Part 3
For my last installation for my thesis, I changed my focus from differentiating between the three different emotions. Instead, I created an installation that was designed to stimulate all three emotions at once to create a chaotic and disorganized environment. My intent was to experiment with how I could depict my struggles with regulating my emotions on a daily basis caused by my mental illness and what it actually is like to feel the madness of emotions in my daily life. When the interactors enter this installation, they will trigger a barrage of intense coloured lights that represent the three specific emotions. At that point, the interactors are also able to augment the experience be listening to a looped audio track through headphones. I chose the pyramid shape to represent my mind because it is an awkward shape to inhabit and this reflects how I feel in my mind as I struggle with the havoc created by my thoughts and each intensified emotion. In this way, the installation recreates the struggles I have in understanding my own emotions and as well as the confusion I feel about how I am supposed to feel in a given situation.
Audio Component
I created an audio clip depicting the chaos of overlapping emotions of sadness, happiness and anger
While I was creating the last installation, I was concerned that having different emotions presented to the interactors all at once may confuse them if those emotions didn’t correspond to what they were feeling. However, research has proven that having multiple visual representations of emotions presented to the individual can be beneficial to the interactor by helping them cope with how they feel. To further demonstrate this theory, in the journal, Mixed Emotions and Coping: The Benefits of Secondary Emotions, the authors confirmed that adding positive feedback to a negative state promotes coping effectiveness (Braniecka, et al. 2014). It is proven that mixed emotional experience may have a positive relationship with the “psychological well-being in the context of psychotherapy by showing that experiencing a mixture of happiness and sadness over the course of treatment precedes improvements…(Braniecka, et al. 2014)” Furthermore, it is established that mixed emotional experience may have a positive relationship with the “psychological well-being in the context of psychotherapy by showing that experiencing a mixture of happiness and sadness over the course of treatment precedes improvements…(Braniecka, et al. 2014)”
Sadness
Sadness may be a simple emotion, perhaps, but not when you live with mental illness. Not when you fear your life, the road to recovery you have walked, will fall apart. It’s a feeling of powerlessness, to say the least.
Sadness is different. It is often related to circumstance. For example, the end of a relationship, stress at work or home, and even things we cannot define. Sadness is human and sadness still hurts- but not, I timidly argue, like depression.
Sometime all you can do is smile. Move on with your day, hold back the tears and pretend your’e okay.
Sometimes, all you can do is lie in bed, and hope to fall asleep before you fall apart.
Happiness
The to key happiness is letting each situation be what it is instead of what you thing it should be.
Two things prevent us from happiness; living in the past and observing others.
Some days you just have to create your own sunshine.
Don’t cry over the past, it’s gone. Don’t stress about the future, it hasn’t arrived. Live in the present and make it beautiful.
Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if one only remembers to turn on the lirght.
Anger
Anger is an emotion that tells us when something may be wrong. For example, we may feel angry when something is beyond our control or feels unfair, when we can’t reach our goal, or when someone is hurt or threatened. We can also feel angry when we are under too much stress. Anger can involved a wide range of feelings.
Anger can be a good thing. It can give you a way to express negative feelings, for example, or motivate yo to find solutions to problems.
Sometimes, we just feel angry for no reason.
Every time you get upset at something, ask yourself if you were to die tomorrow, was it worth wasting your time being angry?
If something angers you easily, it is because your happiness is a mental or emotional state of well-being defined by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.
