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еРИК КРИКОРЦ
ERiK KRiKORtZ
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Emotional Cities
Erik Krikortz creates new tools for communication and
vivid spaces for dialogue. His projects are interventions
in public space that query quotidian life and explore its
potentials. The viewer is not only a receiver, but also a
co-creator. Without an engaged audience actively taking
part, there would be no artwork.
Krikortz interprets a masculine, monumental tradition
in public art, but transforms it into an emotional and social
project. His work is characterized by interactivity and
a genuine interest in people and society. He employs
modern technology to reach out and make the art experience
accessible for a broad public. Krikortz also examines the
social functions of new media and experiments with inter-
faces. The concepts often seem simple at first sight, but
appear more complex at a close-up. A good example of this
is the light installation Colour by Numbers (2006–2010),
where people are invited to colour tall buildings with light
—by calling a number and using the touch-tone function
on their mobile phones. Also in Demonstration Aesthetics
(2010), produced at the Van Abbemuseum, where Krikortz
investigates the function and form of the demonstration in
the digital age, a collaborative effort generated the artwork.
Together with ten young artists in Eindhoven, Krikortz
created demonstration leftovers that subtly infiltrated
public space.
Emotional Cities creates a multilayered visual reflection
of the emotional pulse of Belgrade. The project combines a
website with a light installation in public space. People in
Belgrade are invited to grade their current emotional state
on a coloured seven-level scale at the website. Through sta-
tistical analyses the emotions of all participating Belgraders
will blend together. A median value is continuously calcu-
lated, and the collective emotions of Belgrade are projected
on Palace Albania. Hence you will know the emotional
temperature of the city as you walk in the streets, or even
when you approach the city by air. All values are also
displayed on the website, and not only for Belgrade but
for hundreds of cities worldwide. Emotional Cities has
previously been carried out in Stockholm and Seoul.
www.emotionalcities.com
Pages 106–107 and 110–111:
Emotional Cities, 2007–2010
Net art, light installation
in stockholm, 2007–2009
Photo: Erik krikortz
Erik Krikortz, Moderna Museet
“The day of individual happiness has passed” would be the
perfect catchphrase for Erik Krikortz’s attempt to measure
collective happiness, had it been he who said it, rather than
Adolf Hitler. Happiness has long been a subject for deep
thinkers and dark rulers. Aristotle called it a virtue; Hitler,
something to be sacrificed for the greater good. In his
ongoing interactive project, “Emotional Cities”, Krikortz
invites his audience to log on to www.emotionalcities.com
and register their day-to-day emotional states using a scale
of seven faces, from frowning to smiley, each colored to
represent a point on the spectrum from violet (sad) to red
(happy). In the first two weeks of Krikortz’s recent exhibition
at Moderna Museet, more than twenty thousand people
clicked on the face that best summed up their emotional
grade, and that number continues to grow. Anyone can take
part, but the collective input of Stockholm-based respondents
becomes a part of the project’s next phase: Their self-evaluations,
averaged every second into one representative color,
are currently still lighting up the facades of the five office
buildings around Hötorget square, the closest thing to sky-
scrapers in central Stockholm. Checking out the “Emotional
Cities” webcam one snowy evening, I saw the office buil-
dings awash in yellow; Stockholmers were on the whole
mildly happy.
Krikortz’s scale might seem little more than pop psycho-
logy, too crude a means for creditably measuring the subtle
shades of human emotion; but academic constructs such as
the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), created by researchers
at Stanford University, and other similar instruments, use
as few as four questions to quantify emotional well-being.
But, of course, a measure of happiness is the measure of
discontent, and if nothing else, “Emotional Cities” is capti-
vating in its attempt to visualize, on a mass scale, a Swedish
state of mind. In the country where consensus is king, Stock-
holmers can look up at the Hötorget buildings to see if they
are in emotional harmony with their fellow urbanities.
Erik krikortz was born 1975 in sweden, where he lives and works. krikortz works with installations, interventions and performances—significantly
with projects in the public space, often including web platforms and involving the participation of the
public. he explores issues of democracy and public spaces. he pursues an established tradition in the art of drawing attention
to the shortcomings and merits of the city, with the use of new technology and its interactive potential.
Swedes are reputed to be a gloomy bunch, prone to suicide
and depression; Krikortz’s random sampling suggests
otherwise, and statistics back him up. Sweden’s suicide rate
is not particularly high, and according to the Satisfaction
with Life Index (created by social psychologists at the
University of Leicester), its citizens rank seventh in the
world in happiness. Knowing this prompts us to dissect
myths about nationalities. Where did that yarn about
suicidal Swedes come from? It seems to have taken hold
after a 1960 speech by Dwight Eisenhower in which he
alleged that “sin, nudity, drunkenness, and suicide” were
the direct result of welfare-state excess in Sweden. It was
the rumor heard ’round the world.
At the Moderna Museet, Krikortz’s project is presented
as a sort of advertisement for itself, with wall paintings
featuring an urban skyline silhouette, the words HUR MÅR
DU IDAG? (“How are you today?”), the seven colored emoticons,
and the URL of the website; Internet terminals display
the website, and a forty-two-inch plasma screen shows the
current color of the light projection at the Hötorget skyscrapers.
“Advertising”, Krikortz writes, “dominates the
public space, points at our shortcomings, and tells us what
we need in order to feel good. Our economy is an ’economy
of deficiency’ based entirely on dissatisfaction.” With color-
coded emotions flashed across the Hötorget buildings at
sundown, Krikortz lets real—albeit averaged-out—emotion
speak out over the rhetoric of deficiency. Happiness remains
a virtue, just as Aristotle said. “Emotional Cities”, so
Krikortz claims, provides “a psychological diagnosis
of society.” While this is an overstatement—it’s more like
taking society’s emotional temperature—Krikortz’s heart
is in the right place.
© Artforum, January 2008, “Review: Erik Krikortz,
Moderna Museet,” by Ronald Jones
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