Mirror Ritual: Human-Machine Co-Construction of Emotion

Mirror Ritual is an interactive installation that challenges the existing paradigms in our understanding of human emotion and machine perception. In contrast to prescriptive interfaces, the work's real-time affective interface engages the audience in the iterative conceptualisation of their emotional state through the use of affectively-charged machine generated poetry. The audience are encouraged to make sense of the mirror's poetry by framing it with respect to their recent life experiences, effectively `putting into words' their felt emotion. This process of affect labelling and contextualisation works to not only regulate emotion, but helps to construct the rich personal narratives that constitute human identity.