PROJECT 01 / 2024 — ONGOING / NYC
American Emotions
A living instrument that renders collective affect as color, using public attention as the signal.
01 / ORIGIN
It started as a question about color.
American Emotions began in 2024 as a question: could I render a nation’s emotional state? And if I could, what would the right medium be? The answer arrived as color.
The project ran for seven months leading up to the 2024 presidential election. It was conceived as art, but the process of making it—tracking millions of small signals of public attention, inferring affect from what people were thinking about, watching that affect move and change in near-real-time—established the philosophy that now grounds every other project in the lab.
American Emotions is where the lab’s axiom came from. Affect has value. It is measurable, collective, and shaped.
2024 ELECTION RUN — ARCHIVAL
02 / METHOD
Public attention as an affect proxy.
The pipeline treats Google search trends as a proxy for what people are collectively thinking about. Each trending query is scored against a 171-emotion taxonomy by a language model, which assigns emotional weight and a color drawn freely from the continuous spectrum.
Scores accumulate over time into a luminous field. The renderer uses float32 additive accumulation with Gaussian bloom, so individual queries leave soft traces that layer into a density map of collective attention. The result is not a chart. It is a field you read the way you read a sky.
03 / ITERATIONS
Three runs, one continuous instrument.
The project has run in three phases. The first, AMERICAN EMOTIONS (2024), ran for seven months leading up to the presidential election. The second, NEW YORK EMOTIONS (2025), ran for six weeks leading up to the NYC mayoral election. The third restarted in April 2026 and is ongoing, designed to run continuously through midterms and into the next presidential cycle.
Each run sharpened the pipeline. The taxonomy expanded. The renderer got quieter. The field got easier to read.
04 / INFLUENCE
The art project became the lab.
American Emotions is the work every other project in Studio Lab BH descends from. The philosophy it established—affect as a structured, measurable, collective phenomenon—became the foundational axiom. The pipeline became Chroma. The renderer became a research instrument. The questions it raised became papers.
The project is still art. It is also the lab’s oldest continuously running piece of infrastructure.
