Real Feelings: Emotion and Technology

The catalogue of a 2020 group exhibition at HeK Basel on how digital technology reads emotion and how people form attachments to machines.

Twenty artists are presented, among them Antoine Catala, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Justine Emard, Cécile B. Evans, Lucy McRae, Troika and Liam Young. Their work covers artificial intelligence, interactive installations, robotics, biometrics, video, VR and photography. Themes include humanoid robots in healthcare, sex robots and appliances that listen to conversations. Ariane Koek writes on feeling and post-truth. The neuroscientist António Damásio explains the biological role of feelings and how they might be built into robots. Cécile B. Evans contributes a diary on feelings and the interface. The show ran from 27 August to 15 November 2020.

The book is edited by the curators Sabine Himmelsbach and Angelique Spaninks and was published with MU Hybrid Art House in Eindhoven. Himmelsbach also edited Coding Care: Towards a Technology for Nature (Hatje Cantz, 2023).