Within the exhibition FLUX-US, the exhibition, experimental and interactive project that offers the public a true immersion in modern and contemporary art in the city, art becomes action with .amygdala, the installation of fusions* establishing a relationship with the public, with the aim of representing the flow of data shared by millions of people on the network. The 125,952 LEDs in the 41 columns of the environmental work Media Garden are the access channel for data collected in real time from social networks and are illuminated controlled by the .amygdala algorithm that translates them into sounds and colours.
The emotional state of each of us is conditioned by impulses from the world we live in, the people we relate to and the experiences we have, constantly changing our perception of ourselves and our surroundings. Increasingly, these interactions take place through digital social channels and networks, turning into data that can be listened to, interpreted and used. Simply accessing a social network, using a smartphone, or simply surfing the web is enough to put intimate and private information into the public domain and feed "Big Data", huge data sets containing everything that comes out of the network. AMYGDALA, listens to shared thoughts, interprets their state of mind and translates the collected data into an audiovisual installation capable of representing the network's collective emotional state and how it changes according to events happening in the world.
At the heart of the project is a Sentiment Analysus algorithm that divides emotions into six types (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise) and performs a textual analysis for each individual tweet at a rate of about 30 tweets per second. The textual analysis elaborates word by word using a dictionary of over 5000 words, each of which has a score for each emotion according to its meaning. During the analysis of a tweet there are also heuristic rules; for example, negations in the text are checked and the score is doubled if a word is written in capitals to increase its importance. A tweet, once analysed, is then represented by six percentage values, one for each emotion, and the overall emotional state is given by the average of these six percentages.
AMYGDALA is developed in the 41 columns of the Media Garden where the process of analysing and recognising emotions is depicted, and the 12 video walls of the Media Library where the evolution of the global emotional state over time is drawn. In order to keep track of this process, every 10 minutes the data collected and analysed in the Media Garden are sent to the Media Library to be "archived" in the displays in the form of generative graphs that will build the emotional memory of the 3 months of AMYGDALA's operation.
The aim is to make visible the flow of data and information that is constantly being created by users and that can be listened to and interpreted by anyone, trying to stimulate reflection on the opportunities and risks of the digital revolution we are experiencing.
