Translating the linguistic into the visual P robably the most famous sentence in the history of linguistics is Noam Chomsky's nonsense statement, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." This was concocted to show how a grammatically perfect statement in English could have no recognizable semantic content. After all, how can a colorless idea be green? And what could it possibly mean for an idea to sleep? Or sleep furiously? So within the usual semantic context of everyday English, this sentence is literally meaningless. Yet it exerts an irresistible pull somewhere deeper in the mind, evoking images of all sorts. A visually oriented person hearing this sentence might start seeing strange, vague images of a greenish hue, writhing about, much like a sleeping person twisting and turning in a night of restless sleep. Similar remarks could be made for other nonsense statements, such as Lewis Carroll's famous poem The Jabberwockey.
Recently, two computer artists working at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Lab in Kyoto, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, took up the challenge of creating a method for translating words or sentences into visual forms. Their idea is to produce a set of transformation rules that will accept a sentence like Chomsky's and transform that sentence into a unique form. The first of their efforts in this direction is something called Life Spacies, in which the sentence is transformed into three-dimensional abstract "creatures," while the second program, The Verbarium, creates abstract plants. Both of these programs invoke the use of a small set of transformation rules to creates their objects, showing how the complexity of living things can be generated by the repeated application of simple rules. The overall structure and content of both these exercises are described in detail elsewhere [1]. Here I will go over just a few of the highlights to show how the systems work.
In both programs, the key element is a text-to-form editor that accepts a statement in a source language (English, French, German, or any other Latin-based language) and generates a three-dimensional form from the syntactic structure of the statement. This process proceeds in three steps:
FIGURE 4
A French message and its English equivalent in the Verbarium.