Greenwich Emotion Map

[Image: From Archeology of the Future].

In response to an earlier post, Mark Brown from Archeology of the Future pointed out the Greenwich Emotion Map, a hand-held, GPS-based cartographic project centered around the soggy parks and traffic crossings of London's meridian peninsula: "Artist Christian Nold has been invited to collaborate with local residents from the Greenwich Peninsula to explore the area afresh and build an emotion map of the area that explores people's relationship with their local environment."


[Image: A "Bio Mapping device," from Greenwich Emotion Map].

"The project is set up as a series of participatory workshops that invite people to borrow a Bio Mapping device and go for a walk. The device measures the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. The resulting maps encourage personal reflection on the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. By sharing this information we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited."
The map itself, colored like a graph of heat-imprints, thermal tags of emotion moving through southern London's space, is actually quite beautiful.
More tangentially, Mark Brown's own description of his day out with the biomappers is worth a read, especially this geo-emotional tour through New Labour's failed Millennial geography, the tarnished corpse of the Millennium Dome stranded sadly in the background: "For all of the order imposed by the rigid, controlling architecture and traffic flow design," Mark writes, "the Peninsula is still home to the higgledy-piggledy overlapping of different periods and types of industry so beloved of location shoots. We even saw a film crew huddled in the middle of a mud coated concrete yard, dwarfed by huge boilers, all pipes and ladders like primitive space craft now lying on their sides and rusting in the rain. There are deserted houses. There are twisting pipes and strange smells behind chainlink fences. Wharfs jut into the grey river with machinery corroded to a halt. Great machineries sprout into the sky, some with chimneys burning off excess gas. There are yards full of scrap, huge piles of rubble. We see a decaying warehouse, one side collapsed, a rusting boat nuzzling it from the water. Despite of of the rhetoric, despite the notions of control and renewal, the Millennium Project failed."


[Image: From Mapchester].

Two other projects of note, pointed out by Régine of we make money not art: 1) Mapchester (more info here) and 2) OpenGeoData's London GPS animation, assembled from coordinates taken from bike couriers riding their routes through London. Have fun.