Last Time You Cried

From March 29 to April 9, The Last Time You Cried - a collaborative installation that asks how computers understand human emotions - will be on view on the second floor of the Art and Architecture Building. The opening reception for the exhibition will be March 31 from 5-7pm. For the last two months, we have been collecting stories that respond to the prompt: When was the last time you cried? These messages form the basis for this installation. Using voice recognition software and other digital filters, our project turns stories recorded by participants into poems, which you can hear and see inside a structure built from their audio waveforms. As an experiment in using computers to create meaning out of personal and moving human experiences, the project asks: What happens when humans tell their stories to computers? What can computer poems reveal about the sensitive and uniquely human act of crying? Computers have great difficulty understanding voices that become emotional. The act of crying or tearing up while speaking causes voice software to mishear words or leave gaps in the sentences. Our project fills in these gaps with phrase borrowed from Google and other databases, which are then turned into poems. In a parallel process the architecture installation takes its cue from computer translation. The collection of recordings are analyzed as extruded soundwaves; where there is pause the sound wave is represented as a flat-line and allows for the most light transmission through the open-cell foam. Greater amplitude creates more opacity, but also provides lateral stability. The collection of soundwaves becomes the outline for the inner landscape of the listening booth, a spatial topography that both houses and is composed of confidential confessions. Sponsored by the Taubman College of Architecture and the MFA Program in Creative Writing, The Last Time You Cried is a collaboration between poet Tung-Hui Hu, Assistant Professor of English, and architect Vivian Lee, lecturer at TCAUP, with the assistance of information designer Gaurav Bhatnagar, undergraduate researchers Anne Markey and Zoe Iris, and volunteers from the U-M community. After the close of the exhibition, the installation will travel to the TEDx conference at the Biomedical Science Research Building on April 10, where Lee and Hu will give a talk about the project. For more information about the installation, visit www.lasttimeyoucried.com, or contact the group at [email protected].