Inspicio and the Serpentine residency: modeling inspiration as an emotional state

Notes from the Serpentine UK × Alias Studio residency — how inspiration became a dataset, and a dataset became a series.

The residency brief

The Serpentine UK Future Art Ecosystems residency, run in collaboration with Alias Studio, asked participating artists to explore the relationship between AI systems and creative process. My proposal was to build a model that could detect and visualize inspiration — not as a vague aesthetic quality, but as a measurable pattern of biosignals.

Building the dataset

The dataset for Inspicio was built over three months of sessions during which I worked on creative tasks while wearing a multi-modal biometric setup. The annotation process was rigorous: I had to interrupt my own flow to label states in real time, creating a kind of meta-awareness of my own inspiration that initially disrupted it.