We did it! What a thrill! Dual Brains went live last Friday at Art-a-Hack 2016 Final Presentations held at Thoughtworks in New York City. Our real-time brain data-driven performance came together as we had hoped, given the relatively short time frame of four weeks to conceptualize, discuss, design, test and realize our project.
The event was well attended and buzzing with energy. Dual Brains was the first performance after introductions by Art-a-Hack founders Ellen Pearlman and Andy McWilliams.
See some examples of other presentations here.
Earlier that day, we were busily preparing. Below is us assembling the custom EEG headgear designed by Aaron Trocola for this project, as well as finalizing live data visualizations by artists Pat Shiu and Gal Nissim. Programmer Gabe Ibagon integrated all this with OpenBCI right up until the moment we went live in 3, 2, 1…and…it worked!
We all let out a collective WHEW and beamed smiles at each other afterwards. The three-minute performance was accompanied by pre-recorded sound created by Aaron based on our EEG and ECG data from a previous live data session. We were so pleased that the abstract, low frequency sounds along with recognizable heartbeats which naturally synchronized over time, set an intimate tone to the performance. Dual Brains is, after all, about investigating human neural interaction through correlating brain and heart data. It is also an artistic expression of humans as fundamentally empathic social beings who help one another. Learn more…
Where to next? I hope to continue developing this project. We certainly had other ideas and elements about neuro-social interaction we wanted to explore and integrate, had time permitted. It was thought-provoking to brainstorm and synthesize ideas, as well as great fun to try implementing them. So many directions we can take this art and science-based investigation!
And speaking of people who help each other, this Art-a-Hack project has been steadfast teamwork! Aaron, Gabe, Pat, Gal, and I were all smiles when we realized we had succeeded in making Dual Brains live performance happen. From concept to reality, what a great experience!
Thank you, Art-a-Hack and OpenBCI for this opportunity. Thanks also to Thoughtworks, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and Volumetric Society.
