Generating Scenarios in the Arts: Capitalizing on Polysemy

Abstract

We developed a new environmental system to generate scenarios in the fine arts by appealing to the polysemy of words. This system relies on a Web-based application and unique rules to structure play with word cards. Verbalizations of ideas related to the fine arts are the key input to this system, which grew from an experiment in which painters used a few clusters of words describing their intentions to comment on their creation. During the aforementioned experiment, new scenarios were generated by re-clustering the words in ways that could not have been imagined at the beginning of the process. This implies that some of the words were abstract (e.g., respect, challenge) and may have inspiredparticipants to transform the original context into a new one. The new environmental system constitutes one approach to generating new scenarios in the fine arts.