Art + Science: Computing Emotion

Art + Science: Computing Emotion
Antoine Catala with Fox Harrell
Thursday, October 20, 2016
6:30 pm, Ring Auditorium

French artist Antoine Catala combines animation and holograms with “breathing” sculptures, creating humorous encounters that push the edges of perception. Catala created The Pleasure of Being Sad (2016) for the Hirshhorn’s current exhibition Suspended Animation, which highlights artists who use digitally generated images to question conceptions of reality. Operating at the intersection of image, object, and word, Catala’s installations explore the digital mediation of emotion, the concept of distance within virtual space, and the structure of digital media.

Catala will be in conversation with Fox Harrell, an Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT who works in the Comparative Media Studies Program, and with Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Harrell’s research explores the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. Catala and Harrell will reflect on their own projects before joining in conversation to discuss how technological representation helps or harms our understanding of emotions and the natural body.

This is the second of three Art + Science programs, which pair artists with scientists to explore new frontiers of digital identity.