Circolo Vegetariano VV.TT. Calcata

This book is a collection of essays from artists, psychogeographers, designers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising people’s intimate biometric data and emotions using technology. The book is the outcome of a research process which aimed to reach a deeper understanding of a project called ‘Bio Mapping’, which since 2004, has involved thousands of participants in over 16 different countries. Bio Mapping emerged as a critical reaction towards the currently dominant concept of pervasive technology, which aims for computer ‘intelligence’ to be integrated everywhere, including our everyday lives and even bodies. The Bio Mapping project investigates the implications of creating technologies that can record, visualise and share with each other our intimate body-states.

The Bio Mapping device: GPS – left, fingercuffs – top and data logger on the right.

To practically explore this subject, I invented and built the Bio Mapping device, which is a portable and wearable tool recording data from two technologies: a simple biometric sensor measuring Galvanic Skin Response and a Global Positioning System (GPS). The bio-sensor, which is based on a lie-detector, measures changes in the sweat level of the wearers’ fingers. The assumption is that these changes are an indication of ‘emotional’ intensity. The GPS part of the device also allows us to record the geographical location of the wearer anywhere in the world and pinpoint where that person is when these ‘emotional’ changes occur. This data can then be visualised in geographical mapping software such as Google Earth. The result is that the wearer’s journey becomes viewable as a visual track on a map, whose height indicates the level of physiological arousal at that particular moment. The Bio Mapping tool is therefore a unique device linking together the personal and intimate with the outer space of satellites orbiting around the Earth. The device appears to offer the colossal possibility of being able to record a person’s emotional state anywhere in the world, in the form of an ‘Emotional Map’.

People who actually wore the device and tried it out while going for a walk and then saw their own personal emotion map visualised afterwards, were baffled and amazed. But their positive reactions hardly compared to the huge global newspaper and TV network attention that followed the launch of the project. People approached me with a bewildering array of commercial applications: estate agents in California wanting an insight into the geographical distribution of desire; car companies wanting to look at drivers’ stress, doctors trying to re-design their medical offices, as well as advertising agencies wanting to emotionally re-brand whole cities. Other emails arrived from academic sociologists, geographers, futurologists, economists, artists, architects and many urban planners, trying to get new mental insights into their own disciplines. Surprisingly, there were also intensely personal emails from people who wanted to understand their own body and mind in more detail, asking for a therapeutic device to monitor their daily anxiety levels.

I was shocked: my device, or more correctly, the idea or fantasy of my device had struck a particular 21st century zeitgeist. A huge range of people had imagined ways of applying the concept, some of which I felt uncomfortable about. I realised that ‘Mapping Emotions’ had become a meme that was not mine anymore, but one that I had merely borrowed temporarily from the global unconscious. Faced with some dramatic choices, I decided to try to establish and document my own vision of emotion mapping as a reflexive and participatory methodology.

From Device to Methodoligy

From talking with people who tried out the device, I was struck by their detailed and personal interpretations of their bio-data. Often we would sit next to each other and look at their track together. While I would see just a fairly random spiky trail, they saw an intimate document of their journey, and recounted events which encompassed the full breadth of life: precarious traffic crossings, encounters with friends, meeting people they fancied, or the nervousness of walking past the house of an ex-partner. Sometimes people who walked along the same path would have spikes at different points, with one commenting on the smells of rotting ships, while another being distracted by the CCTV cameras. People were using the Emotion Map as an embodied memory-trigger for recounting events that were personally significant for them. Sometimes these descriptions overlapped, while at other times they were unique. For them, the spikes were documenting not what we would commonly call ‘emotion’, but actually a variety of different sensations in relation to the external environment such as awareness, sensory perception and surprise. I suddenly saw the importance of people interpreting their own raw bio-data for themselves.

Bio Mapping functions as a total inversion of the lie-detector, which supposes that the body tells the truth, while we lie with our spoken words. With Bio Mapping, people’s interpretation and public discussion of their own data becomes the true and meaningful record of their experience. Talking about their body data in this way, they are generating a new type of knowledge combining ‘objective’ biometric data and geographical position, with the ‘subjective story’ as a new kind of psychogeography.

Participants often describe the sensation of using the Bio Mapping tool as a kind of Reality TV show, where they can see their own life documented in front of them. Such a description suggests something similar to Berthold Brecht’s notion of ‘Verfremdung’ (de-familiarisation). Brecht’s idea is that this performative distancing allows the viewer to take a critical distance on viewed events. In the case of Bio Mapping, the participants are vocalising their intimate internal mental life as well as public behaviour to a communal group. In effect, the participants are carrying out a type of co-storytelling with the technology, that allows them to creatively disclose, or omit, as much as they like of what happened during their walks. The Bio Mapping tool therefore acts as ‘performative technology’ which shoulders the burden of having to hold the public’s attention, while offering a safe distance from public exposure to the ‘interpreter’. Used in this way, the tool allows people who have never met each other to tell elaborate descriptions of their own experiences, as well their opinions on the local neighbourhood, in a way that they would have never done otherwise.

This vision of Bio Mapping as a performative tool which mediates relationships is very different to the fantasy of Emotion Mapping that many people approached me about: such as marketeers’ intentions to metaphorically ‘slice people’s heads open to see their innermost feelings and desires’.

With the passing of the time, I started to realise that both the particular context and ways in which a biometric sensor is used drammatically affects the social relationships that are formed, as well as the types of observations that people make during the workshop.

The early Bio Mapping workshops had all taken place in art galleries in the centres of towns and cities. People often walked randomly for 30 minutes before returning to the exhibition to see their emotion maps. In such context, the kind of descriptions and annotations that people left were mainly anecdotal: drank a coke here, had an ice cream there, was spooked by pigeons etc.

Once I started to work with local community organisations for longer periods of time and in less central towns areas, where people lived in and cared about (and not just worked or shopped), the annotations changed dramatically. Instead of being just about their momentary sensations in the space, participants told stories that intermingled their lives with the place, local history and politics. The discussions often followed a trajectory of noticing the bodily effect of car traffic on one person’s emotion map, often leading to discussing the lack of public space and identifying its social and poltical causes. This process of scaling-up and seeking connections between issues encouraged people to talk both personally and politically in a way they had often not done before with other local people 

At the end of each Bio Mapping workshops project, all the information and data gathered were designed into a printed map, which was then distributed for free in the locality. For example, in the Greenwich Emotion Map, this meant using a GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software to create a communal arousal surface which blended together 80 people’s arousal data and annotations. The resulting communal ‘emotion surface’ is a conceptual challenge and question. Can we really blend together our emotions and experiences to construct a totally shared vision of place?

Christian Nold exhibits “Bio Mapping”

February 11 at  the future of Biosensing Thursday, February 11, 2010

Registration: 18:30-19:00, Conference: 19:00-21:15

Location: Waag Society, Nieuwmarkt 4, 1012 CR Amsterdam [Center of the Nieuwmarkt] journal@clubofamsterdam.com