Lottie Percival

How do we feel? 2023

This tactile collection uses a kind of ‘object language’ to convey a 3D experience of a dataset. The sculpted, drawn and worded data is representative of interactive and conversational pathways between humans and AI systems.

Nine feelings I select are imagined by language model Chat GPT and DALL-E – an AI program able to generate images from text. Using my conversations with AI, I generate abstract visualisations of a given feeling’s shape, colour, texture, and form. The results being alien-like 3D mashups, I ask humans to guess the emotions they see.

This questions how some data can be subjective. Data we feed from one ‘being’ to another can be ambiguous, confusing, fluctuating, sensitive.
Who decides what an emotion looks and feels like?
How can data evolve through the continuous loop trailing between human and AI mindsets?

Through human responses to physical ‘object feelings’ we see the journey of an algorithm. We see a journey of emotive communication. We see pathways of communication between humans and humans, and humans and technology.
In a world where communication of feelings is forever evolving… And a world where humans and technology are learning from one another… We see a path of explored empathy being shared between technology and humans.