The Chameleon Project
In daily encounters, people automatically and continuously synchronize with the facial expressions, voices, postures, movements of others. Some of these encounters happen in milli-seconds. Through unconscious mimicry, we forge a bond with each other through our gestures and movements—long before we utter a word. In essence, we are carriers, dancing with each other in harmonized body language, infecting each other with our emotions. The Chameleon Project translated the experience of catching emotions from people into a technology-driven video installation.
Artist Tina Gonsalves, social neuroscientist Chris Frith, emotion neuroscientist Hugo Critchley, affective computer scientists Rosalind Picard and Rana El Kaliouby, as well as Professor in affective computing, Nadia Berthouz, came together to create a system that could read a person’s emotions, and then decide a congruent emotion to reflect back. Drawing on theories of emotional contagion, The Chameleon Project was placed at the intersection of multiple research areas such as empathy, social networks, affecting computing.
About the Artist
Tina Gonsalves is an artist whose practice integrates science, art, and technology to create embodied, interactive audiovisual experiences. Tina has been exploring ideas about the emotional body since 1994, first making short films that aimed to translate internal emotional states into an external medium. Finding the basic film format increasingly inadequate, she moved on to installations to look at ways technology could access the emotional signatures of the body.
Gonsalves has been an Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Neuroimaging at UCL, at the Banff New Media Institute in Canada, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, and many more. Some of the grants she has received include the Arts Queensland Major Grant, the Arts Council England Grant, and the Wellcome Trust Large Art Award.
