E Pluribus Unum - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 165

externalised spatial representations for diagrammatic reasoning. In the former case,
it is common to work within blended spaces where time and spatial extent appear
to have 'collapsed', giving rise to language use such as “keep going straight until
the church” or “turn left before the tower” and so on. Blends of this kind are so
familiar that they may be considered to be entrenched in the cognitive linguistic
sense of having become part of the semantics of the respective terms and shared by
the language community [ 14 , p. 49].
Blends may also be multiple in that once established, for example in a text, further
conceptual spaces might be added as an argument progresses. These may progres-
sively add details to a developing emergent space (or, alternatively, lead to a space
which strains the credibility of a reader or hearer too far resulting in a charge of
'mixing metaphors'). In the right-wing immigration example above from Hart, the
texts do in fact continue with phrases such as 'Britain is full up', 'no matter how open
or closed its immigration policy', and 'our first step will be to shut the door'. This
builds on the previous blend of immigration-as-flood by (i) combining 'Britain' with
a 'container' (which can then be full) that is itself (ii) combined with a 'building' or
'room' that has 'doors' that can be closed, and (iii) those doors can in turn also be
'policies' (which can be open or closed) [ 31 , p. 102]. There need in principle be no
end to this creative extension and combination of concepts. This aspect of iteration
of blending is also explored in the area of conceptual mathematics as explored by
Lakoff and Núñez [ 46 ], where it is argued that abstract mathematical concepts such
as modern number systems, algebra, or set theory, are created through a succession
of conceptual metaphors and blends, grounded in embodied concepts and image
schemas. The structure of such blends and blending patterns in general are discussed
more formally in Sect. 9.4.2 .
There is also now increasing discussion of the potential role of blending or similar
mechanisms when considering the creative use of combinations of information from
different semiotic modes, e.g., drawing relations between verbal information, visual
and gestural information [ 17 ].
In such cases representations or entities in one mode of presentation are made to
take on properties or behaviours in another. The general applicability of an ontological
approach to semiotic blending of this kind is argued in Bateman [ 3 ]. Again, there
are many examples of such creativity in action. Consider for example the extract
from an advertisement discussed by van Mulken et al. [ 69 ] and shown in Fig. 9.1 .
Here an open-ended set of potential further inferences, all supporting the general
intention of the advertisement, is opened up by virtue of the blend. There are also
commonly discussed combinations such as the use of space for time in comics and
visual narrative—moving across the space of a comic's panel, typically in Western
comics therefore from left to right, often correlates with a progression in time [ 50 ,
p. 95]—as well as blends for dramatic or emotional effect, such as when typography
is shaped visually for affective purposes [ 10 , p. 12].
A particularly creative and novel example of semiotic blending across media can
be seen in the following example. In this case the film director Ang Lee works
with the dynamic possibilities of the film medium to enlist graphic resources for
expressing movement developed within the static medium of comics. The result is