Emotions through Art

This pioneering research seeks to discover the emotions that artworks unconsciously produce in the people who observe them, in order to explore the healing potential of these influences. 

Emotions through Art is possible thanks to artificial intelligence and biometric analysis techniques that make it possible to identify the unconscious emotions produced when observing a painting. A camera picks up facial expressions and encodes them through an algorithm into emotions. In addition, this metric is combined with the psychogalvanic response of the skin, i.e. the microdroplets of sweat that are produced when experiencing an emotion; and combined with the information obtained through eyetracking, a device that collects people's eye movements while they are viewing the painting. 
 

The project will classify each of the works of art analysed into 8 basic emotions allowing us to answer questions that until now have been unknown; how do people interact with the works of art, what part of the painting do they look at first, what elements capture their attention based on these emotions, and what are the most important ones? 

The results of this research will be available next October through a catalogue classifying paintings by emotions, a scientific article and our website, where visitors will be able to explore the works in the collection from an emotion-based perspective and through audiovisual pieces that will show both the research process and its conclusions.