When? 16 March 2026, 5 - 7pm
Where? Modal Gallery, Ground floor, School of Digital Arts (SODA), Manchester Metropolitan University.
Modal is delighted to invite you to the Private View of Animoted, a collection of immersive artworks and projects led by SODA and Manchester Game Centre researcher, 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.
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 and will be able to detect emotion from the voice and use that as an input for the graphics. Video material, 3D printed sculptures 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.
Animoted also 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.
Following the Private View, the exhibition will run 17 - 27 March, 10am - 5pm on weekdays.
Find out more about Modal gallery here. You can find us at:
Modal
School of Digital Arts (SODA)
Manchester Metropolitan University
14 Higher Chatham Street
Manchester
M15 6ED