The Emergent Mind of City (EMC) project is a collaborative project between artists and scientists (Hongki Kim, Biomedical knowledge Engineering Laboratory at Seoul National University, BiKE Lab). This project was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘City of Water, Design of City as an organism’. The EMC project observes the city from the perspective of using data-flow instead of water-flow. Data in a city is an objective mind that represents the city, which is in a state of non-self consciousness until it is fi ltered through consciousness. This idea is similar to the psychological concept of ‘fringe’° founded by William James. A fringe experience is vague because as one tries to manifest a context more explicitly, it overwhelms the consciousness with limited capacity for articulation and discourse. In our imagination, the body of memory holds virtual organs such as events, feelings, and appearances. When perspectives and meanings are projected and focused on an event, the news reveals feeling, emotions through appearances and images. A news network that extracts meaningful structures from the meaningless flow of event data represents a flow of words that conceptualizes the city, and reveals collective intelligence. An emotion network, consisting of emotion data, is both a flow and a collective emotion that endow an identity to the news. We wanted to peek into the mind of the city we live in, with the eye of an individual, insignificant as it may be, through the small window where technology and art intersects. However, since a person’s mind, neural activities of the brain at best, is trifling, located in the depths of the mind of the city, his/her mind may not fully experience the whole of the city’s mind. But a scientific work can show intricate ways in which data fragments in a city are connected and intermingled. Upon this work, we hope to approach the mind of a city by visualizing perspectives, emerging through our artistic work.
° The fringe can be difined as the lonk that bridges emotion and cognition, and the space between consciousness and unconsciousness, subjectivity and objectivity.
