Creativity as Pastiche: A Computational Model of Dynamic Blending and Textual Collage, with Special Reference to the Use of Blending in Cinematic Narratives

The theory of blended spaces of Fauconnier and Turner (1994,1998), also known as the many-space model of conceptual integration, is a bold new theory in cognitive science that unifies metaphor, analogy, metonymy and conceptual combination within a framework of interconnected mental spaces. Through an analysis of cinematic pastiche, a form of creative reuse and structural blending in the development of textual narrative in film, this paper considers the computational basis for modelling blend theory, and describes some dynamical properties of conceptual blending which the current theory of Fauconnier and Turner has yet to accommodate. A specific implementation of blending theory, named Pastiche, is presented, and consideration of this modelwhich is essentially a two-space model of metaphor analysis that has been extended to encompass the many-space requirements of blendingthrows light on the deep structural relationship between blending and metaphor as cognitive processes. The computational overlap between blending and metaphor, as made visible by the Pastiche system, suggests that the computationally well-understood process of cross-domain structure mapping is the key process at work within blending.