American Emotions
Public attention, rendered as color.
Attention leaves
a trace.
The project began during the 2024 election period. Public search activity supplied a signal; an authored model assigned emotional weights and colors. Each interpretation became part of a field.
A record,
over time.
The individual traces accumulate. Read together, they make a visual record of the model’s interpretations of public attention.
The field carries those interpretations. It does not establish how a population felt.
Project details
- Origin
- 2024
- Scope
- United States
- Form
- Instrument
- Continuation
- Global Emotions
About the project
An authored instrument that interprets public attention through emotion and color.
The project began in 2024 with a question: could public attention be interpreted as an affective field, and what would the right medium be? Color became a way to explore that question.
The original election-period experiment used search activity as a proxy for attention. Its fields record the computational model’s interpretation of those signals, rather than a verified measurement of a population’s emotional state.
Explore the successor: Global EmotionsSignal → Interpretation → Rendering
Signal
- Public search activity
- Google Trends RSS
Interpretation
- Authored affective model
- Emotion weights and color assignments
Rendering
- Accumulation over time
- A luminous color field
Each query receives emotional weight and a color within the authored system. Its trace joins a field that can be read as an atmosphere. Search activity supplies the input; the model supplies the interpretation.
Rendering method
The later American Emotions renderer uses float32 additive accumulation with Gaussian bloom. Individual queries leave soft traces that layer into a density map of interpreted attention.
Taxonomy across versions
The retained 2024 pipeline asks a language model to assign emotion labels and RGB colors using an open vocabulary. The later American Emotions v2 source defines 171 emotions; Global Emotions documents 169. These describe different iterations, not interchangeable counts for the original experiment.
What the experiment opened
The 2024 experiment opened questions about the distance between a public signal, an emotional interpretation, and a visual form. What can attention stand in for? What does the model introduce? What can color communicate that a label cannot?
That line of inquiry later informed Emotion as System, Chroma, and the ACG installation series. Chroma gives the person authority to name a feeling; the installation places participant input beside interpreted public signals. Each returns the original question in a different form.
New York EmotionsInferred emotion meets feelings expressed in personEmotion as SystemThe research foundationChromaA private emotional journalTell Me How You Feel: ACGA shared encounter with affectFrom American Emotions to Global Emotions
Global Emotions continues this inquiry across locations in a daily field interface. The instrument is a later development, not a live replay of the 2024 American Emotions system. Its model and coverage should be read through its own dated records.
Global EmotionsPublic signals interpreted across locationsProject record
- Origin
- American Emotions · 2024 election-period experiment
- Related work
- New York Emotions · 2025 mayoral-election period
- Continuation
- Global Emotions · Location-based instrument
