Keyi Zhang: Because I just mentioned the inspiration of "Emotional Echoes", and because I really like this work, can you share your entire creative process of this project, including how it was finally exhibited, and what kind of feedback and effects it had in the end?

Ruishan Wu: This work is actually incomplete. I went through a painful iteration at that time, or my initial idea was not to do this thing at all. Because I was studying machine learning at that time, and I was more interested in affected computing, that is, emotional computing. But my mentor thought this was too narrow and standard, and not interesting enough for him.
Because affected computing is an academic term under CS, it is a field that recognizes people's expressions, intonations, voices, and gestures. They recruited some special actors to perform, such as saying something in a very happy tone, saying something in a sad tone, or performing a sad face. They use those datasets to train a model, and then they can identify people's emotions through their facial expressions and speech tones. For example, I may be 40% happy and 30% anxious, and they can score like this.

But my mentor thought this was very narrow, and how to come up with some new understandings or new concepts from an artistic perspective. Because my previous background was design, my perspective at that time was more commercial, that is, I considered some practical uses and business perspectives. But after I came into contact with fine art, and maybe influenced by some teachers, I have an understanding of art, that is, it is not just beautiful, or not just useful, or it may not be useful, but it will have a certain impact on your thoughts or concepts. A professor once said, "Good art makes you feel like your heart has been punched."

So I tried to come up with some more interesting concepts at the time, so I drew these sketches and thought about what kind of feedback I would get. During that time, I couldn't sleep all night, thinking about how to make this thing more interesting lol. So I wanted to compare people and machines at the time, because people are also a bit like a black box. That is, everyone is a black box to others, something that cannot be understood, and we don’t know how the thinking inside is constructed, a bit like we cannot understand how a trained model should work. But how to identify "people"? Maybe physiological signals or some outputs can help you identify. Similarly, machines also have some outputs. If it is a recognition box, it will output some emotional waves. Just like we often say input and output when emphasizing machine boxes, and then we think of some human AI and some visualization.

Then I liked an artist named Anna Ridler very much at that time. Through her series of tulip works and performance art works, I inspired a transformation of multimodal ideas. From body movement to electromechanical recognition, in general, it is input-output, what is the connection between input-output, or the stimulation of synesthesia.
Then I think the input of machines is defined by people, and for humans, there may be a God who defines our input, which is hearing, touch and other things. But because the machine is defined by humans, it can only do so much because of human scientific capabilities. It may be able to hear, but the conversion is actually defined by us humans. To some extent, it is not heard, and it is not so organic.

In general, I think we humans are defining a machine like God, but from ourselves, there may be a higher god defining us. So I think we still have a lot of places to explore. If we explore ourselves as a box, it may be like cognitive science.
I think my emotional echo may still be exploring a feeling of synesthesia. There are some theories, such as not everyone has the ability of synesthesia, for example, when you see a color, you will think it is a sound, or when you hear a sound, you will imagine a picture.

Keyi Zhang: So emotional echoes is exploring the concept of synesthesia?

Ruishan Wu: Yes, that's right. It is emotional echo. First, people hear the sound of each symphony. People can see a ring on the big screen. Its wave ring vibrates according to the frequency of the symphony. That is, the ring will emit some particles, and its number and the appearance of the wave ring will depend on the frequency of the original audio. For example, it may reach a certain threshold before the wave ring appears, and at a certain threshold, its number may be more or less. Then another screen below shows another ring, which reflects the GSR signal of the person. GSR collects the skin telecommunication number. If you have a particularly large emotional fluctuation, you are particularly nervous, or particularly excited or something, you will sweat, and then the electronic conductivity of your skin will increase, and then a spectrum will be generated, and then I use this spectrum to generate the ripples of another ring.

So the whole device is that the viewer will see the first ring, which is the excitement of the music itself - the visualization of the music, and the ring below visualizes the physiological signals of the viewers, which can also be understood as the visualization of emotions. Then in this process, we can observe people's reflections, such as whether they will try to keep up with the vibration of the music, or whether some people will not have a big emotional fluctuation according to the music. How should I put it? It is an experimental art of observation, just to see how they react.