I see you.

This body of work is about recognizing emotion and expression. Each piece combines the historical practice of portrait painting with indications of how facial recognition and sentiment analysis algorithms might perceive the portrait.

In traditional portrait painting we empathetically look into the subject and record the nature of our feeling on the canvas. In Face Emotion Recognition (FER) an algorithm generates scores relating to a body of tagged features in a training data set.

Psychologists disagree about whether emotion can be accurately read from facial posture, and a painters’ internal state machine can foil their portrait implementation.