Hypertype

Hypertype is a generative art piece that takes emotion and sentiment analysis data as it’s main content. This content is given form through the organisation of typographic signs, letters and symbols. The work attempts to draw our attention to the topic of what has been labelled affective computing and the use of AI natural language processing to infer emotional meaning.

The program that generates these pieces uses a data set of keywords that come from the analysis of a vast array of articles and research papers on the subject of emotion recognition, AI and automated recognition systems at large. Each keyword has emotion labels and numerical scores attributed to them. Some of this data is being used to determine the typographic signs and their organisation in the artwork. The keywords are themselves the content. Depending on the random disposition of these words, we can get a sense of the concepts, ideas or subjects that monopolise the topic. Other times, the text is broken up and becomes quite minimal, with just a word or letters apparent, leaving the reader with a more open interpretation of the image.

Hypertype is first and foremost a textual work that relies on the visual interaction of a variety of typographic signs and letters. There is visual content based on a language system and there is visual context based on a subject matter - computers automating humans.