New York Emotions: Live

New York Emotions: Live is a real-time civic installation that speculates on affective ecosystems, exploring how emotions shape society a macro and micro scale. Functioning as an emotional cartography of New York City, this system will passively collect data signals from public social platforms to infer emotions of the collective, while also collecting individuals sentiments form visitors of the NYC PIT Pop Up. These IRL responses will actively shape the display. The installation transforms data into both a public participatory civic dialogue, surfacing how individual emotions influence collective systems, and how collective mood feeds back into the individual.

New York Emotions: Live imagines a civic future where emotions are treated as public data with community value, alongside infrastructure like transit and housing. It extends on systems-art traditions into the algorithmic present, drawing from cultural futurisms that privilege empathy, collective care, and shared storytelling. By making surfacing the affective ecosystem undercurrent of the city, this work critiques the dominance of data-as-surveillance economy and instead envisions a public technology rooted in affect, culture and communal self-understanding.

New York Emotions: Live is a project by Brendon Hawkins, Studio Lab BH.

About Brendon Hawkins:

Brendon Hawkins is a social technologist, Artist, and director of Studio Lab BH. Brendon’s work sits at the intersection of culture, information, and color, with a focus on building infrastructures that make emotions visible and legible through data and color.