The Emotional Compass featured in a chapter of the new “Augmented Reality Art” book from Springer, edited by Vladimir Geroimenko together with Mark Skwarek, Tamiko Thiel, Gregory L. Ulmer, John Craig Freeman, Conor McGarrigle, Patrick Lichty, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Jacob Garbe, Todd Margolis, Kim Vincs, Alison Bennett, John McCormick, Jordan Beth Vincent, Stephanie Hutchison, Ian Gwilt, Judson Wright, Nathan Shafer, Salvatore Iaconesi, Oriana Persico, Dragoş Gheorghiu and Livia Ştefan, Simona Lodi, Margaret Dolinsky, Damon Loren Baker.

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In the book our contribution is titled: “An Emotional Compass: Emotions on Social Networks and a new Experience of Cities

cite as:

Iaconesi, S. and Persico, O. (2014). “An Emotional Compass: Emotions on Social Networks and a new Experience of Cities” in Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium, part of the Springer Series on Cultural Computing, Geroimenko, Vladimir (Ed.). New York: Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-06202-0. http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/book/978-3-319-06202-0

Here is a short sample of the introduction of the chapter:

“The map is not the territory.” (Korzybski, 1933)

 

“The map is not the thing mapped.” (Bell, 1933)

 

“The tale is the map that is the territory.” (Gaiman, 2006)

 

“We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.” (Bateson, 1972)

 

When we experience territories, we create stories. We model these stories using mental maps, referring to one person’s point of view perception of their own world, influenced by that person’s culture, background, mood and emotional state, instantaneous goals and objectives.

 

If we move along the streets of my city in a rush, trying to find a certain type of shop or building, our experience will be different than the one we would have had if we were searching for something else.

 

Focus will change. We will see certain things and not notice other ones which we would have noticed otherwise. Some things we will notice because they are familiar, common, or because associate them to our cultures, to memories and narratives. All this process continuously goes on as our feelings, emotions, objectives and daily activities change, creating the tactics according to which we traverse places and spaces, to do the things we do.

 

In the density of cities, this process happens for potentially millions of people at the same time. In his “the Image of the City” (Lynch, 1960), Lynch described cities as complex time-based media, symphonies produced by millions of people at the same time in their polyphonic way of acting, moving, interpreting, perceiving and transforming the ambient around themselves: a massive, emergent, real-time, dissonant and randomly harmonic, work of time-based art with millions of authors that change all the time.

 

In this, our mental maps – the personal representations of the city which we build in our minds to navigate them to fulfill our needs and desires – live a complex life as our perception joins into the great performance of the city.

 

Dissonance is the essence of the city itself, and represents its complexity, density and opportunities for interaction.

 

Augmented Reality Art

Augmented Reality Art