Annotated Bibliography
Reading List
CHARLES JENCKS AND NATHAN SILVER
Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation
Cambridge: The MIT Press
[1972] 2013
Excerpt pp. 38–53
Like all things natural or mechanical, a product goes through a stage of Adhocism. Similar to what the authors explain, the process of creating the facial expression requires an ad-hoc approach. Individual vector shapes of eyes, mouth, and nose, establish several subsystems which are then used to create one totalistic facial expression. The positioning of these subsystems or vector shapes in relation to each other provided a wide range of emotional variations to be experimented with. The Dissectibility facet of Adhocism also applies to the vector facial expression, wherein one fully formed emotion can be broken apart and combined with other parts to form something different. The only difference is in the case of these vector facial expressions each and everyone is still a valid iteration and can all be termed as a totalistic product.
‘Literature down to a pixel’
Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation
Stanford: Stanford University Press
2017
pp. 165-195
“The digital dissolve into every day as all clocks, all books, all texts, in short, all human activity passes through some form of digital being.” (Pp. 169). Literature in a similar manner transition from a physical medium to a digital format. This changes how we interact with it. In the case of Twitter, the medium provides the user with information from around the world, from all topics and subjects in one single scroll. This provides the medium with an advantage when compared to a physical format. “Smoothness, in his view, is a property of the machine.”(pp. 170) But the publication produced in response removes the smoothness of the digital world and translates pixels into ink and paper making the audience examine the message and question the medium’s viability.
Projects/Practices
Real Feelings by HEK
HeK (House of Electronic Arts, Basel)
2020
Available on: [https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/virtual-exhibition-tour/]
Available on: [https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/virtual-exhibition-tour/]
This exhibition by HEK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) took place in the middle of the pandemic. Twenty artists came together to respond to the topic of technology and emotions. The exhibition showcases the effects positive or negative technology has had and will continue to have on us as human beings. A lot of these artworks highlighted how omnipresent technology has become in our daily lives, as a result of which, how we as human beings have adapted our emotional response to it. The artworks often used personification and exaggeration as a common theme to get the message across. This use of exaggeration and personification also helped my publication to get the desired result. This acted as one of my primary references and hence, through my project, I tried to respond to the body of work showcased in this exhibition.
Porsche Kelly
Social Media is a Killer of Emotions
TEDxOakland
2017
Available on: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z9tZCzrZsE]
Porsche Kelly also known as “The Poetic Activist” with this poem performed at TEDxOakland, uses strong words to highlight how technology, social media in particular, has made us killed our emotions. She, in her 4-minute performance, makes us wonder about the impact social media has on human emotions and how they are being desensitised with its overuse. With the world becoming a global village through social media, it is also disconnecting us from what is right next to us. Exposing users to things like murder and other graphic content that should not be seen next to a post about a new iPhone feature or an ad about a backpack. This was the topic that I explored in my response. Using the form of flip book-cum-publication to showcase the kind of emotional variance one goes through while scrolling through a Twitter feed. Is it okay for us as humans to go through this regularly? How does this impact us emotionally? Is this sort of emotional desensitisation good or bad?
External Reading
Paul Ekman
Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life.
Times Books/Henry Holt and Co.
2003
Emotions Revealed is a book exploring the topic of emotions and facial expressions. This book consists of the categorisation of five different kinds of emotions that humans project through the use of facial expressions. It explains these various emotions using a detailed explanation of the face and images to support the text. These detailed explanations were used to form a set of isolated vector shapes to then be used in combination to form a facial expression for my initial iteration of the faces. These, like the images in the book, acted as a tangible visual aid for the visual translation of the Twitter feed, to help the audience promptly grasp the emotion that the viewer of those tweets initially felt after reading them. This book makes a case of facial expressions as a language. Can these facial expressions get converted into simple vector shapes and still be used effectively? And can simple vector forms incorporate the nuances of a human face?
Jan Tschichold
The Form of the Book
On Books that are Too Wide, Too Large, or Square
Hartley & Marks Publishers
1995
pp. 166-169
This essay by Jan Tschichold, argues for the form of the book to be of a specific proportion and size while also providing supporting arguments and logical explanations for the rules. For a book to last and to be found again, it will have to confine to a set of rules in order for it not to end up in a waste bin. In my case, the publication, produced as part of the work, does not confine to the rule mentioned by Jan Tschichold. The book is too wide, too short, doesn’t have the name on the spine, and cannot be properly placed on the bookshelves. The publication form can be termed as experimental and in agreement with Jan Tschichold’s argument, it might not last long and will not be applicable to any other topics discourse.
Extended Writing
Paul Ekman
Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life.
Times Books/Henry Holt and Co.
2003
Paul Ekman in his work ‘Emotions Revealed’ explores the extent of human facial expressions. He uses text as his main means of discourse explaining the nuances of facial expressions in great detail, while also providing visual aids in the forms of images taken either in real-life situations or those taken with actors specifically for the book. Paul Ekman makes a case for facial expression being a language that is universal and breaks it down for easy understanding among its audiences. And one can argue that understanding facial expressions is a lost art in the digital age and a language that should be understood by everyone.
