthetic. Everyone has a book or poem to be visualized by placing the physical different notion of what is important and beautiful about a book or poem onto the coffee table. As shown in Figure 2, story. Some favor reading for rational truths (what is the placing a book of poetry onto the coffee table causes po- informational value of this story?), some are sensitive to ems in the book to be displayed on the projection, against 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). Figure 2: The Aesthetiscope installation. Poems from the book on the coffee table are visualized Five Realms of Perception on the ambient projection using David’s (the one In computing this theory of aesthetic reading, we imple- standing up) personal perceiver settings. mented five different semantic connotation engines, each operating under a different realm of perception. Each the aesthetic backdrop created by the Aesthetiscope. Al- takes as input some raw story text, and returns a weighted ternatively, whenever a song is loaded in the room’s media vector of concepts expressed as natural language phrases. server, metadata attached to the song retrieves the song’s To compute the gestalt aesthetic interpretation, the weight lyrics, and those appear visualized on the projected dis- sum of the five vectors is taken. Before reading further, play. we offer two caveats: 1) the understandings achieved by The current setup is admittedly basic, but works well each of the semantic connotation engines are rather shal- enough for us to begin exploring some interesting ques- low, often reducing a story to mere text, and 2) the compu- tions. The next two sections examines the two components tation of the gestalt as a weighted sum is so basic that we at the technical nexus of the Aesthetiscope: 1) a novel do not suggest at all that this simple scheme is cognitively plausible; however, as we discuss in the following section, reason why other sensory modalities could not be ad- the process of blending color squares into a single abstract dressed in the future to produce a fully synesthetic experi- image allows for a coherent gestalt to appear despite this ence. limitation. From keyword-annotated stock photography collections Below, we briefly discuss the implementations of each totaling over 30,000 images, we have mined out the essen- of the five realms of perception. tial color palettes of various objects and events in the world, like “taxis” (they are yellow, at least in New York), Thinking. The rational entailments of a story are com- “weddings” (lots of black and white), etc. These constitute puted using Liu and Singh’s ConceptNet commonsense a corpus of visual color memories. The output of the “sen- reasoning framework (2004). ConceptNet 1) takes as input sorializing” analysis are phrases like “color of taxi,” “color a whole narrative, 2) parses the narrative into a linear se- of wedding.” In the color rendering phrase (discussed in quence of events, 3) maps those events into the nodes of its the next section), these phrases are resolved as their corre- semantic network which consists of 100,000 everyday sponding color palettes, which are in turn incorporated into world concepts and 1.6 million semantic edges (causal, the visualization produced by the Aesthetiscope. spatial, and social), and 4) uses spreading activation to compute inferences about the narrative, including spotting Intuiting. Intuiting, unlike Thinking, or Sensorializing, the main topics, and making temporal projections about involves no remembrance or reasoning. As memory re- next events triggered by the narrative. ConceptNet is ideal searcher Tulving put it, intuition is reflexive and instanta- for computing rational entailments because its knowledge neous, it is simply “knowing” (1983). One way of measur- represents some form of common consensus (between ing the intuitions around concepts is by recording free as- 11,000 web contributors to the project) about how things sociations. Psychologists Nelson, McEvoy & Schreiber and events affect each other in the everyday world. For the have compiled together decades worth of research into a interested reader, (Liu & Singh, 2004) contains examples corpus of free association norms (1998). For example, in of the types of common sense inferences made by Con- the corpus, the concept “traffic” triggers “car,” “light,” ceptNet. “jam,” “sucks,” “stop,” “noise,” etc. Of course, we must realize that this measurement of intuition is specific to a Culturalizing. Semiotician Roland Barthes’ structuralist certain population of people during a certain temporal pe- theory of culture is that each culture can be represented as riod; nonetheless, we believe this corpus of free associa- a sign system (1964), where each sign correlates to some tions to be of high quality for our purposes. set of signifieds, and the nature of the correlations is de- We use this resource at face value in the Intuiting proc- pendent upon the value system of each culture. For exam- ess. From a story, we extract out a weighted vector of the ple, the sign “sex” signifies something negative and taboo nontrivial concepts contained in it and calculate all the free in a religious culture, but not in a more socially progres- associations to these concepts. We can interpret the set of sive culture. Using this simple representation of culture, these free associations resulting from a text as divergent we have begun to compute cultural models for some broad thoughts provoked by the story. cultural groups like American pop culture, Catholic culture, American feminist culture. We do so using the What Feeling. We compute both the surface and deep sentiment Would They Think? system (Liu & Maes, 2004), which is of a narrative by combining the Emotus