Google Arts & Culture Launches Art Emotions Map

Google Arts & Culture has released the Art Emotions Map, an interactive online project developed with a research team from the University of California, Berkeley. The map features 1,500 artworks from various eras and geographic origins, each categorized by emotional components linked to specific color palettes such as sadness, joy, calm, disgust, and unease. The classification was created by surveying 1,300 people who associated keywords with each work, defining 25 distinct sensations. Since a single artwork can evoke multiple emotions, these are represented as percentage-based pie charts. Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at Berkeley, explains that the project aligns with emotion science, which views passions as ways of seeing the world that inform ideas of justice, pain, love, and community. The map is part of Google's Arts & Culture Experiments section, which aims to develop new interfaces and navigation tools for the platform's vast database of historical and contemporary artworks.