The body electric: Tom Vanderbilt on Christian Nold

IN 1862, in a letter to the editor of the Parisian newspaper La Presse describing the series of prose poems that would become the classic Spleen de Paris (1869), Charles Baudelaire asked, "Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and choppy enough to fit the soul's lyrical movements, the undulations of reveries, the jolts of consciousness?"

What Baudelaire was describing, and what he hoped to accomplish in Le Spleen de Paris, was a new way of understanding and representing the city in an age of modernity. "This obsessive ideal came to life above all by frequenting enormous cities," he continued, "in the intersection of their countless relationships." Just as the photographer known as Nadar, Baudelaire's contemporary and friend, was hovering above Paris in his balloon to photograph the city from a new vantage point (or descending into the sewers to illuminate the secret metropolis in the first photos aided by electric light), Baudelaire was delving into the city's crowds, wandering into the tangled streets then being transformed by the boulevards of Haussmann.

The activities of Baudelaire as flaneur would later be celebrated by Walter Benjamin in his "prehistory of modernity," The Arcades Project, a never-completed work that was a monumental piece of flanerie itself as well as an homage to Baudelaire and his efforts to "parry the shocks" of modernity through new forms of aesthetic experience. This age was encapsulated for Benjamin in the arrival of the nineteenth-century arcades, self-enclosed worlds of commerce with their own temperatures and the first gas lighting: glass-covered refuges for the flaneur. By the time Benjamin was writing (he began his study in 1927), the arcades had grown outmoded (in part due to the widespread availability of electric light), and the gentle art of the flaneurs eclipsed, in Benjamin's eyes, by the rush of progress.

To interrogate the city; to extract knowledge from what is on the surface unknowable; to render visualizations beyond the dictates of official cartography or planning; to discover secret movements and connections: From the pioneering photography of Nadar to the psychogeography of the Situationists, it is by these Baudelairean methods and motives that artists have sought to comprehend the city and their own place in it, often responding to the technological imperatives of the day even as they employ those same devices.

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A recent example of this can be seen in the work of Christian Nold, a young London-based artist who--as someone deeply interested in capturing and visually conveying our moments of psychological "arousal" in the city, or Baudelaire's "jolts of consciousness"--has for the past few years been investigating a practice he calls "emotion mapping" or "biomapping." The technique involves having subjects perambulate certain urban areas wearing finger cuffs that monitor on-the-fly emissions of galvanic skin response (GSR), the technology upon which the lie detector is founded. GSR is used to measure "electrodermal activity," which is believed to correspond to the sympathetic nervous system; for example, when we are aroused by something, good or bad, we begin to sweat more (though not necessarily visibly), thus increasing the conductivity of electricity through our bodies. Because his GSR equipment is linked to a GPS, Nold can later discern--and plot--precisely what things in the urban environment triggered physiological responses. By relying on participants' comments made in notebooks, and on active interrogation of his subjects, he can also determine why.

Nold is, essentially, conducting a narrative, ambulatory version of the polygraph. Indeed, he says it was his desire, in a time of increased electronic monitoring, to turn this technology inside out that inspired emotion mapping. "I want to move away from power situations where one person decides if the other is lying based on their biodata," says Nold, "and instead create visualizations that allow the subject to interpret their own data for themselves." In one project, called the Greenwich Emotion Map, 2005-2006, he sent residents through the Greenwich Peninsula section of London, then produced a map--a dead-on imitation of British Ordnance Survey maps--tracking the arousal levels during people's peregrinations. The map for Greenwich plots participants' routes as they walked, with notated comments such as "Argument with Mum" or "Nice building." These are set against overlapping swirls of color, from red splotches of "high arousal" to blue whorls of "low arousal"; the result looks much like an abstract topographic map. And, as is appropriate for an age in which mapping has become an aggregative, open-source, customizable enterprise, Nold overlays his maps onto Google Earth. (We might imagine Nadar's aerial imagery tracking Baudelaire's footsteps in the golden age of flanerie.)