Disciplines data visualization
Exhibition STADHUIS (Leuven) 16.11.2018 – 18-12-2018
An emotional story
I’m keeping a diary since my childhood. Sometimes I ask myself: what to do with them now? I can make sure they gather dust on the attic, I can burn them. Or I can use them in an artwork that focusses on the hidden emotions of 2017. From my diaries I reconstructed and designed the lost emotions.
Why focussing on emotions?
In school we learn to write and to read. But seldom we talk about emotions. Most grown-ups are better at driving a car than talking about their emotions. Whilst, during a day, various emotions race through ones head.
I started, just as with a color-scheme, with the basic emotions. Different researchers give different basic-emotions. The amount varies from four to ten.
Design
Eight basic-emotions —love, joy, passion, sadness, shame, fear, disgust, anger —got their own color. The pages from my diary were analyzed and through the lines I re-discovered the emotion of that day.
Each day got its own colored card, according to the hidden emotion of that moment, and got labeled with the day and the hour that was noted in my diary.
Emotions and thoughts are elusive. A page form my diary can start sad, but end happily, without myself noticing it while I was writing. This is the reason I enjoyed seeing the colors of the cards change.
Beautiful future
Finding a way to handle our emotions better.
