Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Is it possible to identify “emotional landmarks” - those places/spaces where,
at a specific or recurring time, a certain emotion is expressed powerfully and
abundantly - ?
If they do exist: do emotional landmarks change over time? Do they change
according to the culture you are observing? To language? To the time of day, week,
month or year? To the specific topic your compass is observing?
These, among many others, were the main questions which we asked ourselves
in our research.
14.3
Previous Work
Abundant work exist which explores the idea of emotionally mapping cities and to
propose forms of navigation that go beyond classical way-finding.
For example, Christian Nold's work on Biomapping (
2004a
) and Emotional
Cartography (
2004b
). In the project, a rather large number of people have taken part
in community mapping activities in over 25 cities across the globe. In structured
workshops, participants re-explore their local area with the use of a device which
records the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of
emotional arousal, in conjunction with their geographical location. A map is created
which visualises points of high and low arousal. Nold's work can be considered to be
a seminal one in exploring how devices can capture location-based emotional states,
and make them accessible through maps and other means. In our research we wanted
to focus more on more complex possibilities to interpret human emotions, coming
from the usage of language, and on the possibility to not only record emotions, but
to turn them into active, searchable, usable, knowledge which anyone could generate
and access.
Another example, the Fuehlometer ('feel-o-meter') (
2010
), was produced by
german artists Wilhelmer, Von Bismarck, and Maus in the form of a public face,
an interactive art installation that reflects the mood of the city via a large smiley
face sculpture. It was installed atop a lighthouse in Lindau, Germany. A digital
camera along the lake captured the faces of passersby, which were then analyzed
by a computer program and classified as either happy, sad, or indifferent. The
cumulative results determine the expression of the sculpture, whose mouth and eyes
shift accordingly via a system of automated motors. Von Bismark's thoughts on
the artwork are particularly interesting in this case: “we wanted people to start
considering if they want people to read their emotions, and if they want to know
others' emotions; if they want to be private or they want to be public. That's
what it comes to in the end—what is private, and what is public?” The artwork
itself provided us with precious guidelines about what we set forth to achieve: an
immediately readable and understandable service. Yet the techniques it used proved
