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)

Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology. Essays by Raqs Media Collective, Marcel van de Drift, Dr Stephen Boyd Davis, Rob van Kranenburg, Sophie Hope and Dr Tom Stafford

A5 Offset Litho – 96 pages – Full Colour

ISBN 978-0-9557623-1-4

To purchase a printed copy for £10 + postage and packing please contact me

Available for free PDF download from here

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

In Britain in the Victorian era, people first experienced what we today recognise as the urban experience. Cities composed of faceless masses sluiced through its rigid arteries. In 1840, London was the largest city in the world and its uncontrolled expansion caused the poltical authorities to worry about loosing the overview. Their response was to focus on categorising the intricate details of everybody’s daily lives and thus created the field of urban ethnography. This project uses a short story by Edgar Alan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ written in 1840 as a historical palimpsest and the basis for a visualisation. The story describes the narrator sitting in a coffee shop, watching and ‘reading’ the London crowd before following a man who he thinks may have committed a crime. The visualisation uses a custom built software to semantically filter and analyse the source text. The software removes common words such as ‘it, and, the’ and then displays the 100 most frequently used words as a Tag Coud. The size of the words represents the frequency of use in the text. The words divide into two themes, the crowd and the city.
Yet the distinction between them merges as elements like the face and cloths become a conduit between our internal life and the city. Today, like the Victorians, we have reached another informational milestone where we appear to be swamped by too many people and too much data and the authorities crave order and the overview. Information technologies such as face and gait recognition software track our movements in the city while statistics and data visualisations rule our cultural and political discourse. Have we reached the point where technocratic technologies allow us to ‘read’ people or will data visualisations become the decorative propaganda art form of the 21st century?

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

UCL Project website

This project is both academic research as well as social activism. The plan is to work with three local communities in the Thames Gateway area in London and set up a series of workshops that get a new social group of people involved in local planning processes. The aim will be on city based workshops as well as building online maps that represent and allow them to gather around their own local agendas.

The Silvertown Affect Map – dowload PDF

Silvertown Bio Mapping – download KMZ (needs Google Earth)

The project as its own website Mapping for Social Change

Launch the project: STRANGE WEATHER

Language is constantly shifting to capture changing popular thought. How is our growing understanding of global climate change – as a scientific, political and cultural phenomenon – reflected in our everyday language?

Strange Weather, graphs the usage patterns of terms that characterize the dialog around climate change from Internet news sources. These terms, including “carbon footprint,” “greenhouse gasses,” and “polar icecap,” are juxtaposed with the mundane daily audio stream of New York City weather information broadcast by the National Weather Service. Strange Weather aims to provoke us to think about how our perception of weather must change from an objective measure of natural phenomena to something that complexly and darkly also mirrors ourselves.