The book is divided into 10 chapters, starting with explaining how emotions and specifically facial expressions are largely universal, only showing a few discrepancies between a few of them. He concludes this, as a result of a year-long study he and his colleagues conducted in the US, Japan, and also New Guinea (an island in Australia). Emotions are developed as an evolutionary trait and have helped humankind survive for this long due to the emotional responses we generate to an outer stimulus. The author, through this medium, is not only trying to make the readers aware of the emotions they encounter in the world but also to help them understand their emotions. To react to them, and sometimes even try to control involuntary emotional responses.
He categorises human emotions under these five categories – Anger, Sadness, Enjoyment, Disgust, and Fear. Paul goes through each of these emotions individually in great detail. The main aim of every chapter is to make the reader more aware of these expressions when encountered in real life. He takes an example of the photos from actual situations where a particular expression was displayed. Furthermore, he uses the same set of male and female actors to allow for an easy comparison of the facial expressions between the various chapters. Each emotion is displayed on a wide spectrum of intensity, causing a lot of the neutral or low-intensity states of different emotions to merge into each other. These images and text were a part of my initial exploration in creating the vector faces, that were then used as a translation device responding to textual information posted online, especially Twitter in this case. According to the book, every emotion has a particular facial feature that ends up playing a pivotal role, for example, sadness is revealed through raised inner eyebrows, contracted cheeks and widened lips. These sorts of detailed explanations, without any kind of technical jargon, make this book accessible to all academic and non-academic readers, which is not the case with numerous books written in this field of study. In the end, the book also asks the user to interact with the book by asking them to identify a set of images and categories according to the emotions that they display, testing the audience on what they have learned to decipher facial expressions.
Although Paul Ekman is a well-known psychologist, some of his critics argue that facial expression by itself only tells half the story and a lot of the context is hidden in the body language. To this day, his book is used by government organisations, field researchers and the public as a way to better understand the ever-expanding field of Emotions and Facial expressions.
Real Feelings by HEK
HeK (House of Electronic Arts, Basel)
2020
Available on: [https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/en/virtual-exhibition-tour/]
Real Feelings – Emotions and Technology, was an exhibition by HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel), that was initially held in August 2020. A total of 20 artists from around the globe took part in this exhibition, trying to tackle the subject of emotions and how it relates and interacts with technology. Surprisingly for an exhibition on this topic, the artworks were dominantly anchored to the present world, most of the artwork responding to the current scenarios rather than to the future. My experience of this exhibition took place through a virtual tour hosted by the director of HEK, Sabine Hinnelsbach, who with two other Co-curators curated this exhibition. Therefore, getting a sense of the environment and the placement of the artworks in response to each other was rather difficult. As this exhibition was happening in the middle of the pandemic, a lot of work responded to isolation and emotional detachment during that period.
The very first thing visible at the entrance was a set of six screens with various emotions listed on them, this was a project called Vibe Check by Lauren lee McCarthy & Kyle McDonald. This, like a lot of the other projects, was created for Real feelings. In their project, they placed several cameras all around the exhibition space and using AI monitored the audience’s facial expressions in real-time and categorised them under 6 different categories through sentiment analysis which was then displayed on the screen. This at the very onset of the exhibition gave a sense of how omnipresent technology is not only in this exhibition but in the outside world as well. A lot of these artworks used personification through animation and interactive instalments, as a common theme to impart emotions within an inanimate object to highlight the way we interact with our devices nowadays. One of the artworks was 5 frames placed next to each, with portraits of robots and humans named ‘One of them is Human’ which asked the audience to identify the image that was of a human and not a robot. This not only terrified me but also made me marvel at the level that we have reached in recreating human-like forms. This sort of arrangement made the audience look deep and analyse all the images to identify (if they could) the one that was human. Another artwork is named a Solitary Survival raft, an instalment consisting of a raft-like structure. This raft’s outer covering would either inflate to form a tent or vacuum out all the air to form a tight suction with the user’s body, acting as an intimacy tool for the user. These artworks highlighted the emotional deficit that people in the current digital world are going through and how technology is now filling in those gaps.
Several of these artworks acted as a replacement for humans to connect emotionally and physically. A virtual reality scenario, wherein the user finds love in the virtual world through an AI rather than in real life, makes us ask how viable a replacement technology can be moving forward.
Feedback – Emotional Rollercoaster
What’s working
-connection to social media (desensitizing, emotional exhaustion
-time span differences(reading a publication(long) vs. scrolling”short 3 mins”)
-the characters acts like an echo chamber/filter effect reflecting the feature of social media
-great innovative binding
-the immediacy of the flip book fits with the pace of social media
What’s not working
-if showing the tweet feed necessary? (Do we need to be told to be sad for something)
-the publication’s less clear/tangible than the flip book
-the form of publication doesn’t have not enough coherence to the subject matter
-more information can be provide in the simplified response
What’s next
-tag different feeling to one tweet(different )
-add emotional complexity
-map emotional response instead of fixing them, use them as face tags/research tools
-survey