The Team

See What You Feel (SWYF) is a thesis project of Catherine Chanse, Laura Copenhaver, and Jerry Yin — students in the California State University, East Bay Multimedia Graduate Program. The experience and skills that the SWYF team bring to the project are varied and include graphic design, programming, and content development experience.

Catherine Chanse is interested in exploring and understanding the ways in which technology can be used to further learning, promote discussion, dialogue, and action within and between communities, and provide opportunities for expression and creativity. She has more than seven years of experience working within the nonprofit sector with a focus on education and access to technology issues.

Catherine is currently a multimedia instructor for Life Frames, a San Francisco based nonprofit that is creating ecological and sustainable environmental and educational transformation in communities.

Laura Copenhaver has been working in design and media since 1998. During this time she has worked in traditional print media as the photo editor of Mother Jones Magazine and in new media as the lead designer of the News and Politics sites at Salon.com. Though her initial training was as a fine artist, her passion for new media brought her back to school to pursue a master’s degree in Multimedia.

Laura currently works as a photographer and freelance web designer.

Jerry Yin is a bay area web consultant with over 8 years of professional experience in web production, project management, and web design. He has participated in several major web launches for the like of Bank of the West, Roxio Inc., Check Point Software Ltd., Universal response Corp., SinaNet, MyPrimeTime, Electronic Arts, Self-Survey, and Napster Inc.

See What You Feel: A Synopsis

See What You Feel is a thesis project developed by Laura Copenhaver, Jerry Yin, and Catherine Chanse for the Multimedia Graduate Program at California State University, East Bay.

Thesis Question

How can a telematic art project that incorporates image analysis, help us better understand how artists depict emotions photographically?

Project Description

See What You Feel (SWYF) is a telematic art project designed to help us better understand how people from different countries depict emotions photographically. We are interested in exploring the patterns, connections, and departures that emerge cross cultures when emotions are expressed visually. Participants’ images will be analyzed and compared using a combination of collected metadata and image analysis software, which we hope will allow us to better understand the visual symbols and language of emotions.

The SWYF website will house five to eight different dynamically generated image galleries, with each gallery allowing search queries on different image analysis functions and/or metadata comparison, such as color, composition, emotion, and shape. Participants will upload their images to the SWYF website and will be able to view their images in relationship to other images through the lens of these different galleries.

SWYF is particularly interested in involving art students between the ages of 18 and 24 because of their ability to articulate their feelings through imagery. We do, however, anticipate and welcome submissions from anyone who is interested in participating in the project. We will contact professors to encourage them to let their students know about the project, or, ideally, integrate it into their curriculum. Art students are experienced in handling graphic assignments, and will benefit from assignments that build their ability to visually express emotions. Additionally, art students are likely to be interested in learning more about how other artists around the world express their emotions through photography.

Participants are asked to upload photographs illustrating thirty-two different emotions to a dedicated server.  The emotions are outlined in Robert Plutchik's psychoevolutionary theory of emotions . Image analysis algorithms will analyze the images for color, composition, and dominant shapes. Once the images have been analyzed, they will be placed in a 3D Flash gallery alongside other images. Participants will be able to see their images in the context of other images of the same emotion, shape, color, or composition from around the world. Visitors to the site will be able to browse emotions and consider the various patterns associated with each emotion.

Emotion Frameworks / Approaches

We are drawn to Plutchik’s circumplex model of emotions because we believe that it both provides an interesting framework for thinking about emotions, and because his visual articulation of the relationship of different emotions is compelling and nuanced.

Plutchik first proposed his cone-shaped model in 1958 to describe how emotions were related. He suggested eight primary emotions (that are four pairs of diametrically opposed emotions): joy versus sorrow; anger versus fear; acceptance versus disgust; and surprise versus expectancy. His circumplex model makes connections between the idea of an emotion circle and a color wheel. Like colors, primary emotions can be expressed at different intensities and can mix with one another to form different emotions. The circumplex model that we use on our website is actually seen as a cross-section of a three-dimensional cone shaped model of emotions.

