The aim is to heighten the young person’s awareness on their way to school and for the young people to reflect on this experience with their peer group as well as communicate it to a wider audience of stakeholders.

]]> http://www.christiannold.com/archives/214/feed 0 http://www.christiannold.com/archives/21 http://www.christiannold.com/archives/21#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:37:31 +0000 admin http://www.christiannold.com/?p=21 ‘A TownToolkit for experiential-socio-ecological governance.’

This project is a cultural and technical toolkit for small towns which is designed to bring local people and local political entities together based on emotions, personal perceptions as well as environmental pollution data. The concept is that local democracy requires a broad holistic view of towns in order to deal with challenges such as social changes, economic development, peak oil and climate change.

This unique toolkit brings together three different levels:

1 Personal Perception / Body arousal. This level involves workshops with local people, where they can use two specially designed electronic circuits which measure emotional arousal as well as noise level. They re-explore their town by going for a walk while carrying these tools and creating a communal map when they return to the project base

2 Opinions / Pollution meansurement. This level involves distributing a series of unique pollution sensors / voting stations around the town. The 8 sensor units are designed to be mounted on lampposts across the town to give a wide coverage of differnt environments.

3 Visulisation, Interpretation & Discussion. This level involves collecting together all the data and insight from the other levels displaying and interpreting results for a large public discussion.

The toolkit was trialed for 4 months in Hedehusene, Denmark where it brought together local people and council members in deliberating the future of this small town which is supposed to double in size in the next 10 years.

“At first I was suspicious but when I saw this project I was amazed.
This is brilliant and will change the way we do things round here”

- Poul Bonderup Poltitician responsible for Hedehusene

Project Website (In danish)

The installation was located in Nottingham at the Broadway Media Centre as part of the Radiator Festival where 14159 votes were cast by memebrs of the public over the 2 month period. The kiosk allowed people to press large ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ buttons in response to a series of panning portraits and on-screen questions. The buttons allow people to ‘rate’ each others, and if they choose, to have their own portrait taken. People could come along to the Broadway in Nottingham and have your say about who will be deported by popular vote!

Project Website

Instead of taking tissue samples as one would from a human being, this project uses cultural probes to investigate the local social body and its unique ailments. Like eastern medicine, this project takes a holistic view of the body to look at the interconnections between problems to get a sense of the whole.

On the map, the walks are represented by blue lines tracing the paths that people walked. The areas of high emotional arousal are represented by red clusters. Arousal is not necessarily positive or negative and is best thought about in terms of heightened attention to ones body or surroundings. The white dots indicate where the participants added textual annotations to describe the variety of events and sensory stimuli that caused their emotional reactions during their walks.

On the map we see an area of Paris on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon in April 2008. We see a mixture of people, events and places and the complex ways these are interwoven with each other. The general ambience is one of calmness but there are a few clearly defined annotation and high arousal clusters. The Situationists from the 1950’s referred to them as ‘unities of atmosphere’. While they thought of these unities as creating a fractured city of contrasting ambiences, this particular map of Paris presents a continuous ‘event space’ of flowing interactions. Right in the centre of the map, the main arousal cluster near the Parmentier Metro Station, is the place where the participants set off from and had to wait to connect to the satellites. On the Place de la République is a prominent arousal cluster caused by a Chinese, pro-Olympics demonstration on the Saturday and a Berber demonstration on Sunday in the same location. The cemetery in the east is a particular high arousal area as well as the busy shopping area on Rue du Faubourg du Temple. Apart form these we see a huge diversity of spatially distributed events from stolen kisses, football games, surprise encounters with friends, ‘lascars’ and beautiful views of the city.

Artwork and Design
Christian Nold 2008

This map is licensed under a
Creative Commons Licence Attribution, Non-commercial, Share-alike

The project involved weekly workshops with 80 local Greenwich Peninsula residents with the aim of re-exploring the area afresh with the help of a Bio Mapping device. The device invented by the artist measures the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with the wearer’s geographical location. The resulting ‘Emotion Maps’ encourage personal reflection on the complex relationship between oneself, the environment and ones fellow citizens. In a group, people then commented about their experiences and left annotations on the map.

To create the communal Greenwich Emotion Map all the individual walks were aggregated to visulises a shared landscape of emotion. The map contains particular arousal hotspots reflecting many of the local discussions about regeneration of the Peninsual. As part of the commision we printed 1000 Greenwich Emotion Maps which have turned out to be a great success communicating the project locally as well as nationally and internationally. Locally every participant received a map and a number are available at the tourism office but the map was also distributed through arts venues such as the ICA and Tate Modern bookshops.

While this participatory project is now at an end, the local discussions about physical and social change in the area are continuing and we hope the map will play a strong part in this discussion.

Over the last five years, over 2000 people have taken part in community mapping projects in over 25 cities across the globe. In structured workshops, participants re-explore their local area with the use of a unique device invented by Christian Nold which records the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. On their return, a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal.

The unique methodology of this project involves working with groups of people to interpret and analyse the data and adding annotating onto these individual emotion tracks. Through this process communal Emotion Maps of lots of people’s emotion data are constructed which are packed full of personal observations and highlight the issues that people feel strongly about.

Over the last years Christian Nold has used this unique methodology and tool in many diverse contexts from art, community development, science research, architectural planning and large scale political consultations. Please get in touch if you would like to set a similar project in your area.

When we become aware of our own and each others unique body reactions to the environment we can create a better world!

Read Emotional Cartography edited by Christian Nold – free PDF download

Some examples of projects:

Stockport Emotion Map

East Paris Emotion Map

San Francisco Emotion Map

Greenwich Emotion Map

Brentford Biopsy

Swords > Ploughshares > Swords

Unfortunately, in recent years there have been so many people, companies and institutions who have tried to copy or imitate the Bio Mapping device and use it for banal, exploitative or anti-social purposes.

For this reason I would like to make it clear that the Bio Mapping device and Emotion Mapping concept are Copyrighted and Trademarked!