Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self

What hacking has to do with art, technology and being human.

If you enjoyed last week’s BioMapping project, it’s time we took it to the major leagues — of biometric visualization, art, and sociology, that is.

Emotional Cartography is an excellent, free book on emotion mapping, featuring a collection of essays by artists, designers, psychologists, cultural researchers, futurists and neuroscientists. Together, they explore the political, social and cultural implications of dissecting the private world of human emotion with bleeding-edge technology.

From art projects to hi-tech gadgets, the collection looks at emotion in its social context. It’s an experiment in cultural hacking — a way to bridge the individual with the collective through experiential interconnectedness.

Hacking is an idea, as well as a social movement, which is about subverting and reclaiming the tools and metaphors that we’re given. Hacking is a DIY culture of action — a very individualistic community, but still a community with a vision of shared benefits.

Download the book in PDF here, for 53 glorious pages of technology, art and cultural insight.

You may also enjoy:

• Heart of a City: BioMapping Fascinating crowdsourced mapping project records people's emotional states and correlates them with their geographic location, visualizing the collective emotion of a community....
• Feeling Thoughts, Playing Visions Public display of emotion, world-saving vocabulary, the new jet set, David Lynch, the animal in us, what Mike Gravel and Moby have in common, why parting with our miniature sheep collection finally seems doable, and how everything begins with music. HEART OF A CITY The Nordic countries, always the beacon...
• Experimental Cartography: The Map as Art Fascinating experimental map-inspired art...
• The Beauty of Maps: Seeing Art in Cartography A new BBC series and web effort looks at the evolution of cartography, from 13th-century antique maps to today's most ambitious digital visualizations...
• We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion Four years and 12 million feelings later, a book by visualization artist and storyteller Jonathan Harris that lives up to its grand expectations....

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 9:00 am in art, culture, free market, psychology, social web and was tagged art, culture, emotion, free, psychology, sociology, technology.