San Francisco Emotion Map

This is what I like about the world today. A lot of information presented in one layer…but on closer inspection is densely multi-layered. Simple complexity. This biomap was created by Christian Nold. Somehow I want to incorporate these ideas into my Honours project. I like the idea of ‘tracking’ home movies to see what type of pattern takes shape and meaning is revealed.

Christian Nold is the creator of this biomap.

The San Francisco Emotion Map is the culmination of Christian Nold’s five-week residency and participatory art project that involved a total of 98 participants exploring San Francisco’s Mission District neighborhood using the Bio Mapping device he invented. During his residency at Southern Exposure, Christian Nold worked in the organization’s Mission Street storefront gallery encouraging visitors to stop by and use the devices during the weekdays and on Saturdays when he conducted intensive workshops. The project invited the public to go for a walk using the device, which records the wearer’s physiological response to their surroundings. The results of these walks are represented on this map using colored dots and participant’s personal annotations. The San Francisco Emotion Map is a collective attempt at creating an emotional portrait of a neighborhood and envisions new tools that allow people to share and interpret their own bio data.

VEER INC.

Veer are a very cool company that provides visual elements for use in professional creative work, such as graphic design, motion design, advertising and filmmaking. Their products include stock photography, illustration, typefaces, and unique merchandise. This New York outfit is very sassy and won the 2008 Webby Awards Winners for Best Use of Typography.Who needs substance, when you have so much style?

Visual Complexity project

visualcomplexity is a beautiful website showing the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is ‘to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web’. Some are not genuine complex networks, but ‘they either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject’.

I love it, because it makes me look at how information and data is (and could be) ‘mapped’ in different ways. I’m also a sucker for the pretty colours and patterns!