Emotional Windows
Category:
Art Installation
The idea for this project came from my own experience with the emotion. Like many young adults, I turned to the internet to understand what I was feeling. Despite being surrounded by friends and lively environments, the emotion persisted. Yet the images I found online did not reflect my reality. They portrayed loneliness as dark and isolated. This mismatch became the trigger point of my research, which later evolved into the installation.
Although I was able to access professional support, the experience raised a critical concern: relying solely on media narratives can lead to self-misdiagnosis when emotional extremities are early indicators of serious mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety disorders.
Research
Top ranking image search results for the keyword "loneliness" from mainstream media platforms including Psychology journals, Search engines and Social Media were collected. The images were coded on the basis of the number of people in the frame, the environment, and the overall mood conveyed by the image.
84% of Images (21/25) portrayed a solitary figure, often in a melancholic or isolated setting. These images had muted color palettes, shadowed environments, and physical isolation to convey the emotion of loneliness. The solitary figure is often framed with a negative void around them, highlighting their alienation.
On interviewing 25 individuals about the environments they were in when they felt lonely; Contrary to previous results, 80% participants (20/25) reported feeling lonely among day to day settings. Their images depicted diverse social strands, with friends and strangers alike. This revealed that loneliness occurs across contexts, not only in Isolation.
The Individual story lines, converted into prompts were fed into Gen AI tool ‘Midjourney’ to create visuals. The prompts were refined and reworked to participant satisfaction.
After comparative analysis done between both Image sets, major gaps were revealed in representation of the emotion. (Refer Graph)
To bridge this gap between percived and true visuals of loneliness, the following Art Installation was created at the India HCI Conference in IIT Bombay. The Research was Published in Springer Computer Science Journal -https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-80832-6_26
The Installation
A board with 9 AI-generated images of loneliness mounted on a 3x4 grid.
Each Image can be opened like a window to reveal the QR code on the inner pane.
QR code leads to a website where the story behind the generated image can be read.
Readers can browse through other stories and also submit their own story on the website. Submitted stories will be generated into prompts and added as images in the digital library.