Additionally, we are interested in exploring Carl Jung’s concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes in relationship to our project. The patterns that emerge, we are hoping, will allow us to better understand the unconscious imagery that is connected to emotions. We are interested in the relationship between Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary approach and Jung’s idea of the symbols and patterns that are part of the “psychological inheritance of mankind.” As we search for patterns, we will seek to uncover, to some extent, those symbols which Jung calls “archetypes” and “primordial images” and that Freud has termed “archaic remnants” .

Patterns – Shapes, Colors, and Composition

Our project seeks to explore the relationship between the emotions that we are hardwired with and the visual patterns – shapes, colors, and compositions - that continually surface in nature and in the artwork of people across cultures, continents, and time. As psychologist Aniela Jaffe notes in Man and His Symbols, “man, with his symbol-making propensity unconsciously transforms objects or forms into symbols (thereby endowing them with great psychological importance) and expressing them in both his religion and his visual arts.”

Physicist and artist, Bulent Atalay, in discussing nature’s symmetry, that is “expressible in mathematical terms,” writes:

When magnified one hundred thousand times, the spirals seen in the cross-section of the microtubules of the heliozoan resemble, in scale and shape, the spirals seen in the horns of the ram. This shape, magnified another hundred billion billion times, resembles the arms of a spiral galaxy.

Within nature, Fibonacci sequences are found in the spiral of shells, the curve of waves, the branching of trees, and the florets of a sunflower, and are mirrored in the architecture and artwork of diverse cultures . The logarithmic spiral can be seen in Leonardo da Vinci’s double circular staircase in the Vatican Museum and Frederick Hart’s Ex Nihilo in the Washington National Cathedral.

Two-dimensional crystal lattice types that have been identified by crystallographers are found repeatedly in the architecture and cultural works of people. Designs similar in structure to these crystal lattices are seen in the mosaics and stone carvings by Moorish artists that are found at the Alhambra Palace in Granada and at the Great Mosque in Cordoba.

Circles, triangles, and squares also appear consistently throughout cultural productions. Sengai, a Japanese Zen priest who lived during the mid 18th Century, is well known for his ink drawing that that depicts these three simple shapes together. Though Sengai simply titled it “The first Zen monastery in Japan,” the piece is usually referred to as “The Circle, Triangle, and Square” and Daisetz Suzuki, renowned scholar and author on Zen, and others have referred to it as “The Universe.”

Though the shapes have been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, Suzuki believed that the circle represents formlessness and the infinite, that the triangle represents “the beginning of all things,” and that the square represents the physical manifestation of forms (i.e. the universe). Robert Lawlor, anthropologist and symbologist, also understood Sengai’s drawing as a progression from “unmanifest Unity” (the circle) to unity manifested (the square). He notes that “geometrical philosophy” has seen the circle and square in this way, and that the square “represents the four primary orientations, north, south, east, and west, which make space comprehensible.”

Though we have done preliminary research on patterns that have reoccurred across time and cultures, this research is ongoing. Since SWYF is a photography-based project, we are particularly interested in in furthering our research on patterns, cross-cultural studies, and emotions within the field of photography.

Related Work

In conceptualizing SWYF, we were influenced by the web work of Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, We Feel Fine (2006) that uses large scale blog analysis to identify pull out sentences that contain the phrase “I feel.” We Feel Fine then provides users with a series of interfaces that can be used to search and sort across a number of demographic slices.

We were also greatly influenced by Christophe Bruno’s Logo.Hallucination (2006) which asks the question “Is the economic dynamics of the collective hallucination leading us towards a privatization of the glance?” Logo.Hallucination, is based on neural network image recognition, and is designed to monitor images on the Internet that may contain hidden logos. When a “hidden logo” is detected, Logo.Hallucination alerts the user to copyright violation and tells the user to cease and desist.

Christian Langreiter’s Retrievr (2006), an experimental service which lets the viewer search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch or searching by color, was also of great interest to us as we were conceptualizing our project .

Conclusion

See What You Feel has the potential to contribute substantially to our understanding of the visual language of emotions, and the similarities and departures that emerge cross cultures.

For more information or to contact the See What You Feel team, please email us at group@seewhatyoufeel.com.