Walking Blues Changes Undersea: Imaginative Narrative in Interactive Poetry Generation with the GRIOT System

Emotionally stirring imaginative narratives help us to make sense of the human condition, including elements of life such as the nature of tragedy, joy, and compassion. Such issues, including happiness and beauty, are seldom interpreted as having much to do with computation. This paper presents an approach to computational narrative that emphasizes meaning and imagination. This approach is based upon research at the UCSD Meaning and Computation Lab that draws upon theories of metaphor, conceptual blending, and narrative imagining from cognitive linguistics, algebraic semiotics, and art practices. With these theoretical underpinnings, I implemented the ALLOY algorithm for conceptual blending, and the GRIOT system for implementing computational narratives. This paper presents new results and analyses, focusing upon my recent interactive generative narrative poetry work entitled Walking Blues Changes Undersea. Additionally, the GRIOT system and different levels of its use are described, an updated automaton for structuring narrative events is presented, and new poetic output is presented and analyzed. This work represents initial experiments toward a larger multimedia project entitled “Loss, Undersea.”