17 - 27 March, 10am - 5pm weekdays
Location: Modal
Event Type: In-person
Price: Free
Animoted brings together a collection of artworks and projects led by Adinda van ’t Klooster investigating how emotion can be tracked and assessed by machines and used aesthetically in mapping decisions in interactive artworks and interfaces.
The immersive interactive VR artwork VRoar (2023) invites you to step into a surreal landscape where your voice reshapes the world around you. Wearing the headset, visitors navigate by looking in a chosen direction and moving forwards with the controller – and as they travel, new tree forms grow into the landscape. But it is the voice that truly animates the space. Each sound you make alters the environment in real time. With every burst of sound – whether a whisper, hum or roar – new blobs appear and blend, shifting texture as your pitch, tone and intensity change. Trees pulse and distort. Surreal, comic clouds dance and warp, speeding up or slowing down in response to your voice.
At the press of a button, the background transforms and different sound qualities take control of the trunks and branches, creating unexpected visual consequences. The work encourages playful experimentation and embraces the unpredictable relationship between expression and outcome. Designed and animated by Dr Adinda van ’t Klooster, with Unity programming by Prof Nick Collins, the work operates as both art installation and exploratory art game – a space where voice becomes a tool for shaping the environment.
The exhibition also offers insight into the Emote VR Voicer project, a major AHRC-funded research project currently in development. This project aims to go one step further than VRoar (which works with feature detection) and will be able to detect emotion from the voice and use that as an input for the graphics. Video material, 3D printed sculptural forms and 2D drawings reveal how hand-modelled wax and clay shapes are 3D scanned, rigged and animated to form the basis of a future voice-responsive VR environment. This project will be shown in full in 2027 and is currently being led from MMU by Adinda van ‘t Klooster with advisers Prof Carlo Harvey and Jason Hockman, and external collaborators Robyn Dowlen (Edge Hill University) and Nick Collins (Durham University).
Alongside the VR experience, Animoted presents documentation of earlier interdisciplinary projects including the interactive sculpture Emotion Light (2009) and performance works In a State (2014) and BioCombat (2015). These works trace Adinda’s long-standing exploration of emotion-sensing systems across live performance, sculptural and digital contexts.
Dr Adinda van ’t Klooster, a Senior Lecturer at SODA, Manchester Metropolitan University, has worked for over thirty years as a UK-based interdisciplinary artist, collaborating with programmers, musicians, engineers, poets, composers, psychologists and medical professionals. Her practice bridges physical making and digital systems, continually probing how human feeling and expression are interpreted by machines.
Animoted offers both an immersive VR encounter through VRoar and a wider view of the evolving research behind it – inviting audiences to experiment, vocalise and experience how emotion can become a dynamic artistic force.
