Fleshmap
Data visualization project exploring the body and desire:
We asked hundreds of people how much they like being caressed on various parts of their body, and how exciting it is to touch different places on their lovers. Their answers, a total of 33,871 ratings covering 707 points on male and female bodies, provide a collective portrait of desire. In Skin to Skin, compare men and women, touching and being touched. In Sorting out Desire, explore an atlas of excitement.
To produce a collective portrait of desire, we polled hundreds of people’s opinions about parts of the body. To do so, we teamed up with Dolores Labs to crowdsource the data gathering step through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site—a marketplace where paid workers perform simple tasks. This means that we set up an open call to anyone on the Mechanical Turk site who was interested in answering questions about desire and the human body.
You can see the results of the surveys at Fleshmap site here (and from the developers here)
Greenwich Emotion Map by Christian Nold - Oct 2005 - March 06
6 month artist commission hosted by Independent Photography as part of ‘Peninsula’.
The project involved weekly workshops with 80 local Greenwich Peninsula residents with the aim of re-exploring the area afresh with the help of a Bio Mapping device. The device invented by the artist measures the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with the wearer’s geographical location. The resulting ‘Emotion Maps’ encourage personal reflection on the complex relationship between oneself, the environment and ones fellow citizens. In a group, people then commented about their experiences and left annotations on the map.
To create the communal Greenwich Emotion Map all the individual walks were aggregated to visulises a shared landscape of emotion. The map contains particular arousal hotspots reflecting many of the local discussions about regeneration of the Peninsual. As part of the commision we printed 1000 Greenwich Emotion Maps which have turned out to be a great success communicating the project locally as well as nationally and internationally. Locally every participant received a map and a number are available at the tourism office but the map was also distributed through arts venues such as the ICA and Tate Modern bookshops.
While this participatory project is now at an end, the local discussions about physical and social change in the area are continuing and we hope the map will play a strong part in this discussion.
Non-representational theory, made relatively infamous through the works of Nigel Thrift, focuses upon practices – how human and nonhuman formations are enacted or performed – not simply on what is produced. It studies the manifestation of affect as a localised experience that is embedded in the landscape as much as it is a part of cultural practice - looking at a life based on movement, is dynamic and multi-spatial. It looks as much to our relationships with things, space, technology, time and geography as it does to our relationships with other human beings.
According to Islamic doctrine, ornament ought to be non-representational. This new Turkish ornament uses the behaviour of dripping paint and the random but evocative forms of Rorschach ink-blot tests to create a new non-representational tile that allows for sensual interpretation.
Uncanny Spaces and Affect -
“The idea of an “architectural uncanny” was put forth by architectural historian Anthony Vidler to describe how our understanding of architecture is often characterized by strange and threatening experiences. His concepts build upon Sigmund Freud’s classic 1919 essay on the uncanny, explaining how the German word unheimlich, of “un-homely,” describes the sensation of the uncanny as being estranged from the comforts of home.”
When space becomes uncanny, our view of the world becomes unsettled. We are moved from a position of knowing into an unknown, where objects become sinister due to their familiarity. What is important to note is that nothing in the physical, exterior world has changed - only the interior world through which we filter our experiences. The manifestation of affect - embodied responses that are created through corporeal stimuli - is a form of thinking, often indirect and non-reflective and all manner of spaces which this affect generates must be thought of in the same way, as means of thinking and as thought in action. Thus, affect is a different kind of intelligence about the world and one that unsettles previously ideas of how the world operates and exists.
“The architecture of pleasure lies where concept and experience of space abruptly coincide, where architectural fragments collide and merge in delight, where the culture of architecture is endlessly deconstructed and all rules are transgressed. No metaphorical paradise here, but discomfort and the unbalancing of expectations…Typologies, morphologies, spatial compressions, logical constructions - all dissolve. Such architecture is perverse because its real significance lies outside utility or purpose and ultimately is not even necessarily aimed at giving pleasure”
Bernard Tschumi.
“The 2009 series ‘The Blocks’ draws together images of the housing estates built in Belgrade in the 1950s and 1960s, which Benjamin Beker has manipulated by adding or taking out floors and facades and combining them into striking aggregate arrangements.The Blocks are a series of monolithic structures designed in accordance with the utilitarian edicts of High Modernism; architectural emblems of socialist idealism that were built to house government offices, but which also became home to thousands of Belgrade citizens. Beker re-configures their brutalist concrete syntax by removing them from their original context and placing them on a plain grey background, thus neutralising their socio-political charge and transforming them into harmonised geometric configurations.
Becker combines elements of reality to make artificial constructs in a way which resembles the curious nature of Yugoslavia – which was a melding of different nations into an artificial whole. These images have come to form the units of his work; photographs that reflect the curiously composite nature of Yugoslavia through their deconstructive play with the registers of fiction and documentary.”
