Dream of Happiness

Apart from convenience, what advancement in digital technology has brought us is a set of standards in life. Take moods for example, only happiness is considered as the ultimate goal to achieve, while other feelings are inefficient or useless. However, since when should we be so dependent on the technology to tell us what is good and what is not? If we can no longer take charge of our own emotions, what can we really take charge of?

Our artwork “Dream of Happiness” features this standardized dream that digital technology has enforced on our emotions. It starts from a picture being taken. While waiting for the analyzed result of the facial expression’s detailed components, an animation symbolizing the standardization process is being played. We can see how eight basic emotions, happiness, sadness, anger, contempt, surprise, neutral, disgust, and fear, come into being, as in well-designed shapes mimicking the DNA. Before that, an emotional wheel is designed and calculated by counting words that belongs to the category. And according to the emotional wheel, the atoms are first one or two alphabets of the words, forming hexagon rings. Last but not least, we can witness the process of happiness eats all the other emotions. After waking up from the dream, the real analyzing result is presented.

If we force ourselves to wake up from the standardized dream created by digital technology, what should we finally believe? What should we do? Where should we go? Technology has been so incorporated into our lives that we have to consider how to live without it.