The Aesthetiscope: Visualizing Aesthetic Readings of Text in
Color Space  Hugo Liu and Pattie Maes, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology Media Laboratory  The traditional story
understanding dogma in AI holds that there exists a singular,
objective meaning implied by text, which can be uncovered by
applying just the right logical inferences. But according to
research into the cognition of reading, text can also be read,
not objectively, but aesthetically. An aesthetic reading of text
engages not only the agency of thought, but also intuition,
sensation, and sentiment, and cultural interpretation. We have
developed and implemented a basic computational model of
aesthetic reading, which employs Carl Jung’s Modes of
Interpretation idea to delegate the task of aesthetic
interpretation out to several different textual analysis
engines, each computing a different mode of interpreting text,
such as generating sentimental evocations of a text (Feeling
modality), or remembering visual imagery evoked by the text
(Sens