Artist Creates Emotional Maps of Cities using Polygraph and GPS
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As cartography projects go, Christian Nold’s approach to charting the peaks and valleys of urban landscapes is distinctly avant-garde, using “emotional mapping“.
Artist Christian Nold demonstrates his system for detecting peoples’ emotions while walking a neighborhood in San Francisco’s Mission District.
He outfits volunteers with global positioning system (GPS) devices and sensors used in lie detector tests. Then his subjects are sent out to wander neighborhoods. When they return, Christian asks them to recount what they saw and felt when the polygraph recorded a quickened heartbeat or an elevated blood pressure.
Answers such as these were returned:
• “Tried to stomp on some pigeons,” after a stroll through the Mission District.
• “House right here, it reminded me of flowers at a funeral.”
• “Security guard at a business giving lollipops to kids. I think I wanted one.”
Nold is a London-based artist, and calls his work “emotional mapping.” Having mapped settings as varied as industrial areas of Bangladesh and the red light district of Brussels, he recently arrived in San Francisco for his first U.S. project.
He’s the first to acknowledge the intimate portraits that result from his work won’t help a confused tourist get from Fisherman’s Wharf to Golden Gate Park.
Instead, by using polygraph technology, his goal is to offer a commentary on the subjective nature of reality. Maps, he notes, have always been influenced by whoever makes them, citing the globes that used to show Europe as being considerably larger than Africa.
“There are different ways of mapping the city that aren’t strictly about the practicalities or financial sensibilities that we usually guide our urban planning with.” Christian said.
The central notion of Bio Mapping is that we can make better sense of our own body data than a disinterested observer. By recording our own body’s bio data along with our geographic location we can review the information and make meaningful decisions about our life.
Marketers, mobile telephone companies, architects and real estate developers have expressed interest in putting Nold’s handheld gizmos to commercial use, a situation the artist finds ironic. He said he gets five e-mail solicitations per day asking about the practical applications, but turns most of them down.
He’s working with a government agency in London to gauge residents’ perceptions of crime in public housing. The purpose of the project is to determine whether areas that get labeled as being unsafe actually have more crime or just higher population densities.
Nold’s five-week stint in San Francisco was sponsored by Southern Exposure, a local gallery mounting an exhibit of artists whose work dealt interactively with public spaces.
“A lot of times, conceptual art can be very elusive. People just don’t get it,” Fink said. “This is very cutting edge, conceptual art, but it has a much more universal appeal to it.”
Nold points out that as accessible as his work may be, people often assume the technology he uses is more sophisticated than it really is. The devices cannot, for instance, detect whether someone’s emotional arousal is positive or negative — that puts the kibosh on determining whether a place makes people happy or sad.
“It seems to offer a hell of a lot, but what the companies want is to be able to slice people’s heads open and see what’s inside,” he said.
Creating emotional maps is labor intensive. Mapping one square mile around Southern Exposure will require 80 to 100 volunteers to spend at least an hour walking the area, plus more time to be debriefed on their experiences.
Nold downloads the information into a computer and comes up with a display showing where the subjects had the most highs along with their comments. When they’re finished, they resemble crude boundaries of medieval kingdoms surrounded by turrets and moats. He prints them out and makes them available on his Web site.
Nold has been making emotional maps for three years and says he has been inspired by the common threads that have linked neighborhoods in places like Siena, Italy, Munich and San Francisco. He’s found that his subjects enjoy being given a reason to roam aimlessly, and tend to have elevated emotions at corners and on their way to a destination.
“When I go to a place, I’m always kind of a tourist,” he said. “But I get a mixture of this ephemeral stuff with an amazing grass roots view you would never get unless you lived in a place for 10 years.”
Bio Mapping
In an interview by Anna Bentkowska-Kafel, Christian Nold comments:
Do people improvise?
People try to mess around with my device, which is interesting. People are playing with it — trying to jump out at each other or into a pool of water. People see there is this issue of control and are trying to deal with it. Bio Mapping is not a way of telling people about their emotions. If you think about Foucault, the body is the place where all control is exercised. The body is politically controlled through physical means but also through our imagination, emotions, fantasies and desires. Bio Mapping is a way of rethinking the body.
Do you make people more aware of their inner side?
Yes, it makes people think about how their body is related to their mind. People’s personal issues arrive differently.
The visualization maps you create, especially since you’ve started superimposing emotional charts onto Google Earth, are visually stunning.
Google Earth has this stunning effect. It’s almost like a three-dimensional diary drawn across Google Earth. Normally there are no people visible on Google Earth; you can spin across the whole world but you won’t see a single one of the two billion people living there, which is quite bizarre. Suddenly with Bio Mapping, you can see these very detailed tracks of somebody’s experience. Visually, it has a certain authority. Maps all have authority and the 3D quality gives this authority to project. You see a peak and people almost need to talk about this peak — it becomes a discussion point.
The visual representation I chose is important not only for aesthetic reasons. I’ve chosen maps because they talk lots of languages we are already familiar with. For example, we are familiar with the scientific visualization of the cardiogram. When doctors look at a cardiogram they look for pathology, and try to see what’s wrong, looking for the missing bit. So the idea of Bio Mapping is of almost a cardiogram put across the landscape. I’m interested how people deal with these mixed languages — the language of maps which is about power and the scientific language of cardiograms. I want people to find their own way of negotiating between the two.
Going back to your days at the Royal College of Art, what did you do before Bio Mapping?
I have a fairly traditional art background. Like a lot of people involved in media art in the early 1990s I was doing video art. In the mid-1990′s I discovered the Internet, or the Internet discovered me. I got madly involved in doing slightly hacky things with the Internet. Heath Bunting was one of my big inspirations, so were people from Irrational, the Institute of Applied Autonomy, and Natalie Jeremijenko. A lot of these people were really influential in showing how technology wasn’t so clean. There is something very irrational and bizarre about technology. These artists were finding really interesting ways of using technology to highlight its bizarre, contradictory aspects.
A high quality (and very cool) MPEG4 video of the Greenwich Emotion Map using Google Earth is available to view or download.
Wow, that is so cool. Seems so simple, so obvious but that’s the trademark of great ideas. I’ll definitely check out his work. Thanks for this great post!
Hi Church,
People never cease to amaze me with their creativity.
Christian’s project has been an immense undertaking. You can read more about him and others involved in it on his website. The link is in this post.
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Very interesting read…..amazing how technology is changing our concept of art…..
Laketrees, I bet you thought you’d seen it all with your art background
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I would love to see the emotional map that he made of the Red Light District in Amsterdam! Surely that place has to be the emotional epicentre of Europe!