— Rainer Marie Rilke, Duino Elegies

I am riding my bike south on Nevins Street, a neglected side street in Brooklyn lined with squat, surly industrial buildings used for glass manufacturing and sanitation and trucking. Trash fills the gutter and piles up like snowdrifts in the nooks between buildings. Small bits of glass glint up from cracks and potholes in the road. I make an illegal right-hand turn onto Union Street and after a few hundred feet I finally see the blue-green shimmer of my destination: the canal.

There is no river-walk or manicured bike path along the 1.5-mile gash of noxious water known as the Gowanus Canal. It must be viewed in snatches from side streets or from the short, glorious spans of one of its brightly painted bridges. The Union Street Bridge on which I now stand is a cheerful aqua structure that makes the brackish water below look even murkier.

I have always loved the banks of rivers and the shores of beaches, the slim spaces between the known world of land and the mysteries below the water’s surface. From the bridge I can glimpse the silt-covered skeletons of grocery carts and broken bicycles on the canal bed. An unfurled condom, like a small translucent trout, floats lazily near a wooden pylon. Weeds jut from cracks and crannies in the concrete walls on either side of the water; a large, gnarled oak tree looms precariously between bridge and retaining wall. This is one of the most hauntingly beautiful locations in New York.

Built in the mid 1800’s, the disintegrating Gowanus Canal is now being reclaimed by the unknown. Searching the waterway’s intermittent shores, I feel like I have stumbled upon Gothic ruins, a crumbling human conceit. The desolation here breeds an atmosphere of mystery and magic.

Unlike the rest of the city, it is a place without set purpose. Free of programming, the Gowanus, this interstitial, obsolete place, offers solitude and a landscape for reflection. I pick up my bike and continue west then south, seeking a vantage closer to the water’s edge and thinking about the industrial wasteland before me. If design is intended, as many people believe, to reduce friction in one’s life then does it also reduce moments of conscious thought? It is strangely liberating to be in a place so non-designed, a place where I am confronted with the poignant friction of trash and waste and ruin, the destruction of man made manifest.

Several streets dead-end at the canal with barbed wire and chain link fences. At Second Street, the fence is absent and someone has cleared the waste to make a boat slip. I leave my bike and venture onto the rough, contoured concrete slab that extends jagged over a shore of rocks and railroad ties. Across the water, a tangle of leafless trees frames an abandoned building that conjures images of Mr. Rochester’s decaying mansion in Jane Eyre. I envision it at night with flames licking at the windows and a mad wife dancing across its roof.

I am completely alone. It feels oddly luxurious, even in this landscape, to be alone in public in New York City. I feel like I can pretend. Unselfconsciously. Like I did as a child in the woods behind my parents’ house. I have the urge to build a fort and look for trolls.

Finding a dearth of fort-building materials I retrieve my bicycle and venture south on Smith Street, moving parallel to the looming steel girders of an elevated railway. I cross onto 9th Street and pause midway on the bridge, steel above, water below. Patches of oil float lazily down the canal towards Gowanus Bay. There are more people here and a steady flow of cars makes its way across the bridge but I look for the troll anyway.

This morning I read that Whole Foods plans to build a grocery store on the canal. The building will have a parking lot and a greenhouse on the roof — consolation for guilty eco-urbanites.

I fear that development will eventually transform the waterway into a disingenuous Disneyland version of itself — Venice meets The Highline. The nooks and crannies would become planters and esplanades. Local weeds would be domesticated into “native plantings.” There would be no gaps, no places of mystery or magic. Eventually, any reminders of the damage wreaked by consumer manufacturing will be camouflaged with a veil of green design. The unknown will be tamed, turned into something non-threatening and ultimately non-beautiful.

Originally published on December 30, 2010

Emotion-tracking algorithms give technology the ability to understand our inner lives.

Joe’s having a bad morning; he wakes up late, stubs his toe, and burns his tongue while rushing to finish his coffee. He heads out the door frustrated and anxious. But after hopping into his car, Joe’s day begins to turn around. His favorite song pumps through the speakers, the air temperature automatically lowers, and the dashboard reminds him not to worry — it’s found a route that will get him to work on time.

This is just one subtle scenario illustrating the future of technological interaction: emotional-responsiveness. Not long from now, our devices and environments will understand how we’re feeling and react in powerful ways. Already, emotion-tracking company Affectiva has developed sophisticated algorithms to analyze facial expressions in order to identify and log human emotion. But this is only the infancy of emotion-enabled technology. Soon, it will transform the ways we live and work, permeating every facet of our digital lives.

At first, the technology might be as simple as an app prompting you to take a picture when sharing a laugh with friends. We’ll use smart devices to track our emotions as closely as Fitbit users track their steps, examining graphs of our emotional timelines to get granular insight into what really makes us happy. A user might notice that coffee-fueled mornings leave them feeling blue in the afternoons and decide to cut back on the caffeine. Or that waking up later has the surprising effect of raising their base mood for the rest of the day.

