Cologne, What is Your Mother's Maiden Name?

Cologne, What is your Mother’s maiden Name? was a participatory psychometric taxi tour of the city of Cologne that used GPS, psychometrics and augmented reality to create psychological portraits of the city. The taxi ride was commissioned as part of a series of post-futuristic tours of the city by the nomadic arts organisation Noordkaap in partnership with the Akademie der Künste der Welt . Members of the public were asked play ‘ispy’ and record their experience during their taxi ride as they explored different parts of the city. These written observations were then analysed for their psychometric properties, similar to the techniques used by companies such as Cambridge Analytica to target consumers in online advertising and political campaigning to produce a psycho-geography of the city.

The psychometric taxi tour was produced as part of a series of workshops in collaboration with artists from the Akademie youth program Emma Bieck, Johannes Hoffmann, Bessie Normand, Argia Helen Wehner. A publication documenting the different taxi rides was produced in June 2020 and is available here.