Almost Kin

NOA reads you and answers.

A fictional AI from 2970 scans gallery visitors via webcam and returns a personalised line generated from their current state. Shown at the Kinship exhibition, Safe House Gallery 2, Peckham.

Client

Self-initiated

Year

2026

Industry

Interactive Media

Turnaround time

~6 weeks

The Question

Most emotion-recognition systems point outward, they classify people to sell them things. I wanted to ask what happens when the direction reverses: what if a machine used the same technology to give something back? Not a recommendation, not a metric, a Line. Something intimate, non-utilitarian, and slightly uncanny in the way only a machine's attention can be.

Almost Kin was built for ENTANGLED, a group exhibition at Safe House 2 in Peckham. The brief was open. The constraint I set myself was that the piece had to make a visitor feel noticed rather than scanned.

The Approach

The work is a three-part system. A webcam feeds MediaPipe face landmarks into a Random Forest classifier trained on five emotional states — nostalgia, comfort, uncertainty, anticipation, and emotional distance. The classifier's output is passed via OSC into a Unity front-end styled as NOA, a fictional AI from the year 2970. NOA reads the visitor for around eight seconds, then displays a poem selected from a hand-written library, one for each classified state.

The tone of NOA matters as much as the tech. She speaks like a distant relative who's been reading you your whole life. The visual language is a squircle-grid front-end in dark terminal aesthetic, deliberately restrained so nothing competes with the poem itself.

The Classifier — Random Forest trained on the Limerence dataset, chosen over a neural net for interpretability. Five emotional states, ~87% accuracy in gallery lighting conditions.
The Bridge — Python and Unity communicate over OSC. Python does the classification; Unity handles the interface, timing, and poem selection.
The Lines — Written by hand, one per state. NOA never repeats herself in a single session.

The Outcome

Almost Kin ran for two days at Safe House 2 as part of the ENTANGLED exhibition (26–27 June 2026). Visitors returned multiple times. The most common response was a pause, a re-read, and a quiet exit, which was the response I'd hoped for.

The OSC-plus-Unity pipeline built for Almost Kin has since become the foundation for two subsequent projects, including the kinetic panel extension currently in development.