Let’s build something sharp, strange, and unforgettable.
Selected Clients Miu Miu, Keinemusik, WhomadeWho,
Sandro Paris, Philipp Plein, Volkswagen, Tinder, Mozilla, Telekom, Electronic Beats, Public Possession, Mschf, Acronym, Sony Music Bio
Thomas Kuhn is a creative director and experience designer working at the intersection of fashion campaigns, spatial experiences, and interactive visual systems.
His practice blends cinematic storytelling, mixed-media art direction, and digital experience design, building visual worlds that move fluidly between screen, space, and performance
Global fashion + music campaign production
Founder of Floathouse Studio, producing spatial, cultural, and multimedia formats
The Emotional Perception Study Ceative Systems Design & Visual Interaction Concept
Concept
We never look at the same image the same way.
A moving image is never neutral. Even without narrative context, viewers instantly decide how to feel – but those decisions are subconscious, biased, and unstable.
This project examines how humans reconstruct reality from incomplete information.
I built a small system to measure how people project emotion, memory, and personal narrative onto ambiguous visual scenes.
I interviewed 50 people showing them five selected scenes, based on the semantic differential, a research tool by psychologist Charles Osgood that measures how people position a stimulus between opposing meanings.
Participants were asked to locate it along paired emotional axes: tranquil vs. unsettling, familiar vs. bizarre, calming vs. frightening.
Results
The final videos were shown in the same order, ranging from real to increasingly surreal to all participants. This is what they revealed
Scene 01 – The scene was widely read as calm and liberating, yet the emptiness of Times Square made it quietly uncanny. Familiar but slightly out of place, inviting but not entirely safe.
Scene 02 – The clip produced extreme emotional divergence: where some viewers saw a tender, intimate moment, others perceived danger, discomfort, or something ominously staged — revealing how fragile narrative certainty becomes when context is withheld.
Scene 03 – The clip produces a form of cold surrealism: visually quiet yet emotionally unstable. Viewers read the scene as oppressive, eerie, and bizarre, even though nothing explicitly threatening happens. The stillness itself becomes the threat.
Scene 04 – This clip generated arousal without clarity: viewers found it lively and even liberating, yet simultaneously bizarre, unsettling, and physically uncomfortable. The unnatural motion and camera tilt created a form of energetic surrealism, half performance, half impossibility.
Scene 05 – The final clip triggered the strongest uncanny responses: viewers felt unsettled, inhibited, and uncomfortable, even though the setting was ordinary. The glitch-like presence of a person who is seen only as a distorted silhouette disrupted the basic logic of the scene, producing a powerful sense of the bizarre. This is ambiguity at the level of existence rather than action.
Key Learnings
1. Interpretation collapses when social context disappears.
2. Two types of surrealism emerged: affective and perceptual.
3. Stillness is more disturbing than movement.
5. People rated the narrative they imagined, not the image they saw.
This experiment shows that emotional perception can be mapped, compared, and made visible. Ambiguity doesn’t blur interpretation; it exposes the mechanics of how people construct meaning.
The system demonstrates a method for analyzing affect, narrative projection, and perceptual drift — a direction I aim to develop further across interface design, creative research, and computational storytelling.