Kissing Data Symphony
Intimacy Data Symphony is a poetic ritual for intimate experience of Kissing and Caressing each other faces, multi-sensory and socially shared in public space of merging realities. In live experiments with Multi-Brain BCI E.E.G. head-sets, visitors are invited as Kissers (or Caressers) and Spectators. Brain activity of people kissing and caressing is measured and visualized in streaming E.E.G. data, real-time circling around them in a floor projection. Simultaneously, the Spectators brain waves are measured, their neurons mirroring activity of intimate kissing and caressing movements, resonating in their imagination. The Spectators brain activity data are interwoven in the data-visualization. Brain activity of all participants, mirroring each others emotional expressions and movements, in interpersonal and aesthetic ways, co-create an immersive visual, Reflexive Datascape.

Random String of Emotions

Emotion recognition software analyzes our emotions by deconstructing our facial expressions into temporal segments that produce the expression, called Action Units (AU; developed by Paul Ekman), and breaking them down into percentages of six basic emotions, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, and disgusted. In this video the artist uses this decoding system to turn the process around. Here – instead of detecting AUs – a computer is used to generate a random string of AUs. In this way complex and perhaps even nonexisting emotional expressions will be discovered. These randomly formed expressions, played in random order, are then analyzed again by professional emotion recognition software.

Synesthesia Machine
“Synesthesia Machine” is an artificial intelligence with synesthesia, it will emitting corresponding unique scents while perceiving human facial expressions. Through the facial expression recognition algorithm, it can analyze the facial expressions of the audience and output the values ​​of different emotions. At the same time, based on these emotional values, the installation is driven to extract different proportions of scent liquid and atomized and mixed to convert the audience’s facial expression into a unique smell.

The willful marionette
the willful marionette (2014) was created by artists Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault during a residency with the University of North Carolina Charlotte, working with the College of Computing and Informatics as well as the College of Art and Architecture. The marionette is 3d printed from the scanned image of a human figure and responds engagingly in real time to spontaneous human gestures by reading a viewer’s movements and expressions. Its strings are manipulated by motors and software and there are two depth sensors that read and analyze the behaviors and gestures of participants. The puppet’s subsequent actions are designed to elicit further responses, creating an exchange focusing on the frailty and insecurities of the human participant and raising issues of contemporary relevance. The intention of the project was not to create so much a perfectly functioning robot but rather to imbue an obviously mechanically actuated marionette with the ability to solicit a physical and emotional dialog with a viewer.

BELIEF SYSTEMS
Facial micro expressions last less than a second and are almost impossible to control. They are hard wired to the emotional activity in the brain which can be easily captured using specially developed technological devices. Free will is now in question as the science exposes decision-making as an emotional process rather than a rational one. This ability to read emotions technologically result in a society obsessed with their emotional reactions. Emotions, convictions and beliefs which usually remain hidden, now become a public matter. “Belief systems” is a video scenario about a society that responds to the challenges of modern neuroscience by embracing these technological possibilities to read, evaluate and alter peoples behaviours and emotions.