The New York trends and innovation company PSFK publishes daily news on their website, which has 400 000 monthly readers. Last week Simon Mainwaring wrote the article “‘Powers of ten’ for the Twitterverse” about the impact of social media in the future. One of Mainwarings examples - together with Twitter, Facebook and Google Wave - is Emotional Cities, which he describes as follows:

‘Emotional Cities’ is the work of Swedish artist, Erik Krikortz that creates multi-layer, visual reflections of the world’s emotional pulse. You simply pick your current emotional state on a seven-level scale, allowing Erik to calculate and plot the average values for different cities, countries and the world in real time. In some cities, their emotional state is even projected on to a light installation, so you can know the emotional temperature of a city as you fly in on a plane. The social potential for this is staggering as it allows individuals, networked groups, entire cities and even countries to track their emotional states and virally affect others.

A couple of weeks ago there was a four page article about Emotional Cities in the Norwegian daily newspaper Dagbladet. Click on the article in order to read it. When the article opens up in a new window, enlarge it by clicking on it again.

The article about Emotional Cities published in The Local on Tuesday, called Stockholm art installation wins international award, is at the moment one of the newspapers five most emailed articles today. Written by Charlotte West, the article gives a good introduction to the project. The Local is a Swedish newspaper in English language.

På torsdag klockan 19:00 sänds ett inslag om Emotional Cities i programmet “SvD Kultur” på TV8. För den som missar programmet sänds det i repris fyra gånger, samt läggs upp på Svenska Dagbladets hemsida.

On Thursday at 7 p.m. a report about Emotional Cities is broadcasted in the TV show “SvD Kultur” on TV8. For those who miss the show it will be rerun four more times, and published on the website of Svenska Dagbladet.

Last Thursday (December 27) Emotional Cities was the cover story of the culture section in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. The article inside was written by the journalist Ricki Neuman and can be found here.

Next week the ARD-Morgenmagazin, broadcasted in Germany on the national television channels ARD and ZDF, will feature a report about Emotional Cities.

Yesterday I was interviewed by Mats Benesch on the talkshow Eftersnack, together with writer/professor Stefan Einhorn. The show can be watched online at the website of SVT, the public Swedish broadcaster.

Eftersnack, 2007-12-05

I gårdagens Malmö Lund City spekulerade reportern Lena Philipson och fotografen Mårten Svemark i hur Emotional Cities skulle kunna ta sig ut i Malmö:

Samtidigt vill jag passa på och rätta några detaljer i en artikel som skrevs i gårdagens Stockholm City. Det var ju inte första gången Hötorgsskraporna var orangea, utan färgerna har (vilket ni som följer projektet kanske har sett) skiftat väldigt mycket under projektets första fyra veckor. Färgen på skraporna visar medianvärdet för stockholmarna för de senaste 60 minuterna. Förra fredagen var däremot det första hela dygnet då medianvärdet för stockholmarna blev oranget.

Antalet medlemmar hittills på emotionalcities.com är just nu 2 627 stycken. I Stockholm City angavs siffran 2 035, vilket i måndags motsvarade antalet medlemmar enbart i Stockholm.

I intervjun i Stockholm City citeras jag bland annat med dessa ord: “Det är rätt ytliga faktorer som påverkar oss - pengar och väder”. Jag är emellertid övertygad om att vi påverkas minst lika mycket av andra faktorer, som kanske kan anses vara mer genomgripande eller djupgående. Därmed inte sagt att människor inte påverkas av pengar och väder, två till synes ytliga saker som kan göra livet fundamentalt lättare eller svårare.

There has been a tremendous echo in the press for Emotional Cities. Up until now more than 50 articles and reports have been published. I try to keep track on them in the press archive.

Here is some recent and upcoming stuff:

In Svenska Dagbladet the art critic Clemens Poellinger recommended Emotional Cities in the section “Helgvalet”, on November 23rd.

On Saturday Evrim Coşar Bilgin wrote about the project in the Turkish newspaper Bir Gün.

Tomorrow both Stockholm City and Malmö Lund City will feature articles about Emotional Cities.

In the January issue of Artforum Ronald Jones is writing about the project.

I am being interview by Swedish public service radio P1 as a part of the show ”Bildrutan: Finns det lycka i samtidskonsten?”, broadcasted on November 28 and 29.

For some nice photos of the light installation in Stockholm, click here.

Photo: e_digitalis