He is the founder of Transmute, the interdisciplinary collective behind Intimate Transactions, an interactive installation that has been exhibited all over the world, where two people in geographically separate spaces inhabit and interact in a shared virtual space.

In many of her pieces a live physical presence central to the work, where the audience’s movement and interaction with the installation directly affects the space. In Potential Energy, where a line of sensors on the wall set into movement the line of chains opposite, the audience functions as triggers. In The Real Thing, a large-scale kaleidoscope where the viewer’s body not only triggers the installation but becomes the content for it, the work literally cannot function without the presence of an audience, as it is their body that is captured as an image, processed and projected as the kaleidoscopic content shifts and changes with the person’s movement.

She has collaborated with performers, writers, video artists and sound artists like Talia Linz, Eva Mueller, Young-Ah Noh, Matthias Erian, Muse Me and Nick Mariette, and participated in residencies ranging from CarriageWorks in Sydney to the Transmediale: Digital Culture Festival in Berlin.

As the user goes about their day, the bio sensors capture real-time information on their physical states, including pulse, movement, skin temperature and galvanic skin response. At the end of the day, when the user syncs the collection devices to the tablet, the software interprets the bio data and represents the user’s emotional and physical states as colourful body shapes in positions ranging from fully reclined to upright. The colour of the shapes represent emotional states, with blue for the calm/rested end of the scale, red for the other aroused/agitated extreme, and gradations of purple for the states in between. Whether the shapes are more horizontal or vertical indicates that the user is moving around a lot or a little, respectively. Text messages that the user has received throughout the day, and photos they have taken are also uploaded to the diary from their mobile phone. All this bio and social data is then overlaid on a timeline of the user’s day.

The user can then navigate their diary by scrolling through this timeline and looking at sections of their day and the data associated with it. Photos they have taken are displayed in stacks according to their timestamp, and circular symbols that represent text messages received can be clicked on to reveal their contents. The user also has the ability to write or draw on these sections – perhaps notes on where they were, who they were talking to – adding another layer of narrative.

High-res screen captures can be viewed here and there is a video with more information on how to use the system here.

Affective Diary was developed in the Interaction Lab at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) in cooperation with Microsoft Research. Participants in the project are: Kristina Höök, Martin Svensson, Anna Ståhl, Petra Sundström and Jarmo Laaksolathi, SICS, Marco Combetto, Alex Taylor and Richard Harper.