Face of City

Artists Statement: This project focuses on the imperfections of social systems and the potential power art holds that may possibly change such systems. This is based on the faith that emotions and sentiments hold the power to fill in the cracks, created by deficiencies and irregularities, in society, to complete it.
is an attempt to visualize the data from language, a factor that connects local communities. In particular, analysis of intricate emotional and personal information in language produces an entirely novel meaning. The analytic process used to produce is otherwise known as machine learning, through which emotional words are detected. Sentences are categorized as either positive or negative via survey results, and different values are designated to each sentence according to how positive(or negative) it is. This information is stored in the computer, which creates an algorithm that alters the facial expression of each city by analyzing social media captions in real time.
Producing the data for the computer to process was an extremely important part of this project, in order to ensure the feasibility of such facial expressions. Thus, foundation of the infrastructure that could constantly produce data through locations and keywords became a priority.

Artist(s): Jaehyung LEE, Yonsei University
Jungmin Park, Seoul Nation University of Science and Technology