Rituales Tecnológicos II: Sensus and the sensitivity of time

Behind the scenes of Sensus at Palacio Libertad during Rituales Tecnológicos II — navigating the intersection of institutional culture and experimental digital art.

The institutional context
Palacio Libertad is one of Buenos Aires' most visible cultural institutions — a former post office building repurposed as a space for technology and digital culture. Showing there carries a kind of legitimacy that alternative spaces do not, but it also means working within structures that were not designed for experimental art.

The idea behind Sensus
Sensus began as a way of honoring Hokusai — not by copying his work, but by asking what his attention to fleeting, everyday beauty would look like translated into a living system. The piece is built around a single emotion: sensitivity — the capacity to notice what usually passes unnoticed, and to feel it before naming it.

How it works
The piece is built from a reading of Sares's own face, captured through facial emotion recognition model and mapped across a range of emotional states. That reading feeds a diffusion model, generating a fluid, constantly shifting image from his own emotional data — coordinated in real time through visual code software. What's on screen isn't a live reading of the viewer; it's the visible trace of an emotional state captured once, unfolding continuously in front of them.

What people found
What surprised us wasn't just the emotional reaction — it was the curiosity. Visitors of every age stood in front of the screens and asked the same question in different ways: whose feeling is this? For a few minutes, each of them watched a trace of someone else's inner state take shape as something they could see.