Atmospheric intensities: Skin conductance and the collective sensing body

This chapter explores the creative and empirical potentials of skin conductance sensors for mapping the play of afective intensities across the environment. We focus on the use of wearable Electodermal activity (EDA) sensors in participatory art and social inquiry with young people. We discuss creative experiments that brought young people together with artists and researchers to collectively explore their local environments through alternative practices of sensing, thinking, and making. In breaking away from clinical and pathologizing models which interpret electrical skin activity as a form of individual stimulus-response, our work reclaims EDA data as an atmospheric function of the environmental and the atmospheric. Specifically, our experiments aim to study the collective nature of becoming achieved through works of immersive art and media, in which multiple agents together achieve a shared but heterogeneous understanding of an event . Rather than use the devices for identifying individual affect, we design experiments in which EDA signals from multiple bodies are fused and fed back into the environment. We assemble the concept of atmospheric intensity to describe afectively charged environments in which bodies and technologies enter into complex relations of sensory intermixing and dispersal.