Cleaning Emotional Data
Cleaning Emotional Data explores the invisible labor involved in cleaning data to train emotion recognition algorithms. In the winter of 2019, artist Elisa Giardina Papa worked as a microworker, categorizing emotions and recording her own expressions for a training of AI.
The videos highlight the limited spectrum of emotions deemed relevant and recognizable by algorithms. The embroideries featured in the video installation emphasize the dissonance between the abstract lines of human expressions that are algorithmically legible and the emotional vernacular derived from the Sicilian dialect (the artist’s mother tongue), which remains unreadable to the algorithm.