Ponens textual capable of compiling together a model of a person or affect sensing system (Liu et al., 2003), and Peter Roget’s group’s attitudes toward various subjects (in our case, to- lexical sentiment classification system (1911). Emotus ward signs) by automated analysis of a corpus of texts Ponens parses a story into events and evaluates the affec- compiled on the person or group. What Would They tive connotations of those events (thus it is sensing the Think? works by detecting that certain topics are talked affect of the deep structure of text). For example, “getting about in a consistent tone of voice; for example, “movie into an accident” connotes fear, anger and surprise. Ro- stars” in American pop culture, signifies “wealth,” “glam- get’s 1911 English Thesaurus features a 10,000 word af- our,” “good,” “popular” etc. fective lexicon classifying groups of words under affective For the particular implementation in the Aesthetiscope, headwords. We compute with this classification system to we use only the cultural model for American pop culture. evaluate the surface linguistic sentiment of a story. Com- The model is extracted from a text corpus we compiled bining the affect sensing capabilities of Roget and Emotus consisting broadly of news articles from a variety of popu- Ponens, the Feeling process projects an input narrative into lar periodicals such as People Magazine, MTV News, etc. a space of affective keywords. 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. Psychological Color Rendering

Sensorializing. By sensorializing text, we mean that the Having completed an aesthetic analysis of the text, we are reading of a narrative triggers the remembrance of past still faced with the challenge of mapping a vector of natu- visual imagery, sounds, smells, etc. The current imple- ral language concepts into the space of colors. Many theo- mentation addresses only visual imagery, but there is no ries have been put forth regarding the psychological entailments of colors, and the color entailments of psycho- artwork using a jagged layout where similar colors are logical states, including the cross-cultural color surveys of scattered across the grid rather than clustered. Gestalt ef- Berlin & Kay (1969), and the psychological color mixing fects are visible in Figure 3, which depicts the aesthetic theory of Goethe (1840). What we have done is to synthe- visualizations of the words “sunset” (top-row) and “war” size these theoretical conclusions into a computational (bottom-row), as interpreted by a Rational-Sensorial Per- model of the psychological color space. ceiver (left-column) versus an Intuitive-Sentimental Per- ceiver (right-column). The lower-left panel renders image- A Psychological Color Model Our color space is an extension of that proposed by Mun- sell (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 Figure 3: The aesthetic visualizations of the 180 Roger sentiment headwords (e.g. excitability, pleasure, words “sunset” (top-row) and “war” (bottom- pain, vulgarity, cowardice) with the descriptive vocabulary row), as interpreted by a Rational-Sensorial Per- of Hue, Temperature, Chroma, Saturation, Value, and ceiver (left-column) versus an Intuitive- Harmony, according to the prescriptive color psychology Sentimental Perceiver (right-column).. theories of Berlin & Kay, and Goethe. A sample annota- tion is given below: ries of war as discordant, whereas the upper-left panel renders imageries of sunset as harmoniously blended. Inexcitability = harmony-harmonious, temperature-cool, hue-blue, chroma-colorless, saturation-medium, value-dimmest Discussion

Using this model of color psychology, the concepts vector After our initial installation piece, we gathered a plethora outputted by the aesthetic textual analysis subsystem are of encouragement, and suggestions from those who have mapped into color space. Of course, not all of the concepts experienced it, including psychologists, designers, color- are affective keywords, e.g. traffic light, wealth etc. To ists, and hundreds of others. Since then we have redes- force these into color space, we use ConceptNet’s Proper- igned the presentation of the Aesthetiscope to incorporate tyOf and PartOf relations. For example, ConceptNet their suggestions. In this section, we would like to briefly knows that a “traffic light” has the properties: “red,” “yel- discuss some of our redesigns and reflect upon the compe- low,” and “green;” and that “wealth” has the property “de- tencies and incompetencies of the installation. sirable” which we can in turn map into color space using our psychological color model. Finally, the output of the Letting the Eye Blend the Image. Initially, a two pixel Sensorializing analysis consists of phrases like “color of black border separated the color squares. We heard multi- taxi,” “color of wedding,” which are mapped into color ple suggestions of removing this border so that colors space by recalling the memories of the color essences of could sit right next to each other, allowing the eye to prop- those objects and events using the corpus we collected erly blend the squares into a whole abstract image. Upon from stock photography collections. 