Gary Wolf

March 13, 2008

How do you feel in different places? The precise correlation of location and emotional arousal is the topic of Christan Nold‘s long running biomapping project. The project used a simple galvanic skin response meter, which gives a reading of how excited you are.
A GSR device is simple. Here’s the Lego version.

These GSR readings are not very specific. They do not tell you whether you are disgusted, shocked, thrilled, or fascinated. But once Nold added GPS tracking, and invited people to annotate their readings, he could produce a map that correlates emotion with locations. This can be mashed up in Google Earth with contributions from others.
Nold’s device looks like this.


You can download a printable version of the San Francisco map (PDF). But, better yet, you can get the raw data (kmz) and load it onto Google Earth to browse. Right now this is an art project, a vision of the future, a hint of the utopian upside in surveillance and tracking.
Next step – getting my own version!