Description
“No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it’s still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You are still alive.” — Robert Kurvitz (Disco Elysium)
Echoes and Shadows is an emotion visualizer created with the purpose of introspection to help the creator (and, as a result, the audience) look at themselves from above and “think outside the box.” The visualizer iterates through a personal diary, bringing one’s thoughts and feelings to life in the form of a live organism. It is a representation of the intricacies, uncertainties, and events that humans face on a daily basis, aiming to present a new perspective.
Technical Description
The digital installation is composed based on a dataset including 2011 personal diary entries written from 20.03.2019 until 19.09.2024 (the time of the final testing of the project). The personal diary is collected using an app called Pixels, which allows users to choose a color based on how they felt during the course of the day, select their emotions using pre-defined tags in the app, and write a diary entry of what had happened during the day. The project is realized using an algorithmically generated moving structure representing the neurological connections between brain synapses. The original diary input application only supports five colors for emotions, but for better visualization, more variety of color themes are assigned to each day’s state in this installation: Purple undertones for sad and depressive days, gray and blue undertones for boring/neutral days, yellow and orange undertones for stressful/angry days, and green undertones for happy and peaceful days. The visualization is generated using Touch Designer, and the data gets imported into Touch Designer project via the Pixels app’s JSON output (converted to CSV using Python for ease of compilation). As the visualization evolves and self-generates, the dates appear on the screen, and the color of the structure changes based on the emotion of the respective date, allowing the developer and viewers to observe the linear events of life and their feelings from the outside, for a better perspective of the turn of events and the range of ever-present emotional changes throughout the years.
The chosen music is ambient music performed using a glass harp (glassharfe) to create a calming atmosphere and put the audience “on edge” at the same time.
Context
This project is documented in Hfk using a sound system and a projector.
Artist
https://instagram.com/artbyLaMinty