Emotive Mirror

Emotive Mirror is an interactive installation that examines how computational systems interpret human emotion.

As participants face a projection screen, emotionally charged prompts guilt, grief, longing appear as slow drifting text. A webcam captures the viewer’s facial expression in real time, and emotion-recognition software attempts to classify the detected state.

The system then translates this classification into a generative portrait produced by artificial intelligence. The resulting images are stylised, dreamlike, and often ambiguous, less reflections of the viewer than interpretations shaped by algorithmic assumptions.

The installation highlights the gap between human emotional complexity and machine categorisation. What appears as recognition is often projection: a system aestheticising what it cannot fully understand.

At the end of the interaction, viewers are invited to write their own reflections in a physical journal, introducing a slower, analogue response to the automated interpretation.

Rather than presenting technological failure, Emotive Mirror reveals the subtle misalignments that occur when human emotion is translated into data.