Studio V
Representation of Emotion
Bam, another idea that I thought I could work with is having a Tamagotchi style installation, where the “pet” thrives off the likes it receives from the audience. I want to make my project a bit more metaphorical though, not in a literal “here is social media” kind of thing. I thought about how else I could represent the emotion one may go through with social media, without using facial/human features.
I tried to find some research on representations of emotion, but found an interesting one on facial features.
Universal Facial Expressions of Emotion (Paul Ekman, 1997)
It is thought that facial expressions can represent different emotions within different cultures. There is common ground between cultures, we all have a universal “angry” face, or “sad” face. However the meanings behind such could be different.
Different cultures experience events differently from each other. For example, a funeral may be a somber, sad event, while other cultures may see it as a celebration of ones life.
And then there’s the whole, “how much emotion should I show?”, or “how do I cover up how I feel?”. When people feel emotions, there is a tendency to cover up or exaggerate the emotion, depending on the situation.
There were some experiments conducted to see what facial expressions were associated with what emotions, with participants being of different cultures. The findings were basically that there are universal facial expressions, but there is slight differences in interpretation, caused by the above reasons.
I found it interesting that facial expressions can actually be interpreted differently, although there are the classic expressions that everyone recognises. I think emojis are a good example of how we have these facial expressions to show our emotion through text, however even then, they can be read differently person to person.
I thought it would be good to ask some people to show me how they would represent happiness and sadness without using human features. These were what they gave me:
I really like the two images of the sky, the simple changes of colour scheme changes the mood of the image. This is also the same for the rose images at the top.
The flowers work well with the idea of having a “pet” to look after, it can change between the happy and sad phases.
Revisiting the original idea, I thought it would be cool to create a physical flower which will droop down when ignored, and bloom when given attention. Giving it a physical form would also show how the digital affects the real. To symbolise social media, I could use the interactive point for the user as a “like” button, as on Facebook. Facebook is the most popular social media, therefore it would be most familiar to a large audience.
More consideration is needed for this idea.
References:
Ekman, P., & Keltner, D. (1997). Universal facial expressions of emotion. Segerstrale U, P. Molnar P, eds. Nonverbal communication: Where nature meets culture, 27-46.
