The State of Emotions

What does a government feel?

The State of Emotions is a virtual artwork commissioned for Valtori — the Finnish Government ICT Centre — following an open competition by the State Art Commission. It was the first time the Commission produced digital artworks for the virtual work environments of Finnish state administration.

The work draws on an emotional mapping framework developed by the Finnish Association for Mental Health: a psychological atlas of inner states that rarely make it into official language. Employees across state agencies encounter it through their work computers — a living piece that collects their emotional states and renders them as a continuously shifting network. It is never the same twice.

What emerges is something bureaucracies rarely make room for: the inner weather of an organisation. Not productivity metrics, but what it actually feels like to work inside a vast, distributed system — and the quiet fact that every node in that system is a person.