Having a clean-up of the desk – which has to happen every month or so, when the archaeological layers threaten to descend into chaos – I stumbled across the handout from a session at the Literary London conference that I had neglected to record, but that certainly deserves a bit of attention.
It was with the artist Christian Nold, who uses the technology of lie detectors (which of course sense stress, not “lies”) to create maps of London showing where people’s stress levels rise as they walk the streets. Participants are then invited to annotate the 3D maps with explanations of what caused their reaction – creating a personal but also social recreation of a moment in space and time.
It is described as bio-mapping and the inventor descibes it as visualising “our subtle relationship between the emotional world and the extrenal world”.
The theoretical discussion contained something of course of the Situationists dérive, something of Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, and something of Peter Ackroyd’s views of London’s effects on crowds, that it “channelled the energies of its citizens into the crooked chape of its lanes and thoroughfares, rendering them ever more fierce and desperate”. (Not actually a view of London with which I concur.)
But the maps produced has a very physical reality – the stress measured in black walls that grow high as stress grows.
The “cyborg memory” was my label – for that’s in fact what each map is.
About