Kunstuniversität Linz Artistic Data Abstraction in User-Data-Driven Interactive Media Art : Transforming Emotional Data into Color This paper proposes Artistic Data Abstraction (ADA) as a new conceptual framework for user-data-driven interactive media art — one that is developed and demonstrated via the author’s own artistic practices — and examines how emotional data can be transformed into aesthetic color experience within this context. Existing frameworks proved inadequate to describe this body of work. Data visualization prioritizes accurate information delivery, and artistic data visualization, while artistically intentioned, presupposes a structural mapping between data and image. ADA departs from both, finding its aesthetic roots in the tradition of pictorial abstraction. It is organized around three principles: embracing the algorithmic lens as a valid perspective of the contemporary moment; treating emotional data as formal raw material subject to the artist’s compositional judgment, rather than as something to be faithfully reproduced; and enacting a circulation model in which color experience triggers new emotion in the user, completing the cycle. Three of the author’s interactive media artworks are analyzed to show how ADA is realized in practice: I am, We are (2024), which uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to translate text-based sentiment into collective color fields; In Between (2025), which employs Facial Expression Recognition (FER) to render emotional states as color silhouettes that intersect across time; and Cycle of Emotions (2026), which combines NLP and FER across a multi-stage installation to accumulate emotional data into an immersive spatial color experience. Each work realizes the three principles of ADA along a different axis — space, time, and stage accumulation. User experience is analyzed through user logs, surveys, and field observation. Comparative analysis with contemporary data-based practices engaging with emotional data clarifies where ADA converges with and diverges from existing work, and reveals that the direction of translating emotional data into color experience while positioning the viewer as co-creator of the cycle remains largely underexplored. Future research directions include developing methodologies to verify the later stage of the cycle — whether color experience actually stirs new emotion in users — expanding ADA beyond color into other sensory media such as sound and movement, and diversifying the practice across different cultural contexts. en TEXT Master theses Masterarbeit Tesi di master Text Masterarbeit Text Master theses Documento PDF Tesi di master 2026 2026 Yuseung Lee Manuela Naveau