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 Gestalt Effects not considered the gestalt effects of laying out the color Having collected together a palette of remembered colors squares to either induce or prevent these emergent shapes, (from Sensorializing) and color descriptions (using the but now it was clear that we have to incorporate the layout psychological color model we have developed), some color into our model. In the current system, the nature of the descriptions will emerge as salient. The most salient of layout, be it jagged to smooth, is a key aspect of the aes- these descriptions will affect the gestalt of the whole pal- thetic being communicated. ette. For example, Chroma-primary causes the whole palette to shift to more primary colors, while Harmony- Contextualizing the Abstract. Some designers com- discordant causes the color squares to be rendered into the mented that although the abstract color piece was beautiful, it was not always clear how it is that the system was and occurs in serial rather than in parallel (hence, thought choosing particular colors, and what those colors were process, train of thought). Or maybe Rationality is just not supposed to mean. Responding to this, we decided to ex- very aesthetic. pose 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 Works Cited to pop up within random color squares for short bursts of time. A sort of “peek-a-boo” trace, if you will, with Aristotle: 350BCE/1998, Poetics, trans. by K. McLeish. phrases for “sunset” like “feel awe,” “think dark,” and “in- London: Phoenix tuit romance.” This design feature gave the perceiver a Roland Barthes: 1964/1968, Elements of Semiology. publ. sense of where the system is coming from, and was well- Hill and Wang appreciated in the next iteration of the Aesthetiscope. Roland Barthes: 1978, Image-Music-Text. Noonday Press. Breathing Life Into the Image. Initially, the image was Clive Bell: 1987, Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. static, but we heard comments that it became much more engaging after we animated it. Each color square waxes Brent Berlin and Paul Kay: 1969, Basic Color Terms. and wanes in value and saturation, controlled by a Gaus- Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. sian spring model; the gestalt effect is that the image R.G. Collingwood: 1958, The Principles of Art, Oxford: glimmers and “breathes.” The engaging effect of perturba- Oxford University Press. tion is also observed by Ken Perlin, who, in adding some noise to a 3D model of a human face, observed that people J.W.v. Goethe: 1840/1970. Theory of Colours, trans. C. L. found the new image to be much more lifelike (1997). Eastlake. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. C. G. Jung: 1921/1971, Psychological Types, trans. by H. An Attempt to Introduce Shapes. Some designers won- G. Baynes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. dered about using different sized squares or shapes in lieu of the homogenous grid of squares. We have been ex- Hugo Liu: 2004, Articulation, the Letter, and the Spirit in perimenting with different shapes, but it has exposed us to the Aesthetics of Narrative. Proc. of the 2004 ACM Work- new design problematics. When a color splotch is shop on Story Representation, Mechanism, and Context. contained within a larger color splotch, a new Hugo Liu & Pattie Maes: 2004, What Would They Think? psychological effect is introduced. As demonstrated in the A Computational Model of Attitudes. Proc. of the 2004 work of some abstract Fauvist painters, a rich color layered ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 38-45 upon a thinner color can lead to a perception of gravitating inward, and the inverse arrangement leads to an even more Hugo Liu & Push Singh: 2004, ConceptNet: A Practical psychological effect. If the inner splotch is placed Commonsense Reasoning Toolkit. BT Technology Journal centrally on top of the outer splotch, that is a different 22(4). pp. 211-226. Kluwer Academic Publishers. evocation than if were placed on the periphery. These are just two examples of the new complexities introduced by Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman, Ted Selker: 2003, A Model heterogenizing the shapes. Until we can develop a more of Textual Affect Sensing using Real-World Knowledge. complete grammar of color and shapes and their Proceedings of ACM IUI’ 2003. pp. 125-132. psychological consequences, we must continue to use the Kenneth Moorman & Ashwin Ram: 1994, A function the- homogenous grid of squares. ory of creative reading. The Psycgrad Journal. Technical Where Gestalt Succeeds and Fails. We are thrilled by Report GIT-CC-94/01, Georgia Institute of Technology. the apparent consensus from those who have visited the installation that a gestalt aesthetic seems to emerge from A.H. Munsell: 1905, A Color Notation, Boston. the abstract display. Even though the perceptions of the D.L. Nelson, C.L. McEvoy & T.A. Schreiber: 1998, The five realms of analysis are summed up so naively into a University of South Florida word association, rhyme, and single color palette, the eye and mind seems to be able to word fragment norms. pull out a single aboutness from the palette that the system http://www.usf.edu/FreeAssociation/ could not have anticipated. Of course, the gestalt parameters of the rendering process helped, but even when per- Ken Perlin: 1997, Layered Compositing of Facial Expres- ception was purely based on visual memories (so not ge- sion. ACM SIGGRAPH 97 Technical Sketch. stalt parameters were in play), the eye seemed still able to Peter Roget: 1911, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words find that undeconstructed essence of the abstract display. and Phrases. Retrieved from gutenberg.net/etext/10681 In fact, the gestalt seemed to be weakest when Thinking was the main perceptual modality. One possible explana- E. Tulving: 1983, Elements of episodic memory, New tion is that visual imagery, intuitions, and feelings just York: Oxford Unversity Press. blend better and more intuitively than rational thoughts. Semir Zeki: 2000, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and And people are not used to blurring thoughts; the nature of the Brain. Oxford Press. rational thinking is that it is highly focused, disciplined,