Multi-channel audiovisual installation
Full Production
By separating the emotional experience across three differnet screens, the installation reveals how feeling moves between the body, the face, and an abstracted system of signs. The work reflects on how emotion is sensed, recorded, and reinterpreted, and how the act of repeating grief can create both distance and clarity.
Concept
The project begins with the physical sensations that accompany sadness: tightening muscles, shifting posture, the moment before tears form, and the heaviness that follows release. These subtle changes become the source material for a system that translates emotion into patterns. Rather than presenting grief as a single narrative arc, the installation treats it as a series of states that repeat, vary, and drift across different forms.
The three channels each represent a different register of emotion. The close-up video shows the smallest shifts in tension and expression. The full-body recording documents the ritualistic, almost mechanical process of crying to a familiar film. The third screen offers a more distanced interpretation in which emotion is not shown directly but encoded into symbols and sound.
The title The Pattern of Sadness refers to the idea that grief can move between forms and still retain traces of itself. The installation asks whether emotion remains personal once it is abstracted, and what is gained or lost when a feeling becomes a system rather than a moment.
Installation Form
The installation consists of three digital displays arranged horizontally or in a slight arc. Each screen presents a distinct emotional layer:
• Channel 1: Close-up footage capturing micro-expressions and subtle shifts in tension
• Channel 2: Full-body footage documenting the ritual of inducing and releasing sadness
• Channel 3: A generative screen where machine-learning triggers produce symbols and sound
Viewers can move between the screens but cannot see all emotional layers at once. This separation encourages them to piece together the work through their own physical position and attention, emphasizing the fragmented and nonlinear nature of emotional experience.
Visual and Emotional System
Emotion moves through the work in three forms: physical, representational, and symbolic. The close-up footage shows the fragility of facial expression. The full-body footage reveals the cyclical nature of the sadness ritual. The symbolic channel abstracts these experiences, turning muscle tension or hesitation into graphic marks and sonic gestures.
The installation treats grief as something that repeats rather than resolves. Even though the emotional state gradually shifts, it never settles into clarity, mirroring how real sadness often feels like a pattern rather than a conclusion.
Machine-Learning Trigger System
A Teachable Machine model is trained to detect specific facial movements, gestures, and changes in expression captured in the close-up footage. When the model recognizes these features, it sends values into TouchDesigner that trigger:
• The appearance of new drawn symbols
• Variations in symbol scale and position
• Corresponding audio events that respond to the emotional shift
This system creates a generative layer that reacts to the recorded performance, blurring the line between lived emotion and computational interpretation. The third channel becomes a record not of what sadness looks like, but of how it behaves.
Concept, Video, Sound: Nova Park
Tools: TouchDesigner, Teachable Machine, Ableton Live, Adobe Premiere
Year: 2025