EMOTIONS ARE ABSTRACT ART

MINDSWARMS

Have you ever wondered what your brain looks like when it’s thinking and feeling emotion? Feelings can be abstract. Especially when they are turned into digital paintings.

Mindswarms, developed by Random Quark, was commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK to produce digital paintings from emotions. These beautiful and compelling works reflect both an individual’s mood and global sentiment.

The project initially set out to explore the core belief that empathy is a powerful motivator for behavioral change.

Random Quark co-founders, Theodoros Papatheodorou PhD, a developer, educator, and creative technology enthusiast, and Tom Chambers, a creative coder, full stack developer, and artist, iterate among concrete data, electrons, and abstraction -- between physical and virtual reality. The studio creates bespoke interactive installations that augment experiences and environments, working with computer graphics, web and mobile technologies, computer vision, electronics & hardware, virtual reality, projection mapping, interactive theatre, and data visualization.

To come up with individual portraits of SWUK employees’ emotions, each was asked to remember an emotional experience while wearing the headset: the birth of a child, the loss of a parent, their wedding day, etc. After recording their electrical brain activity for 30 seconds, the software responded to the impulses in their brain.

Emotion recognition algorithms were used to determine what each person was feeling. This data was then fed into a generative algorithm to create swarm paintings that represented each individual's state of mind at the time of recording.

These paintings have become a fundamental part of the Saatchi Wellness UK identity.

The random quark studio specializes in designing and developing experiences that combine the real with the virtual. They create bespoke interactive installations that augment experiences and environments.

Working with the Geneva Emotional Wheel, a standard neuroscience tool, which maps a set of 7 core emotions — joy, sadness, anger, love, aversion, fear, and surprise — the random quark team pinpointed the two predominant feelings inspired by each memory. They then assigned a specific color to each emotion: red for anger, blue for sadness, etc., with the vibrancy of each color indicating the strength of the emotion. The result was about 100,000 data points representing the resulting ratio of both colors for each individual.

Random Quark adopted a generative flocking algorithm inspired by bird swarm or movement of fish in the sea.

Swarm behaviour is the collective movement effect of a number of individual 'agents,' such as birds, that follow simple rules to guide their behavior. In this application, each agent was represented as a tiny brush that moved on a canvas leaving an ink trail behind it.

Emotional data extracted from the raw brainwaves was fed into the swarm visualization system, which resulted in complex, non-repeating patterns of color. Watch the video.

Flocking algorithms offered the best way to incorporate the massive amounts of data produced by the brain during the EEG test without reducing it to a few inputs. The resulting emotional landscapes — or EmoScapes™ — look like beautiful abstract expressionist paintings.

The Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK website now features an “Empathy Engine” — a live artistic algorithm that uses IBM Watson to monitor global social media sentiment and identify the moments that are moving people all over the world. The Empathy Engine changes in real-time to portray world’s emotions as a constantly shifting piece of art.

The global response to Brexit, for example, fueled a visualization comprised primarily of deep purples and light blues, colors associated with surprise and sadness, respectively:

The election of Someone With Tiny Hands, on the other hand, was depicted in bright reds and oranges, indicating simultaneous expressions of love and anger. His inauguration was overwhelmingly expressed with fear and sadness.

This remarkable integration of data analysis, generative algorithms, and artistic expression is already inspiring new digital applications that can be used to contextualize and accommodate human emotions. This adaptive technology has the potential to not only improve the way humans work with and leverage digital applications and storytelling.

Learn more about Random Quark here.

Read more about Beautiful Abstract in  Earth As Abstract Artist.

And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Mind/Body, Soul/Impact, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Arts/Design, and Place/Time, Daily Fix posts.

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IMAGE CREDITS:

1. Image: Courtesy of Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK.
2. Image:  “Mindswarms” series commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK. Courtesy of Random Quark.
3. Image: “Mindswarms” series commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK. Courtesy of Random Quark.Image: “When I was young in my country house in Spain (joy & love).” “Mindswarms” series commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK. Courtesy of Random Quark.
4. Image: Color Legend for Random Quark Mindswarms Project. Courtesy of Random Quark and Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK.
5. Image:  “Mindswarms” series commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK. Courtesy of Random Quark.
6. Image: “My mum had brain surgery (fear & disgust).” “Mindswarms” series commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK. Courtesy of Random Quark.
7. Image:  “Mindswarms” series commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK. Courtesy of Random Quark.
8. Image: Mindswarms Image of emotions resulting from Brexit vote. Courtesy of Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK.
9. Image: Mindswarms Image of emotions resulting from Someone With Tiny Hands election. Courtesy of Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK.
10. Image:  “Mindswarms” series commissioned by the Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK. Courtesy of Random Quark.
11. Image: “Proposal to my fiancé (love & fear).” “Mindswarms” series commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK. Courtesy of Random Quark.
12. Image: “Finding out my tumour was benign (love & surprise).” “Mindswarms” series commissioned by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness UK. Courtesy of Random Quark.