Aidan Moesby's Periodic Table of Emotion  and Sagacity features in Hearts & Minds at LifeSpace.

Sagacity (2015)
Live data visualization projection

Periodic Table of Emotions (2015)
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuhle PhotoRag
Bright White Paper, 308gsm, Edition of 118.

Both works were developed by Aidan Moesby with Nick Taylor (University of Dundee), Jon Rogers  (University of Dundee), Clive Gillman (Former director DCA), Nicola Prosser (Graphic designer).

There are many software tools available that aim to support individuals to measure and define their mood and to represent this in ways that might symbolically or graphically allow better self-awareness and insight, but nothing that enables a city to do this. We commonly talk about the mood of a city, but what can we - or more specifically, I - do as an individual to improve that mood?

This project has resulted from research with the Small Society Lab to determine how mood assessment processes, such as those used to support patients within the mental health system, could be developed to define and influence the mood of an entire city. It seeks to extend these processes to generate a reflexive barometer that it is hoped will create visible manifestations of the city’s attitude and mental health.

There were two stages to the development of this work –first defining the terms or keywords about emotional
states, captured from geolocated social media texts (via Twitter). Secondly, the team assessed the dynamic significance and weight of these terms by working with both the service users of mental health support systems and the community of social media active people in Dundee.

It is hoped that ongoing dialogue through social media will be able to mark out a coherent and useful definition of the city mood and a representative measure of it, helping Dundonians to assert their positivity in a creative and reflexive manner. Through tweeting, you can continue to participate in the piece. The elemental emotions of the periodic table will appear brighter and stronger based on how the software captures and understands your tweets.

Aidan Moesby is an artist and curator based in Newcastle. His work is informed through dialogues which may be experienced personally as a participant, or observed. His research based practice focuses on the  relationships between people and place, how we make sense of the everyday through the imagery of ritual and routine, and how we communicate and connect. His work seeks to distill intimate, sometimes concealed, histories into text based site- or context-specific interventions in which the works serve as a catalyst for a socially-engaged conversation and personal or communal exploration.

Sagacity was commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts in partnership with the Small Society Lab, the University of Dundee and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, supported by Project Ginsberg and New Media Scotland's Alt-w fund.