ABSTRACT
Intersemiotic translation (IT) can be described as a cognitive artifact, designed to distribute artistic creativity. Cognitive artifacts are part of material and cultural niches of human cognition. They have different forms and can be used in many different activities. Their varied morphology includes “material and mental” structures (Norman 1993), “designed for and opportunistic” entities (Hutchins 1999), and “transparent and opaque” processes (Clark 2004). For several authors, cognition is full of cognitive artifacts; even more radically, cognition is a network of artifacts. For many artists, intersemiotic translation is one of these tools. But what is its ontological nature? And how does intersemiotic translation work? As an augmented intelligence technique, intersemiotic translation works as a generative model, providing new, unexpected, surprising data in the target system and affording competing results that allow the system to generate candidate instances. To describe this process, we introduce a model of intersemiotic translation based on Peirce’s mature semeiotic. At the end of the chapter, we speculate about the role that abductive inference can have in the process of generating new ideas in an artistic domain. What we have done here must be considered a preliminary tentative model of intersemiotic translation as a cognitive artifact to externalize creativity.
