PROJECT 03 / 2025 / COMPLETE / NYC
This Is How I’m Feeling: NYC
A site-specific installation that streamed one person’s daily emotion into three windows as colored light.
01 / PREMISE
What if a private feeling spilled into public light?
The lab thinks about affective ecosystems, the way private emotion moves through shared space. This Is How I’m Feeling: NYC asked the question directly. What happens if you put one person’s emotion onto the street, in plain view, every night?
The answer was a studio in New York, three windows, and a nightly broadcast of one feeling rendered as colored light.
02 / PROCESS
Journal, to emotion, to color, to light.
Each day began with a journal entry. The entry was translated into an emotion, and the emotion was translated into a color, using the same scoring process the lab uses for American Emotions and the broader research on color as an affective interface.
The color was then streamed to three networked LED fixtures installed in the three windows of a studio in NYC. As the day’s feeling shifted, so did the light. The building spoke for the interior.
03 / FRAME
A study in the permeability of affect.
The project is small in scale and direct in form. One person, one studio, one feeling per day, three points of light. But the frame is the lab’s larger claim. Affect is not bounded by the body. It is a field phenomenon. It moves. It leaks. It can be made visible, and once visible, it becomes a shared coordinate.
This Is How I’m Feeling: NYC is the simplest possible demonstration of that claim. The subsequent work, ACG by SLBH, scales it.
