From Map to Score: Turning Affective Data into Cartographies of Play

Our colorcodes don’t end on the photographs. They transform into a score — turning affective data into instructions for performance. Each mapped location becomes a minute of play, where colors, numbers, words, and images fuse into action.

Protocol-cards in Scope BLN studio

Within the Living Atlas, the affective colorcodes do not remain fixed marks on a photograph; they evolve into instructions for a performance play. Each of the forty mapped locations generates six cards: painted colorcodes inscribed with a number they become a unit of time, measured in minutes, echoing the sequence of the walk. To the left of each code, a formula inspired by John Zorn’s Cobra and Xu Feng injects the logic of improvisation. To the right, two words—extracted from the distorted map—tie the card back to its site, though always obliquely, through resonance rather than fact.

From there, the process unfolds through collage. Magazines collected during our drifts through the city are mined for images that gravitate toward these words. Each collage becomes a provisional surface of thought: fragments reassembled into new constellations. On top of this surface, we inscribe a performative instruction. The card thus crystallizes into a hybrid object: part map, part score, part memory.

Activated in play, these cards extend the Living Atlas beyond representation into performance. They transform walking into choreography, mapping into enactment, and observation into shared experience. All cards combined make the Living Atlas, an atlas that does not describe territory but proposes ways of inhabiting it, collectively.