Pulse - Markus Kison

By misusing data material, Markus Kison researches social contexts that emerge from the relationship between physical objects and their inherent digital information layers. Pulse is a live visualization of real-time emotional expressions on the Internet, inspired by Robert Plutchik’s seminal book Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion (1980). In it, he describes eight basic human emotions – joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and anticipation – and presents a diagram in which these emotions and their weakened and amplified counterparts form a three-dimensional cone containing 24 areas. The cone serves as the basic form of Pulse and can expand in the 24 directions of the emotions. Each time an emotion tag or its synonym is identified in a recent blog entry, the shape-shifting object transforms itself, so that the new volume represents a piece of the overall current emotional condition of Internet users.

Developed in the Digital Media Class at the University of the Arts Berlin.