These Animated Facial Expressions Will Haunt Your Very Soul

OK, here's a warning: watch this video at your own risk, because it may give you nightmares. Like, permanently. It's called Parametric Expression and is by artist Mike Pelletier—he calls it "a series of ambient video loops exploring quantified emotion". Which amounts to some animated polygon figures haunting your soul with CG-contortions.

Quantified emotion is using technology to help read the emotional state of people, where machines monitor factors like heart rate variability, speech tone, and use facial recognition software to detect how someone's feeling.

Used in the context of this animation it makes for some creepy expressions—reminiscent in their strangeness of the Chris Cunningham/Aphex Twin collaborations from the 90s—and features teeth-baring grins, digital growths, and other facial weirdness.

The project was made in collaboration with Subbacultcha! x Pllant / Marieke van Helden. The music and culture platform Subbacultcha! and Pllant / Marieke van Helden extended their exploration of talent to the visual realm, merging musical performances with the visual expressions of local artists into full experiential environments.

@stewart23rd