Mapping the City Through Affective Data

When we walk the city, we’re not just following streets—we’re tracing its rhythms, interactions, and invisible currents. Our colorcode transforms these experiences into affective data, revealing patterns, atmospheres, and social dynamics that remain invisible on conventional maps. Rather than measuring the city objectively, the colorcode translates perception and experience into a visual language, offering new ways to read urban life.

Mapping colorcodes in the streets Berlin, 2025, ink on paper

We situate this practice within the history of mapping. In the seventeenth-century Low Countries, cartographers triangulated between church towers to create geometrically precise networks, a top-down tool for control and navigation. Today, the city is far more complex: gentrification, digital infrastructures, shifting social identities, and invisible flows of capital defy conventional mapping. Our colorcode inverts this logic, charting affective, perceptual, and social currents along forty points, materializing presence and challenging top-down assumptions.

We work in dialogue with Dutch artistic traditions. Classical landscape painters, like Van Ruysdael, guided the viewer’s eye; Impressionists, like Van Gogh, went into the field, responding to light, color, and atmosphere; Conceptual photographers, like Jan Dibbets, arranged and photographed interventions to reveal perception as constructed and mediated. We build upon these lineages, but the field today is the city itself. With the colorcode, we capture how the city feels, how people interact, and how social, cultural, and economic forces ripple through space—turning observation into both art and research.

Through this approach, maps become living, interpretive tools rather than instruments of control. We de-modernize mapping: taking a technique invented for domination and precision and transforming it into a system for reflection, engagement, and shared perception. The colorcode allows viewers to navigate not only space, but also experience, emotion, and relational dynamics, revealing urban life as a continuously unfolding, affective landscape.

Mapping colorcodes in the streets Berlin