What are our emotions? Where do our emotions come from? What do our emotions feel like? How can we understand them?
When the the Dalai Lama imagined "a map of our emotions to develop a calm mind” - he asked his longtime friend and renowned emotion scientist Dr. Paul Ekman to realize his idea. From their conversations and work of father/daughter team Drs. Paul & Eve Ekman The Atlas of Emotions was born. The Atlas is a online visual tool developed to build an emotional language that helps us answer these very questions.
In partnership with Dr. Eve Ekman, The Greater Good Science Center at U.C. Berkeley, and 4DSOUND - InBodied is an experiential evolution of the web-based Atlas, one that brought emotional awareness off the screen and into the body via cutting-edge immersive technologies. This iteration of Atlas of Emotions used art to manifest interoceptive awareness through direct sensory activation within the context of a live, shared experience of emotional resonance.
For the InBodied series - we partnered experimented with the artist’s ability to to impact the bodies of the audience within a shared spatial sound landscape. Utilizing advanced motion-capture technology - the emotional / physical state of the artist is directly connected to the audience as the performers quite literally moves sound through the space, and in turn, the bodies of the audience via gestures and expression. Traversing hyperrealistic imagined sonic worlds - digital opera artist Amanda Gregory enacts a fundamental human journey of longing and belonging - a duet as the performer elegantly merges voice with nature and self-perpetuating ML sonic entities.
This new work was presented at three major tech & creativity festivals, both in the United States and Europe in Summer 2019.