biometric mapping and various odds-and-ends

As many of you know, I’m fairly obsessed with stories that grow from place.  I’m fascinated by accounts from real people of feelings and events they experienced at actual, mapable locations, and I think that much of the subtlety surrounding our experience with — and knowledge of — a place can be captured in the sophisticated language of story.  (For these purposes, let’s call it “articulated memory”.  I’m making the distinction between these kinds of stories and the fiction I write.)  Telling a story about a place that matters to you will both call up and reinforce your feelings about that place, and privilege it above other, less evocative places in your memory and in your future actions.

One thing I like about story collecting is that it’s a mutual endeavor.  You tell, I listen – and then we switch.  There’s something satisfyingly democratic about it.  Even when the roles don’t shift, there’s a relationship that develops between teller and listener that has the potential to alter the content and nuance the understanding.

How much of that place-feeling can be captured biometrically?  Christian Nold is determined to find out.  He’s the principal investigator for a project that lands square in the intersection between art and geography, and the free-for-download Emotional Cartographies is a record of his inquiries and those of other, like-minded people.  Nold has worked out a way to link a simple biometric device – a machine that measures “galvanic skin response,” finger sweat as an indicator of emotional intensity – to a lightweight GPS unit.  He straps the apparatus to people willing to then walk through personally relevant landscapes, records the data, and uploads it to create a simple Google Earth map of the route and his subjects’ emotional arousal.

Described this way, his project seems geeky; sci-fi.  And, clearly, the potential applications of this data for commercial use have not escaped the attention of real-estate professionals, urban planners, marketing executives, and the like.  Nold has a different idea in mind.  In Emotional Cartographies, he relates that

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….

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.

You can see the idiosyncratic maps this process produces on his website.

ODDS

Want to learn more about how Google Earth can be used to create useful, customized maps for humanitarian aid, community projects, and similar purposes?  Check out the MapAction Field Guide, a 118-page, free-for-download how-to pamphlet.  Even if you’re unfamiliar with GPS, GIS, and all the other acronyms of today’s techno-geography, they’ll lead you through the basics of how to create a useful map you can share with others.

ENDS

One more thing:  an Albuquerque arts consortium is hosting what looks to be a very interesting series of events and installations this summer and fall.  It’s called LAND/ART, and there’s a two-day symposium late June, preceded by an appearance by Laurie Anderson and others.  Check it out here.

 

Leave a Comment