Nostalgia: A Human-Machine Transliteration

Abstract

Nostalgia is an installation that draws attention to the computational challenges of understanding human emotion. Through affective computing and machine learning, the underlying system attempts to translate the components of the sentiment’s qualitative makeup in quantitative terms. In Nostalgia, participants are asked to submit text-based memories, which are then used to calculate, predict and ultimately visualize relative nostalgia scores based on the aggregate of stories collected. However, given the ambiguities and complexity of human self-expression and the necessary precision of computational intelligence, Nostalgia highlights the entanglements of achieving emotional understanding between humans and machines.