{"id":1546,"date":"2006-08-27T17:06:05","date_gmt":"2006-08-27T17:06:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1546"},"modified":"2006-08-27T17:12:45","modified_gmt":"2006-08-27T17:12:45","slug":"mapping-the-emotions-of-london-or-creating-cyborg-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/?p=1546","title":{"rendered":"Mapping the emotions of London, or creating cyborg memory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Having a clean-up of the desk &#8211; which has to happen every month or so, when the archaeological layers threaten to descend into chaos &#8211; 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. <\/p>\n<p>It was with the artist <a href = \"http:\/\/www.softhook.com\/\">Christian Nold<\/a>, who uses the technology of lie detectors (which of course sense stress, not &#8220;lies&#8221;) to create maps of London showing where people&#8217;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 &#8211; creating a personal but also social recreation of a moment in space and time. <\/p>\n<p>It is described as <a href = \"http:\/\/www.softhook.com\/bio.htm\">bio-mapping<\/a> and the inventor descibes it as visualising &#8220;our subtle relationship between the emotional world and the extrenal world&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>The theoretical discussion contained something of course of the Situationists d\u00c3\u00a9rive, something of Donna Haraway&#8217;s cyborgs, and something of Peter Ackroyd&#8217;s views of London&#8217;s effects on crowds, that it &#8220;channelled the energies of its citizens into the crooked chape of its lanes and thoroughfares, rendering them ever more fierce and desperate&#8221;. (Not actually a view of London with which I concur.)<\/p>\n<p>But the maps produced has a very physical reality &#8211; the stress measured in black walls that grow high as stress grows.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;cyborg memory&#8221; was my label &#8211; for that&#8217;s in fact what each map is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Having a clean-up of the desk &#8211; which has to happen every month or so, when the archaeological layers threaten to descend into chaos &#8211; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-history","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}