Portuguese designer Luis
Giestas recorded his emotions, at every hour, for 300 days, and laid out the
result in a series of color-coded diaries.
The project started as an exercise in dealing with anxiety, and unfolded
to explore and document the whole range of basic universal emotions as
represented by distinct colors.
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| photo courtesy of the artist |
The artist’s color-coded
matrix, entitled “Soft Cover Emotions,” is largely based on psychologist Robert
Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.
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| photo courtesy of the artist |
The result is a series of
three visual diaries, each one adding a twist to the initial premise. The first
volume displays the sheer variety of emotions one goes through in a single
day. The second version shows us that
the emotions we feel and the ones we express are not always the same, while the
third volume plays with expectations, reality and memories.
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| photo courtesy of the artist |
The emotions range from
serenity to ecstasy, or from pensiveness to grief. The unconscious hours of
sleep are represented in black.
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| photo courtesy of the artist |
The second volume introduces
a twist to the premise: each page is divided in two; the bottom half showing
the emotions that are felt and the top half displaying the emotions expressed.
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| photo courtesy of the artist |
Whenever there is a
discrepancy between what is felt and what is expressed, a split line is created
in the middle of the page.
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| photo courtesy of the artist |
The third volume explores
the issues of expectations and memory.
The top third shows the emotions expected the following day; the middle
section displays the emotions felt in the present moment; and the bottom shows
the emotions recalled 24 hours later.
The emotions that cannot be recalled or predicted are displayed in
white.
This exhaustive and
repetitive process of recording ended up inspiring other issues, such as the
expression of our feelings, how we are constantly surprised about what we
expect to feel even during our daily routine, and our capacity to have a clear
image of our emotions and store them in our memory.
This color-based project
resulted in some important insights, the artist points out. “Before starting the project I thought I had
a clear sense of how I feel, and now I know that the image I have of myself is
a very unstable approximation of an ever-changing stream of emotions. This is something we all know in a way, but
to be able to see the graphical evidence of it as represented by color made the
painstaking process of recording completely worth it."
