We wanted to codify the findings from our experiment in a way which would retain aspects of the scientific process, while more generally being a talking point for our theoretical research, our interviews, our experiments and our analysis.
This approach was inspired by our readings on the subjectivity of emotion - but what if we tried to remove the subjectivity?
We decided that taking the idea of representing emotion through art to a far-fetched conclusion, directly physically rendering and 3D printing emotional output, would allow us to examine the artistic process from a new angle, in a highly speculative approach. We took on board our discussions with artists, and our theoretical research into emotion. We were pointed - by Atau, actually - towards the work of Maurice Benayoun, who, for instance, in his work Brain Factory, took EEG readings from participants to associate raw data with emotional response according to a binary framework. A comparable translation was also made in his work SFear.
The artists we spoke to all agreed that in their practice they did not seek to explicitly represent, or force feeling around, a specific emotion, so we wondered what it would mean to actually attempt this.
We thought the approach of choosing a physical object as our artefact would provide a point of interaction with our project. The idea we settled on of 3D printing the GSR and the natural language data in a way which allowed comparison between the two, while respecting that they are separate datasets.
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