How do you feel? Detecting Urban Ambiances with artistic data devices

Urban ambiance, the intangible embodied sense of how specific city locations and districts affect our sense of well-being, is as instantly recognisable as it is difficult to quantify.Urban ambiance can be traced back to the avant-garde group the Situationist International with their concept of psychogeography, the study of the impact of the geographical environment on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. For the Situationists, psychogeography held the key to not only understanding cities, but to re-making them as liveable spaces worthy of the desires of their inhabitants.This paper introduces Data-Psychogeography, an artistic revisiting of Situationist praxis in the context of the data-assemblages of the contemporary city. This will expand the notion of urban ambiance to include not only the physical environment but intangible social media sentiment and the actions of hidden algorithms acting on our data. The project, currently under development in UCD’s Parity Studios in conjunction with Insight Centre for Data Analytics, will create and deploy speculative, embodied data-capture devices that seek to quantify the emotional experience of being in this data-city in a poetic and playful way. Through asking how the city makes us feel the project frames the individual as sensor, part of an urban data-assemblage combining human and non-human elements; sensors, data, algorithms, digital devices, communications and computing infrastructure, and of course human faculties. This approach it is suggested offers an alternative method of reflecting on the nature of the ubiquitous regimes of data generation and capture that characterise the contemporary city.