Happiness is the only true emotion

Since the 2000s, computer research has been conducted to develop systems capable of recognizing and interpreting human emotions. Clément Lambelet is interested in this phenomenon of automatic recognition of emotions and questions its generalization, especially through all the social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat that use these algorithms.

For Happiness is the only true emotion he worked from a panel of portraits established by the Pain Expression Set at Stirling University in Scotland, selected one emotion per subject and cropped the images to retain only the face. The artist used a subjective treatment on the materiality of the images to make this surface more expressive. These portraits become vectors of emotions. Each image is then submitted to Microsoft’s Emotion API to test its accuracy. The Emotion Api could only recognize happiness with certainty.