Cycle of Emotions

Cycle of Emotions

<G.MAP New Wave> From Data to Painterly Abstraction — Gwangju Media Art Platform, South Korea
2026

Interactive media art installation — NLP API & Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) · 12 × 6 × 3 m

Inspired by Kandinsky’s spiritual abstraction, this project reinterprets algorithmic data through the artist’s own painterly rules. It transforms cold, dry numerical data into a sensory experience through four stages — Dot, Color, Plane, and Flow.

Dot

A stage that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze emotions in the user’s text input and cluster keywords. It visually reveals how AI interprets and classifies human linguistic expressions of emotion.

Color

Using Facial Emotion Recognition (FER), the user’s real-time expressions are analyzed into seven basic emotions. The colors and unique sound data the user assigns to each emotion accumulate together with the data of others.

Plane

The space where individual and collective data gathered from Dot and Color converge. Based on this dataset, three visual experiments are conducted, generating images that shift fluidly according to the artist’s curation and connecting to the final work.

Flow (흐름)

The final stage, in which the dominant emotion triggers audiovisual elements built from the accumulated data of previous participants. Through real-time facial emotion recognition (FER), the viewer becomes a co-creator and is led to experience their own emotional shift.

The Cycle

The sequence connecting AI and algorithmic data processing (Dot), emotion-color mapping (Color), data visualization (Plane), and co-creative participation (Flow). Having experienced this complete cycle of emotion, the viewer returns to the starting point in an altered emotional state.