emotional/sensorial standpoint. 30 engineering students were sent across the
city to selected sites and evaluated the given location in a state of hypnotic
trance, accessed by listening to an audio hypnosis cd. The results were then
plotted out into a data field, and represented in a robotically controlled map of
Cagliari that deformed the map upwards and downwards depending on the
positive and negative emotional responses at given locationsDigital
Psychotopography of Cagliari
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in which you find yourself ....focus from within on what surrounds you....as if,
bit by bit, your nervous system extends itself outwards towards your
surroundings... as if you could feel the emotions and sensations that emerge
from your surroundings...the surroundings that you have chosen, the
surroundings that have attracted you to them...focus on the sensations,
thoughts, feelings and intuitions as if they were completely connected to
you...and as the impressions of the location grow within you, just allow that
link to generate a dialogue between you and your surroundings....a
dialogue...a narrative...heightened sensations...perhaps embedded in the past
or present,or maybe in the future...
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like take a hold of the pen and allow your hand to draw from your mind...
directly...independently...let it render what is outside as it is drawn from
within..."
1950's when Guy Debord developed the idea of the "dérive", or a mapping of
the city based on chance experiences, rather than the surveyor's theodolite.
With the "dérive", the new type of mappers were expected to drop their usual
work and leisure activities, as well as all their usual motives for movement
and action, and wander through the city, attracted by certain traits and
encounters that were recorded so as to make up a "psycho geographic"
terrain.
With our project, Cychopolis, the participants were not just asked to drop their
usual habits of behavior, but more especially, their acquired habits of thought,
so as to view the city from a completely personal and embodied point of view.
In order to map the city from a vantage point that is uncontaminated by
externally formed ideas given to us through peer-pressure or assimilated
through education, the 30 engineering students were asked to
emotionallyevaluate the terrain directly from the unconscious. The students
were divided into groups and asked to choose 6 different points in the city of
Cagliari. Each point corresponded to one of 6 different categories: commerce,
circulation, public spaces, public buildings, private spaces and green spaces.
Each student then listened to a short hypnotic induction in the selected places.
The audio hypnosis made the students undergo a temporary lapse of acquired
knowledge and memory, followed by commands to open up the senses to the
location. In trance, the students drew, or imprinted their impressions, and
upon awaking, precisely described their experience.
revealing surprising and almost synesthetic or narrative emotional textures of
the locations, what we were most interested in was finding common patterns,
or emotional nodes or vortexes that run through the city. In order to build up
a psycho-sensorial map of Cagliari, we asked the students to evaluate each
location according to the four basic parameters of experience as established
by Carl Jung : sensing and intuition, feeling and thinking, as well as whether
the experience seemed embedded more in the past or the future. The students
were also asked to grade the impact of their experience on a scale of 1 to 10.
This gave us an enormous set of data which could then be mapped back into
the city of Cagliari. We began to see that certain areas or zones elicited a
strong, intuitive response, whereas other areas or zones seemed, for
instance, to arouse feelings.
In this way, the map of Cagliari begins to distort itself, with larger values or
topographical "humps"emerging where students responded most strongly, and
locations of weaker psycho-sensorial response begin to shrink. This type of
mapping seems to mirror the idea of the "homunculus", or the mapping of
the senses on the cerebral cortex. Just as hands and feet have more
processing power devotedto them in the brain than let us say the shoulders,
and as an extension our hands and feet occupy a larger sensorial terrain than
our shoulders, so our mapping of Cagliari, inaccurate to the eye of the
surveyor and the theodolite, is, in a certain sense, a more accurate measure
of how the city is experienced.
At the media and architecture festival "Image", in Firenze in October 2003
we displayed a servo-controlled, interactive, moving map that reflects the
changing psycho sensorial terrain of the city of Cagliari...perhaps the
installation itself will spark a chain of psycho-sensorial associations within
the city of Firenze...
Collaboration Oliver Hess Sound Design Christina Clar
Thanks to Prof. Giovannimaria Campus , the Faculty of Engineering of Cagliari
and the students:
Marco Barabino, Paolo Caddeu, Alessandra Cireddu, Antonio Contini, Carlo
Dessì, Rita Doro, Francesca Fancello, Francesco Fancello, Piero Fancello,
Gianluca Farina, Francesca Ghisu, Francesca Lai, Michele Mameli, Giancarlo
Marcias, Adriano Masia, Martina Mattana, Daniela Melis, Francesca Melis,
Francesco Muggianu, Mariangela Murgia, Chiara Patteri, Alberto Piras, Cinzia
Piras, Massimo Pirinu, Antonio Pittau, Marco Sanna, Francesca Scaramella,
Paolo Spiga, Valentina Talu, Salvatore Ziranu
Daniela Frogheri is a student of ingegneria edile at the university of Cagliari,
and has been collaborating with Marcos Lutyens on the MindBrowser and
CychoPolis for the past year, charting the structures that emerge from the
collective as well as the individual unconscious.
Giovanni Maria Campus, tenured researcher of Composizione Architettonica e
Urbana, professor of Composizione Architettonica 3 as part of the University
of Cagliari. He is involved in architectural issues related to communication,
projects, realization, feedback, as well as perception and emotive
communicative processes directed towards architectural transformation.
Thanks also to Day Nguyen, Marco Brizzi, Elisa Grilli and Eric Lozano.
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