BrainMattersMUSES — a brain–machine interface exhibition
Six works in which a visitor's brainwaves become sound, image, poetry, drawing — and a map of a city's feelings.
I — The workConcept
BrainMatters is a creative platform for works that use brain–computer interfaces. For its first exhibition, MUSES, multidisciplinary teams of artists, designers, musicians, engineers and programmers made creative and investigative use of EEG headsets. Where art usually asks an audience to reflect its thoughts while looking, here thoughts, feelings and brainwaves are reflected physically, in real time, inside the work itself.
The six muses: BrainFeedBack, an audiovisual world that responds to frequency bands of the brain; MindWave Pool, which lets EEG signals shape a magnetic-fluid pool; MusiWave, a soundtrack steered by attention and meditation; MindYourPoem, computer-generated poems drawn from a reader's state of mind; Neurotic Draw-Bot, a robot that draws your portrait and renders your distraction in its lines; and Real Life EEG, a first attempt at emotional city-mapping along a walk through South Tel Aviv.
II — DocumentationPlates
III — The storyMaking & meaning
BrainMatters set out to reconnect fields that have drifted apart: technology and art, spirit and matter, science and creation. Consumer EEG headsets had just become affordable, and we wanted them in the hands of artists, poets and musicians.
Our role was as mentors and curators: nine multidisciplinary teams developed projects, and we pushed each one to make the invisible activity of the mind tangible — as a wave in a pool, a line in a drawing, a stanza.
The most quietly radical piece, Real Life EEG, recorded four people walking from the Rothschild boulevard, through a parking lot and a busy junction, past a street of brothels, into Neve Sha'anan — a street home mostly to African migrants — and asked what the city feels like from inside its inhabitants.