Cleaning Emotional Data is a three channel video installation that addresses new forms of precarious labor emerging within artificial intelligence economies. Specifically, it focuses on the global infrastructure of microworkers who “clean” data to train emotion-recognition algorithms.

In the winter of 2019, Elisa Giardina Papa worked remotely for several North American “human-in-the-loop” companies who provide “clean” datasets to train AI algorithms to detect emotions. Among the tasks she performed were the taxonomisation of emotions, the annotation of facial expressions and the recording of her own image to animate three- dimensional characters. Cleaning Emotional Data documents these microtasks while simultaneously tracing a history of emotions that questions the methods and psychological theories underpinning facial expression mapping. The implications of this demand for emotional legibility – used increasingly either to identify consumers’ moods or to detect potentially dangerous citizens who pose a threat to the state – is further explored in the embroideries of the textiles of the installation. The embroidery juxtaposes the abstract lines of facial micro-expressions detected by the algorithms with untranslatable emotional vernacular from the Sicilian dialect. This joint “fabrication” of computational and human language demonstrates how emotional sensibilities exceed reductive categorisation.

Cleaning Emotional Data is the third installment of a trilogy exploring how labor and care are reframed by digital economies and artificial intelligence; it follows Technologies of Care (2016) and Labor of Sleep (2017).