It might mean clothing that alters its shape and color in order to broadcast your mood to others. Or a smartphone application that sends you adorable puppy videos until your anxiety level falls within a healthier range. It could mean a streaming music service that tailors its tunes to how you’re feeling or want to feel, a dating site that matches couples based on compatible emotion profiles, an e-reader that tracks your emotional response alongside your page count, showing you how it compares to the thrills and yawns of others readers.

As more data is compiled and incorporated, the venues for emotion-reading technology will grow. Beyond facial expression, emotions will be measured through heart rate, skin conductivity, brain chemistry, behavioral patterns, and more. Every device, application, and environment will become an input for emotion and an output for emotional responsiveness. Every kind of experience will be enriched with what Affectiva calls the “emotion data layer.”

Restaurant and movie reviews will be accompanied by emotion graphs showing the average rise and fall of feelings throughout the dining experience. The facades of theaters and concert halls will light up with vibrant visualizations of the real-time emotion levels of the audiences within. Your corner cafe will be able to know immediately if you aren’t happy with your latte and send you a notification offering the next one on the house. Cars won’t let people drive when they’re overly upset. Doctors will receive notifications when a depressive patient’s emotional state crosses a worrying threshold.

The entire movement will be powered by what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has referred to as “ambient intelligence.” That is, the automated ability of computers to convert massive amounts of data into responses that feed back into human culture. Incorporating emotion information into Big Data will provide unprecedented insight into emotions all over the world. Researchers will have a field day correlating the emotional reactions of sets of individuals with international events, weather patterns, geography, and more.

Emotional expression is the first form of human communication. It’s a near instant way of telegraphing meaning to another person. Think of an infant’s cries or the instant power of a seductive smile. We’ve evolved to slightly mirror the emotions of the people around us and this mirroring creates empathy. Emotions move from person to person like a telephone message transmitted along the wires.

Our first interfaces with computers were through keyboards and punch cards. Now we’re using voice recognition and gesture interfaces that can better respond to the user’s needs and wants. The real revolutionary potential that emotionally responsive technology holds is the ability to instantly know how we feel and then deliver on it. Without typing, voice-to-text, clicks, taps, or gestures.

Emotional expression is one of the most powerful ways we communicate with each other. Soon it will be the most powerful way we communicate with the world around us.

Originally published at realart.com/

The remarkably personal metrics of Girolamo Cardano, a true Renaissance man.

Had the Up bracelet existed in the 16th century, Girolamo Cardano would have worn one. The Italian physician was obsessed with recording his personal metrics centuries before fitness apps, Feltron Reports, and the growing hubbub over the quantified self.

A mathematician, doctor, astrologer, pro gambler, and one of the founders of the field of probability, Cardano wrote more than 200 works on medicine, philosophy, mathematics, and religion over his lifetime. But it is his autobiography, written in 1575 that exposes Cardano as the proto-shaman of the tribe of personal metrics. Better than most, he understood the power of personal data:

“I made it a practice that I should take the most careful account of my time. As I rode or ate or conversed, or as I lay in bed sleepless… I had in mind that common adage: “Multa modica faciunt unum satis.” That is, the many small things soon make one of size!”

Cardano was arguably the first person to write about himself in the spirit of scientific exploration, enumerating everything from his chief ailments (ten) to his typical modes of exercise (fifteen) to the number of his remaining teeth (fourteen good ones and one “which is rather weak”). He recorded such intimate facts as his erectile dysfunction — “from my twenty-first to my thirty-first year I was unable to lie with women” — and his daily urine discharge, which ranged from 60 to 100oz.

Like many of today’s self-quantifiers, Cardano meticulously logged his sleeping habits and his diet. Searching for patterns in this data like an astrologer parsing the stars, he identified an annual period of insomnia always lasting about eight consecutive nights:

“This I am wont to cure by abstaining from certain kinds of food, especially heavy food, but I do not diminish the quantity. This insomnia has never missed a year.”

He believed that such intuitions and deductions were generated in part by a mystical talent for prediction. It was this use of pattern recognition and inference that lead Cardano to become one of the most preeminent physicians of his time. He famously recognized that the asthmatic symptoms of the Archbishop of St. Andrews were caused by the latter’s luxurious feather pillows. With the removal of his down cushions, the Archbishop recovered and Cardano achieved the first recorded instance of a cured allergy.

Today, we would attribute Cardano’s mathematic reasoning, gambling abilities, diagnostic skill, and personal insight to a talent for deduction. But Cardano himself called this flair for intuitive reasoning Splendor, and imbued these abilities with an almost mystical significance. He read people’s horoscopes and claimed to have made astonishingly accurate predictions about the outcomes of foreign battles. Naturally, he’d only make such predictions after inquiring into the situation in question and amassing all of the relevant data:

“I would not have anyone think that these things are far-fetched or of a demon, or of astrology, but they are based on Aristotle’s idea of prophecy. True divination, says he, is an endowment of the prudent and the wise only.”

Cardano lived between two worlds of thought, one foot in the sphere of superstition and intuition and the other foot flat on the ground of science and reasoning. Yet his penchant for amassing personal information and using it to further understanding is a distinctly modern compulsion, one that is only today coming to full fruition. Whether we’re computing our steps or our urine, modern measurers would do well to keep prudence and wisdom in mind.

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