biomapping edmonton?

What fascinates me about Biomapping is how it sort of of disproves one of its own assumptions. It's a space-based concept, mapping emotional response to geographical location, and there were responses to specific, concrete locations ("Beautiful mural by Andrew Schoultz," "Really big hill") -- but there were also random experiences that could have happened anywhere in any city (my personal favourite: "I got startled by pigeons," followed quickly by "Tried to stomp on pigeons"). It might be worthwhile to do a statistical analysis and trace out ratios and patterns, but anyway the data indicates -- maybe -- that what seems like it'd be incidental to our experience of place is actually central to it.

Also interesting: responses to place that relied on memory ("Walked by ex-girlfriend's house"), foregrounding the way the project maps how people are embedded in places. As I discussed with my group at the end of Thursday's class, the map of Edmonton I would love to see is one in which five different people are "released" into the wild of Edmonton at the same spot, then allowed to disperse within a given area. Their autonomous journeys and emotional responses would be recorded and displayed -- each in a different colour, maybe? -- on the same map. While the biomaps we saw gave a sense of a synchronic moment, collapsing time into a bunch of data points, this could fold those scattered, striking moments into diachronic narrative strands, revealing the way individuals appropriate the same space in different ways.

It might also be a revealing experience for the participants. De Certeau says that walkers of a city write urban texts blindly, without being able to read them. A lot of the responses on Nold's biomaps indicated that wearing his scientific mood ring heightened their awareness-- of their mission, but also in general; they were, perhaps, not as blind as the average urban pedestrian.

my edmonton: terra incognita

Typing "my Edmonton" feels like stealing, because Edmonton's not mine at all.

It's sort of like waking up in bed and realising you're sleeping next to a stranger, even after twenty years of arranged loveless marriage. I always assumed I knew my city, but even though I've made its spaces into places they've never cohered for me in a way that gives me a sense of the local.

I go places to do things. Then I come home. It's hopelessly utilitarian. And so my sense of the city is just a handful of isolated, unconnected spaces: my house; bus stops and LRT stations; campus; the Whitemud Crossing library, to which I have paid literally hundreds of dollars in late fines; the Confederation pool, preferable to the YMCA because it's saltwater; friends' places; doctor's offices; bookstores on Whyte and coffee shops along 109th. I have an intimacy with the places themselves, but no idea of the communities that grow in and around them, no idea of their spatial interrelationships because my sense of direction is a joke which my friends laugh at often and loudly.

Rhetorically speaking -- in a de Certeau kind of way -- my Edmonton has no narrative. It's just sentence fragments, walked over and over again to create a familiar but incomplete poem. It's constrained by bus routes and truncated by self-created "city limits" like my comfort zone, mobility issues courtesy of chronic pain, the fact that I am just too lazy to get my drivers' license. (I know, I know.)

It's time to salvage this relationship. It's time to fall in love.

Since I was raised by books, my first instinct is "read lots of Edmonton books!" but I suspect the real solution is the same as it is for a lot of the Grand Theoretical Problems which sulk inside my head for weeks.

GET OUT MORE! DO THINGS!