tamed

: Exhibit at PARALLEL

This project explores the areas of emotional delivery, spiritual healing, human behavior observation, and visual effects communication. This experience was mainly created for myself to understand my range of emotion as changes occur as well as to search for new ways to subconsciously heal my feelings before I noticed them. The machine was used to observe my outfit choices I made unconsciously, in order to tame an unexisting consciousness to calm the feelings that I would be facing at the start of each day. The final outcome of this project is a “tamed quote” that relates to the colors I wore on certain days that correspond to the diary entries.

intention

people usually don’t know they are suffering after they look back to see what they have been through

if we could understand our emotions sooner, can we take care of ourselves better?

key working concepts

emotions - accessing through past experiences

In Lisa Feldman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. The Theory of Constructed Emotion is a theory that states our emotions are constructed by our past experiences. We first document the situation in our mind, and the emotions appear from the past experiences we have been through.

wardrobe - approaching own past

In Walter Benjamin’s article Unpacking My Library, he described reading one’s bookshelf as reading one’s life. Not only is the action of buying, collecting, and discarding books a representation of one’s behavior, but also the content of their collections. This analogy can also apply to our wardrobe. Consider if the action of buying a book could be said as owning the knowledge, then the action of buying a dress could be described as claiming a style.

psychology aspect of color and clothing

Following up with the psychology studies of clothing selection by David Juliao, he stated that the “clothes you choose to wear might be affecting not only how others see you but also the way you feel. A certain mood can make us choose some type of clothes, which in turn, will reinforce the way we are feeling.”

python library used

cv2 - extract colors
u2-net - remove the background
text2emotion - extract emotions from my diary
nltk - pick up semantic text from my diary
story generator - create daily quote

envision the future

Humans need certain interactions to understand what they have been through. It takes time for myself to find out my mood swings. Moreover, what other people describe can hardly approach what I truly feel. This thesis project is a speculative experiment that answers the question of whether the machine can notice the changes of my emotions sooner than myself. Can it provide a way to help me heal when needed?