E(*)star, navigating the landscape of emotion language

This cross-disciplinary installation merges artificial intelligence (AI), linguistics, and interactive art to explore the rich, ambiguous terrain of languages describing human emotion across cultures. At its core is an AI system that guides visitors through a vast, multi-lingual emotional lexicon.This installation explores the inherent ambiguity of human experience and emotion. Language, our tool of choice for describing feelings, paradoxically both clarifies and complicates our emotional understanding. It collapses the infinite spectrum of feelings into discrete terms while simultaneously giving rise to new emotions tied to abstract concepts. Language itself even is an ambiguity—a dynamic system born of consensus, connecting sounds and symbols to experiences and phenomena. We find that, as we create systems to manage ambiguity, we inadvertently generate new ambiguities. Humanity is seemingly in an ever tail-chasing moment trying to crystallise ambiguity in something concrete, yet creating even more ambiguity along the way. This (dare I say, ambiguous) play is an intriguing part of life, and connecting AI to it should allow for even more daring ambiguities to come to being.