Project idea: Pandemic words (2020)

 

“Referring to the Leitmotiv of “Pandemia” I would like to present the spread of emotions within groups like a viral process.

 

This project is inspired by my personal experience sitting in the audience of a political debate in a 100-meter-long factory building. The atmosphere was calm until the three politicians on the stage started arguing aggressiveley. Within seconds I could hear angry shouts “travelling” to the back of the building, with some people strengthening the aggressive impulse while others tried to calm the situation down.”

 

My plan is to create a video animation to visualise the “infectious” spread of emotions in audiences during public speeches. I will gather a group of people to watch extracts of political speeches while I record them. I will analyse the recordings with Artificial Intelligence to detect the emotional responses of the audience. I will then create a bird view model of the scene with markers for speaker and audience members. These markers will be animated to change colours in synchrony with the detected emotional changes of the audience members during the speech. The change of colors might add up to visual patterns of emotions “travelling” throught the audience: how they emerge, maybe move, accumulate and dissipate.

 

This project might inspire. The animation will allow to investigate the spread of emotions like a contagious phenomenon and might shed a new light on mass communicaition (of emotions).