Leanna Barwick

"This research-creation project translates qualitative and quantitative feedback gathered during a period of institutional instability into new aesthetic and analytic forms through a multi-sensory installation of printed generative-AI artworks, short audiovisual works, interactive data visualizations, and a contextual essay. The dataset includes metaphorical descriptions, emotional reflections, songs shared to express how the moment felt, and linear rating-scale measures. Although numerical evaluations are present, it is the affective responses, which are often undervalued or excluded in favour of rating systems, that reveal understandings formal feedback tools rarely register or address. By inviting these alternative modes of expression, the project positions this affective archive as an intervention in how institutions collect, interpret, and value knowledge during moments when they struggle to represent experience. Affective clusters were developed through qualitative thematic analysis informed by patterns in the rating-scale responses. These clusters guided the project’s visual and analytical dimensions and shaped how generative AI was engaged as both collaborator and critical mirror. Prompt structures drew on sentiment patterns, metaphor frequency, tonal cues from submitted songs, and quantitative signals embedded in the data. One image for each affective cluster appears as a 12×12 inch printed canvas. For each cluster, a short audiovisual composition synchronizes static imagery with a corresponding soundscape. Interactive data visualizations are available for visitors to explore, and a printed essay is provided. Together, these components form an affective record of a shared communal moment, offering new ways of engaging with memory, emotional testimony, and emerging forms of computational storytelling."