What color would Cleveland be? Emotional Cities

What if the city could physically represent the emotion of its inhabitants?

What color do you think we would be?

Could different areas have a different color?

An artist named Erik Krikortz has launched a website where one can, among other things, vote on how they are feeling that particular day. Accumulated votes are tabulated and then represented by being projected as a color wash upon a series of buildings in Stockholm.

Visitors may also post in a diary about how they are feeling however the entries are not visible to any other user. While currently only in Stockholm Krikortz plans for more installations in more cities, hopefully in public spaces, that can be run concurrently with scientific studies in order to corroborate the relationship between media/expression and mood.

The cynic in me figures the current governmental body would jump on this as a way to demonstrate the 'terror alert level' or some other relatively useless information (to the general public that is. Really, if the terror alert is 'high' what are you going to do about it besides be scared and eventually indifferent?) however the link between color theory and design has always intrigued me as a viable communication tool and I hope that these installations and studies move forward.

I would be intrigued to discover if specific cultures have a different emotional responses to the different colors of the color scale and if that would affect voting preferences, or how if the city is portrayed as 'happy' or 'depressed' through a major lighting installation the affect upon those that live/work in the area. Would they notice? Could this be used to test cognitive dissonance and self-perception theory on a large urban scale? Could we alter our own perception of where we lived based upon some pretty lights?

Stranger things have happened.