Emotional Cartography
John recommended that I read Emotional Cartography by Christian Nold, which became a key conceptual foundation for me throughout the project. This reading highlighted the emotional connection that people hold with certain places and sparked ideas of psychogeography and the world that exists around landmarks and museum objects.
Emotion Map
The way the Emotion Map works is as an embodied memory-trigger for recounting events that were personally significant for them. "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" (Nold, pg. 5).
The data generated from this bio-mapping is a combination of "‘objective’ biometric data and geographical position, with the ‘subjective story’ as a new kind of psychogeography. (Nold, pg. 5)
I wondered how I could apply a similar bio-mapping to the museum environment.
Key Questions
What were museum visitors' emotional responses to certain objects and paintings? And how would I capture these emotions?
Were physiological responses the same as emotional responses? My intuition told me no.
Sensations do not equate to emotions.
In addition, emotions are always in flux and occur at different levels. A person looking at a painting may experience a mix of different emotions at once. How would my design take into account this flow of emotions?
Communal Emotion Map
I was also interested in the communal aspect of the Emotion Map and thought about constructing a collective emotion map of a specific museum. I considered tracing museum visitors' emotional journeys through a single gallery in a museum.
This idea stemmed from the composite map from Emotional Cartography: "The records of these personal journeys can be aggregated into a composite map which represents the emotional engagement of a group, showing where the community feels stressed or excited, so both personal and group subjectivities are depicted, and both incorporate transient temporal phenomena" (Nold, pg. 21).
Main Ideas
Some of the main ideas that I gathered from this reading were:
- Psychogeography as applied to art
- How can we access our memories and emotions connected to a work of art?
- Responses to works of art – the viewer’s role in the work of art
- Should this emotion mapping be an individual or collective experience?
- What do I need from museums?
- Will this be digital, physical, or supported digitally?
Subjectivity Gained from Emotion Mapping
Now it was time to start thinking of some design ideas. In the emotion mapping case, the map is an "externalisation of something which belongs to the user." When this is presented to the user on a device held in the hand while walking, as a kind of prosthetic extension, the element of personal, temporal subjectivity centred on the subject is brought to the fore (Nold, pg. 48).
Privacy Issues and Surveillance
Along with the misgivings I had about whether physiological measurements could truly capture people's emotions, there were also issues surrounding privacy and surveillance. I wondered how many people in museums would consent to a stranger attaching a monitor to them and measuring their biometric rhythms.
Even if I could add an interpretive layer to it, the people I spoke to might feel pressured to come up with an answer. How could I capture their emotions as accurately as possible?
I knew that for my design, I wanted something more true to their emotions and open to interpretation rather than something quantitative like a heart rate. How could I combine the quantitative data with qualitative interpretation?
Some key questions that I took forward with me were:
What is the relationship between emotions and physical space?
How would I draw out people's emotions when they look at works of art?
I also began to look more at the Situationists and their ideas of psychogeography.
Al liked the idea of mapping and suggested that I think about what I want to leave in and what I want to leave out?.
What are the networks and interactions around objects?
How would I showcase the traces of interactions with objects and each other?
For my fieldwork in museums, I would look closely at the way they stand, what clothes they're wearing, and other content analysis.
References:
1. Nold, Christian ed. (2009). Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self. Space Studios.
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