PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY, a term coined by the Situationist International in the 1950s and appropriated by contemporary media theoreticians and artists, is used to describe projects that produce affect in relation to the geographic environment. Rather than making maps in the traditional geographic sense, these geo-locative works utilize maps and geography to conduct located experiments with (among other things) people, vehicles, objects, the sky, and the built environment. Often making use of mobile technologies and existing in the hybrid spaces of the Internet and the physical world, these projects produce new understandings of location and identity as shifting, fluid, singular and irreducible." from "artinteractive.org"
::A State of Being:: The Bioreactive Mapping and Affective Visualization Project provides a multi-dimensional sensorial map of daily spatial experience. Informed by the fields of affective computing, wearable computing, computer-mediated communication (CMC), neurophysiology, and technologies of locative media, this is both a technological and interactive media art practice and an experiment in exploring the relationship of emotions, memory, consciousness, and language.
Throughout at least an 8 week period, personal experience is simultaneously captured by wearable webcams, GPS location receivers, and multiple biological sensors such as Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Brainwave patterns (EEG), Heart Rate (ECG, and Muscle Tension (EMG.) A running personal narrative accompanies the internet transmission of this data in VLOG format. The resulting data will be merged and mapped as in the example depicted below. The project will begin to accumulate data within this blog in early 2006.
The implications of the project cross many areas, such as the nature of surveillance and personal privacy, ethics, computing as social practice, the politics and consequences of citizenry leveraging networked technology and wearable computing devices to create counter-surveillance techniques, and even the co-optation of the body and emotional expression into a form of bioinformatics.
In this prototyped mapping example GPS location is merged with a video clip taken at the GPS waypoint, in addition to an overall "arousal" level associated with a simultaneous biosensor reading. This represents: what is experienced, where, and the emotive responses.
This is a sample of one biosensor reading, in this case EEG output.

USEFUL REFERENCES:
Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo (2003), Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means, Plume.
Bennington, T., and Gay, Geri (2000). Mediated Perceptions: Contributions of Phenomenological Film Theory to Understanding the Interactive Video Experience. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Vol. 5(4).
Ede, Sian (2005), Art & Science, I.B. Tauris.
Espinoza, F., Persson, P., Sandin, A., Nyström, H., Cacciatore. E. & Bylund, M. (2001), GeoNotes: Social and Navigational Aspects of Location-Based Information Systems, in Abowd, Brumitt & Shafer (eds.) Ubicomp 2001: Ubiquitous Computing, International Conference Atlanta, Georgia, September 30 – October 2, Berlin: Springer, p. 2-17.
Kawamura T., Kono Y., Kidode M. (2002), Wearable Interface for a Video Diary: Towards Memory Retrieval, Exchange and Transportation, In Proceedings of ISWC.
Mann, Steve. "The Wearcam and Wearable Computing", URL: http://wearcam.org and http://about.eyetap.org.
Moradi, Iman (2004), Glitch Aesthetics, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, School of Design Technology, The University of Huddersfield.
Nold, Christian. The Biomapping Project. URL: http://biomapping.net
Picard, Rosalind (2005), Evaluating Affective Interactions: Alternatives to Asking What Users Feel, CHI Workshop on Evaluating Affective Interfaces: Innovative Approaches, Portland Oregon, April 2005.
Reynolds, Carson (2005), Adversarial Uses of Affective Computing and Ethical Implications. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, MIT Media Arts and Sciences.
Reynolds, Carson and Picard, Rosalind (2005), "Evaluation of Affective Computing Systems from a Dimensional Metaethical Position," 1 st Augmented Cognition Conference, In conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. July 22 - 27, 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Rheingold, Howard (2003), Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Basic.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (2003), Narrative as Virtual Reality : Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society), John Hopkins University Press.
Sawahata,Y, Aizawa K., (2003), Wearable Imaging System for Summarizing Personal Experiences, In Proceedings of IEEE, ICME.
Torio, James (2005), The Social Phenomenon of Blogs, unpublished Thesis, Syracuse University.
Weibel, Peter and Druckery, Tim (2001), net_condition: art and global media (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice), MIT Press.
Wilson, Stephen (2003), Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology, MIT Press.
Artist/Researcher
Cheryl Harris is a professor and media researcher interested in the intersection of communications, media, and technology. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina.
Reach her: cheryl at objectiveanalytics.com.
RSS 2.0