PROJECT 01 / 2026 / ACTIVE / GLOBAL
Global Emotions
Global Emotions is a public emotional observatory — a daily instrument that reads the world as a weather system of attention.
01 / THE PROJECT
One field a day.
Each day, search behavior across countries is classified into emotional categories and mapped to a single color field. Over time the fields accumulate into an archive — a record of how the world felt, one day at a time.
TODAY / DAILY FIELD
SYSTEM OVERVIEW
- GOOGLE TRENDS — DAILY (GLOBAL)
- EMOTIONAL CLASSIFICATION
- EMOTION → COLOR MAPPING
- ATTENTION WEIGHTING
- DAILY COLOR FIELD
OUTPUT: 1 FIELD / DAY · SCOPE: GLOBAL
02 / METHOD
A daily computational artwork.
Global Emotions translates search behavior around the world into emotional and chromatic fields. Each day produces one color field per place: an atmospheric reading of the public mood.
The instrument reads daily search trends together with the headline context around them, weighted by traffic and publication time. Everything is aggregated by country and stripped of individual identity.
03 / COLOR
How the color is generated.
Search terms are classified into a fixed taxonomy of 169 emotions, each carrying a canonical color and a coordinate in valence–arousal–dominance space.
A day’s headline emotion is the label nearest the traffic-weighted center of its trends in that space — the field’s center of mass rather than its most common label. The final gradient is weighted by attention intensity, so louder days burn brighter.
FIELD / GRADIENT DETAIL
04 / THE LAB
An instrument built by the lab.
Studio Lab BH is a systems research lab that builds computational instruments for understanding invisible human systems — especially affect. Global Emotions is the observatory that runs continuously.
MODELING INVISIBLE HUMAN SYSTEMS · SLBH — V1.0
INSTRUMENT
