Happy Place: The Emotional Life of Cities

Seed Grant Semester Awarded
Spring
Seed Grant Award Year
2013

This project brings together a social psychologist, a cultural geographer, and two artists to interrogate happiness, its forms, meanings, and spatiality by using the methods of affect theory and data-driven art.

Using happiness as a cipher to explore discontinuities and intersections between different disciplinary approaches, Profs. Harp, Moon, Grzanka, and McHugh will seek an understanding of how data-driven art can illuminate, complicate, and embody ideas about affect and how they influence what can be called the emotional cartographies of cities, the distribution of affect across urban spaces.

Principal Investigator(s)
Hilary Harp, Associate Professor, School of Art
Barry Moon, Associate Professor, School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies
Patrick Grzanka, Honors Faculty Fellow, Barrett, the Honors College
Kevin McHugh, Associate Professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning