Decipher the emotion evoked by art with the help of artificial intelligence

2024-05-02 18:29:08

Art often provokes an emotional response. However, it is difficult to predict and plan when preparing for museum experiences… at least until now!

As part of a research project integrating artificial intelligence (AI), has Co-DOT Laboratory from Laval University is teaming up with the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) and the immersive technology company OVA to develop a tool to recommend and simulate artistic journeys and experiences rooted in emotion.

Exploring emotional reactions

To get there, we first had to understand the relationship between art and emotion. In 2022, Sébastien Tremblay, professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Laval University and director of the Co-DOT Laboratory, led a research project to explore the emotional responses that artworks evoke. Around a hundred volunteers visited the MNBAQ exhibition halls, equipped with equipment that could record their emotions.

“We asked both participants to identify their feelings through self-reported measurements and measured the physiological reactions expressed by contact with the works and which could be linked to the range of emotions, such as eye movements, heart rate or even the inflection of the voice. ,” explains the director of Co -DOT Laboratory.

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The data collected as part of this first initiative, he explains, will fuel the development of artificial intelligence models that will be able to predict the emotional response evoked by works of art.

“Ultimately, we will have developed a tool that will be able to recommend to the curator a set of artworks that evoke the desired feeling in the observer, as well as allow them to visualize in advance various route scenarios in a virtual reality environment,” emphasizes Professor Tremblay.

“This new collaboration with the Co-DOT team will make new tools available to our design teams, tools that will enable new approaches to develop the experiences we offer to our visitors,” indicates Annie Bérubé, Head of Mediation Service at MNBAQ. For her, this collaboration follows on the heels of a decade of innovations that the museum experience has benefited from.

An interdisciplinary initiative

Sébastien Tremblay assembled an interdisciplinary team around the project – with the participation of Professor Audrey Durand and Professors Jean-François Lalonde and Denis Laurendeau from the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, Professor Philip Jackson from the Faculty of Social Sciences, as well as contributions from experts from the OVA company for the initial phase.

“Our aim is to utilize both the technologies and expertise in AI, artificial vision, virtual reality, museology and cognitive psychology,” explains Professor Tremblay.

The project lasts three years and is funded with $365,220 by the Alliance program of the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and by the Prompt organization.

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