Sid Mehta Works
Mind Your Feelings

Mind Your Feelings

Project details

Role

Developer

Client

NNJCF, ArtsBergen

Team

With Juanli Carrión and Rodolfo Kusulas

Tools

JavaScript, Arduino, WLED

Year

2026

Project highlights

800+

community participants

5 months

installation in public use

Real-time

touchscreen-to-LED response

Overview

Developed the touchscreen-to-LED system behind a public library installation where 800+ people mapped their feelings onto a responsive brain sculpture in real time.

Installation · Creative TechDeveloper · NNJCF, ArtsBergen

Mind Your Feelings
The kiosk: a lit brain on a stand above a touchscreen

Our supporters.

Funders and partners, from the ArtsBergen initiative to Johnson Public Library
The neural landscape, drawn from fMRI work on emotional fingerprints at Duke
The flow on screen: tell us what you are feeling today, where do you feel it, and what the findings say

Walkthrough of the kiosk.

The color of the emotion you draw is sent to the brain, which lights up in that color.

Visitors at the installation in the library
A visitor answering at the kiosk, the brain lit gold behind her
Two visitors reading the results together
The full emotion set, and the note that it received over 250 responses in three weeks
Reflection

This was the first project where I had to connect physical hardware to a live software system in a public space. The Arduino brain needed to respond to user input within milliseconds or the experience would feel broken. Getting the Python backend to reliably bridge the web interface to the WLED controller took more debugging than I expected, but once it worked, the brain responded before people had finished choosing. That lag mattered more than I expected.

What surprised me was how quickly strangers opened up when given a space that felt safe. People were not looking for the right answer, they just wanted to be seen. 800 participants in five months, and the data we collected is now being used by local mental health organizations tracking how communities process stress and emotion.

Back to top
Next project AI Self A research arc in three phases. First, experiments asking what AI actually perceives, a... Back to top