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Heart of a City: BioMapping

By Maria Popova

Why skin is the new heart and how your neighbors can change the way your feel about your street.

On the trails of yesterday’s fascinating exploration of cities as living organisms, today we look at another piece of high-concept urban portraiture that harnesses the power of art, sociology and technology to a brilliant end.

Since 2004, Christian Nold has been orchestrating Bio Mapping — a crowdsourced community mapping project, which wires people up to Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) devices, detecting their emotional arousal, and sends them on their merry way around the neighborhood. These states are then mapped onto people’s geographic location, creating a visualization of communal emotion.

This is a mind-spinning, gorgeous project that highlights how ubiquitous social web technology will start to make us think about and experience our urban environments differently.

I’ve noticed similar effects just with having an iPhone with reliable location and mapping data on you all of the time. I navigate London very differently, especially. The mapping data has changed how I model it in my head.

Same on the South Downs when I’m mountain biking. I “see” trails and ridges and hills via a Google Earth view almost… I’m making sense of an environment that used to be the background to the road and train system around Brighton in my mental model in a different way. Re-wiring how my brain sees it, cross referencing with computer data and trails/comments that others have made, often online, leaving their trails etc. there…