An experiment on phenomenology and bio-mapping

It is often argued that New Media Art is difficult to grasp. In contrast to this common argument, I would like to show how New Media Art helps us to grasp the world around us. I’m interested in how we encounter New Media Art and in order to explain this relationship I would like to use a piece of theory which is not often used that is, Phenomenology of Perception (1945) by Maurice-Merleau Ponty. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty is considered as one of the main figure of phenomenology and one of the most politically engage. My opinion is that Phenomenology could be relevant to explain our perception of a piece of New Media Art such as the Emotional Cartography of San Fransisco by Christian Nold. As phenomenology is a philosophy of affects and emotion it will be interesting to apply his version of philosophy to Nold’s work on communal representation. The aim of this talk is to investigate our relationship to New Media Art through Phenomenology. We can wonder if Merleau-Ponty’s notion of subjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception is a useful grid to understand a visual event? The first part will outline, in evaluating Merleau-Ponty’s notion of body-subject, how he defines the relation with space. The second part will consider the confrontation of this theory with the Christian Nold‘s Emotional Cartography of San Fransisco. I will show that not only is a useful theory from which to think about Nold’s work of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of subjectivity and space but that Emotion Cartography also sheds a new light on some aspects of Phenomenology of Perception.To evaluate Merleau-Ponty’s study of space it is important to consider first his notion of subjectivity. According to him subjectivity comes from the body-subject concept, in which there is a unification of the body and mind. Indeed, Phenomenology of Perception is written in reaction to Descartes theory of subjectivity. In spite of this latter for whom the mind is disconnected from the physical body, Merleau-Ponty postulates that the body is the matrix of the mind he even writes: “I do not bring together one by one all the parts of my body, this translation and this unification are performed once and for all within me they are my body .” Merleau-Ponty clarifies the notion of body and space and criticizes the transcendental approach. Indeed, in spite of Kant and his objectivism, Merleau-Ponty taps in the research in psychology and biology of his time to place the body-subject as a new centre of perception. Therefore, he rejects the epistemological starting point of the Kantian tradition. The key aspect of this argument asserts that all our knowledge is gained throughout our personal experience and writes: “A world forms itself round me and begins to exist for me ”.Consequently, this re-defining of subjectivity changes our relation to the world around us, and Merleau-Ponty affirms that reality is inter-woven. He defends the idea that our perception of the world is pre-conscious. It happens before putting names on things. Reality can be described as a nexus in which we are embedded in. This is one of the main shift operated by Merleau-Ponty, our body is not in space but a part of it . We have seen that our mind is intertwined with our body; therefore the world now appears as a different range of possibilities. In contrast to the Cartesian system where the world is mediated by the “I think” here the world is mediated by the “I can”. As a result, our experience of the world is produced through our lived-body. In order to explains this idea, Merleau-Ponty compares the body-subject as a work of art: “The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art. (…)A novel, poem, picture or musical work are individuals, that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, (…)It is in this sense that our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a nexus of living meanings, not the law for a certain number of covariant terms. ” With this metaphor, the body-subject becomes a performer, it embodies our ability to perceive and then define the world around us.

Bearing in mind the previous points, we can now consider the work of Christian Nold. In 2005, this british artist worked on his project Emotional Cartography of San Fransisco. The artist who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004, is interested in creating new models for communal representation. The San Francisco Emotion Map is an Art Project that involved a total of 98 participants exploring San Francisco’s Mission District neighborhood using the Bio-Mapping device invented by Nold. The project invited the public to go for a walk using an electronic device, which recorded the wearer’s physiological response to their surroundings. The results of these walks were represented on this map using colored dots and participant’s personal annotations. This emotional map shows the level of emotional arousal that participants experience while wandering in the streets. We can assert here that the arousal registered is a manifestation of our engagement with the world. It is an indicator of our awareness of being of the world.Christian Nold’s study is effective because it provides a visualization of Merleau-Ponty’s theory. Indeed with this emotional map of San Francisco we witness in real time how space is defined by our memories, sensations. It is our position that draws the map, we follow our subjectivity, our personal point of view to define and describe the world around us. Another relevant point is that participants were asked to add their annotations afterwards. It illustrates the Phenomenological idea that our perception of the world is pre-conscious and then words are added. Moreover, this map is a portrait of ourselves in so far as it reveals our feelings and who we are. There is reciprocity in our relation to space: we define the space with our emotions and the map tells us the objects we react to. With regards to this focus on subjectivity, we notice that this map is free from any authoritative point of view. Usually the drawing of a map is made by a state apparatus in order to set the boundaries of its authority. A map is often perceived as a matter of power, but here Nold takes the opposite position and draw a map not from above but from our body-subject, from within. It refers back to our philosopher theory in which our knowledge is gained from within. It would seem that this map is from the people and by the people and from this account, we can have a political reading of it. Indeed, this map is the illustration of a collective experience and a visualization of a shared idea of things. It is worth noticing that Nold entitled his project cartography and thus emphasizes on the collective writing of this sensorial experience. Nold’s collective re-appropriation of space can even help us to shed new light on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas. The map of this bio-mapping project points out that every path is intertwined, such as a network. This network underlines that we are of the world, and we are, in the Phenomenologist perspective, all connected. We are, through our bodies, defining ourselves and are being defined by others. We perceive and are perceived through the publicity of our bodies. Our body and we are then the result of a communal project, a political process. With his work, Nold sheds a light on our engagement with the world, which parallels Merleau-Ponty’s political engagement: “I am not beyond class. I am situated in a social environment; (…) it is to identify oneself as a worker or a bourgeois through an implicit or existential project which merges into our way of patterning the world and co-existing with other people. My decision draws together a spontaneous meaning in my life which it may confirm or repudiate, but not annul .” It is worth noting that Phenomenology of Perception was published for the first time in French in 1945 and only in 1962 in English (after Merleau-Ponty’s death). He was actively involved in the war as he enlisted the French army right in 1939 where he served as a lieutenant in the infantry. Some academics claim that the war is present throughout the whole book in a silent way. Though Merleau-Ponty’s writing style is not explicit about it, it is not out of context to read his Phenomenology of Perception in such a fashion, if we consider that the political perspective will be developed more in depth in his later work The Visible and the Invisible.To refer back to the question that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of subjectivity as a relevant grid for a visual event, evidence to date would appear to suggest that it is pertinent. Not only Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology helps us to grasp a piece of New Media Art but, it allows us to go further in that perspective. As far as subjectivity and senses are concerned it would be interesting to turn to more recent investigations. In his research on the sensorial turn, David Howes explores the life of senses in society. According to him, every sensorial experience is a “field of cultural elaboration”. Thus, Howes adopts an anthropological approach which points out how a sensory experience may be differently structured across cultures. Therefore, he suggests the way in which senses can be invested with various meanings depending on the culture they sprang from. Accordingly, it would be interesting to witness a project as the Emotional Cartography of San Francisco in a non-Western city context for instance.