Rendering Aesthetic Impressions of Text in Color Space

What is an artwork and how could a machine become artist? This paper addresses the provocative question by theorizing a computational model of aesthetics and implementing the Aesthetiscope—a computer program which portrays aesthetic impressions of text and renders an abstract color grid artwork reminiscent of early twentieth century abstract expressionism. Following Freud and Dewey’s psychological interpretation of “aesthetic” and Jung’s ontology of fundamental perceptions, we theorize that a viewer finds an artwork moving and satisfying because it seduces her into rich evocations of thoughts, sensations, intuitions, and feelings. The Aesthetiscope embodies this theory and aims to generate color grids paired with inspiration texts (a word, a poem, or song lyrics) which can be received as aesthetic and artistic by a viewer. The paper describes five Jungian aesthetic readers which are capable of creative narrative understanding, and three color logics which employ psycho-semantic principles to render the aesthetic readings in color space. Evaluation of the Aesthetiscope revealed that the program is best at portraying intuition and feeling, and that overall, the Aesthetiscope is capable of creating the aesthetic of art based on an inspiration text in a non-arbitrary way.