Caracolomobile: affect in computer systems

This essay presents and reflects upon the construction of a few experimental artworks, among them Caracolomobile, that looks for poetic, aesthetic and functional possibilities to bring computer systems to the sensitive universe of human emotions, feelings and expressions. Modern and Contemporary Art have explored such qualities in unfathomable ways and nowadays is turning towards computer systems and their co-related technologies. This universe characterizes and is the focus of these experimental artworks; artworks dealing with entwined subjective and objective qualities, weaving perceptions, sensations and concepts. One of them, Caracolomobile, features an art installation creating a set up for an artificial robot that recognizes humans’ affective states and answers them with movements and sounds. The robot was installed over an artificial mirror lake in an open indigo-blue space surrounded by mirrors. It perceives and discriminates human emotional states and expressions using an interface developed with a non-intrusive neural headset (The neural headset used was developed by Emotiv Systems: http://www.emotiv.com . Accessed 11 August 2011). This artwork raises questions and looks for answers inquiring about the preliminary steps for the creation of artefacts that would conduct one to poetically experiment with affect, emotion, sensations and feelings in computational systems. Other works in progress ask about the poetic possibilities of mixing computational autonomous processes and behavioural robotic procedures (Arkin 1998) to create artificial environments mixed with humans.