Heart of a City: BioMapping

Why skin is the new heart and how your neighbors can change the way your feel about your street.

On the trails of yesterday’s fascinating exploration of cities as living organisms, today we look at another piece of high-concept urban portraiture that harnesses the power of art, sociology and technology to a brilliant end.

Since 2004, Christian Nold has been orchestrating Bio Mapping — a crowdsourced community mapping project, which wires people up to Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) devices, detecting their emotional arousal, and sends them on their merry way around the neighborhood. These states are then mapped onto people’s geographic location, creating a visualization of communal emotion.

Participants — over 1,500 of them to date — also annotate the data with personal observations, memories and thoughts they associate with each location, painting a rich emotional portrait of the social space of a community.

Perhaps most fascinating about the project isn’t the mere documentation of collective emotion, but how that awareness would change our perception of our community and environment.

Those who have been with Brain Pickings for some time may find Bio Mapping reminiscent of Swedish artist Erik Krikortz’s Emotional Cities project. But, as researchers, we love the idea of measuring emotional states via biofeedback rather than self-reporting.

After all, there’s often a gaping disconnect between how we publicly broadcast emotion and how we privately experience it.

via Very Short List

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Film Spotlight: Paper Heart

Decheesing love, or how Michael Cera went from cameo to Romeo in a never-signed-up-for-it way.

The only thing cheesier than the subject of love itself is a film about love. Unless its about love. Which is why we love Sundance gem Paper Heart — a wonderful documentary about Charlyne Yi, a girl who neither understands love nor believes in the very possibility of it.

Cherlyne embarks on a journey to dissect the nature of love, traveling the country and interviewing people — little kids in “puppy love,” couples who grew old and grey together, Vegas-wedders — to hear their stories about the ever-elusive subject.

And then comes the wildcard — Charlyne meets actor Michael Cera (of Arrested Development and Juno fame, among others) in order to interview him.

But the two grow increasingly fascinated with one another and something begins to boil between them, something that may just be, oh, who knows, love? Suddenly, the film director realizes that Charlyne and Michael’s relationship has taken a life of its own and has now become part of the documentary, which turns into a wonderful piece of anthropological field study of love in the very moment when it crystallizes. (HD trailer here.)

What we love most about Paper Heart is that it remains exactly what it set out to be — a real documentary — yet it’s about the very subject of all the world’s sappy fiction, exposing it in a refreshing new light that strips it of all the Hollywood glam and romantic scene music scores, leaving nothing but the raw and vulnerable human emotion in the heart of this universal phenomenon.

Artist Spotlight: Teddy Zareva

How a photographer’s lens can break through the thickest of walls.

Visual art, at its most powerful, charges a static image with a fluid and turbulent flow of thought and emotion.

Photographer Teddy Zareva does just that in her work, sometimes aspirationally glamorous, often gritty and raw, and always rich in human complexity.

Her work shows a profound understanding of the human body, made all the more impactful by her brave use of light and color.

But we’re particularly taken with Teddy’s series of emotive portraits, which capture those deepest, most complex layers of how we relate to others and to ourselves.

Check out more of her work on deviantART, with select prints available for purchase.

Friday FYI: Hate Mornings Less

Why orchids are better than coffee.

Feel anything from grumpy to homicidal when you have to get up in the morning? Yeah, we hear ya. Luckily, a bunch of researchers at — where else — Harvard have discovered a neat trick to soften the punch of the alarm clock: stick a bouquet in your bedroom.

The behavioral study found that those of us who don’t consider ourselves “morning people” report feeling happier and more energized after looking at flowers first thing in the morning. This, in turn, makes us more positive throughout the day, which makes those around us a tad friendlier too, thanks to the whole “emotional contagion” thing. (We won’t get into the mirror neurons shenanigans, but it’s compelling and legit stuff.)

(And another study in that series found that flowers in the home make people feel less anxious and more compassionate. Which, you know, really helps in case the “emotional contagion” stuff didn’t work on that jerk at work.)

via

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