Embodied Simulation

‘Embodied Simulation’ is a multiscreen video and sound installation that aims to provoke and nurture strong connections to the global ecosystems of which we are a part. The work combines artificial intelligence with dance and research from neuroscience to create an immersive, embodied experience, extending the viewer’s bodily perception beyond the skin, and into the environment.
The cognitive phenomenon of embodied simulation (an evolved and refined version of ‘mirror neurons’ theory) refers to the way we feel and embody the movement of others, as if they are happening in our own bodies. The brain of an observer unconsciously mirrors the movements of others, all the way through to the planning and simulating execution of the movements in their own body. This can even be seen in situations such as embodying and ‘feeling’ the movement of fabric blowing in the wind. As Vittorio Gallese writes, “By means of a shared neural state realized in two different bodies that nevertheless obey to the same functional rules, the ‘objectual other’ becomes ‘another self’.”

FRAGILE
Fragile is an audio-visual installation that aims to investigate the relationship between stressful human experience and the transformations that occur in our brain. Recent scientific research has shown that neurons belonging to different areas of our brain are affected by stress. In particular stress causes changes in neuron circuitry, impacting their plasticity, the ability to change through growth and reorganization.
Our process exploits the scientific data provided by the Society for Neuroscience and elaborates this information trying to show the effect of external interactions on our nervous system and ultimately on our relationship with the outside world. In order to achieve this we developed an artwork composed of different digital representations following one another, branching into 5 screen projections.

Journey
JOURNEY is a 4 min. immersive audiovisual experience, telling the story of photons, primary elements of light, from the moment they approach the eye until the brain reconstructs them into perceivable forms. Our journey begins with the formation of photons in blank space, the colored photons approach the eye and we find ourselves in the capillary structure of Iris, the first layer of the eye. Next stop for the light particles is the Lens, which has a more crystalline form. We find ourselves in a refractive and fractalized environment. With an accelerating pace, we move towards a structure of many capillaries, aka optic nerves, gradually becoming thinner and eventually transmitting light particles towards neurons.

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.

Self-Reflected

Dr. Greg Dunn (artist and neuroscientist) and Dr. Brian Edwards (artist and applied physicist) created Self Reflected to elucidate the nature of human consciousness, bridging the connection between the mysterious three pound macroscopic brain and the microscopic behavior of neurons. Self Reflected offers an unprecedented insight of the brain into itself, revealing through a technique called reflective microetching the enormous scope of beautiful and delicately balanced neural choreographies designed to reflect what is occurring in our own minds as we observe this work of art. Self Reflected was created to remind us that the most marvelous machine in the known universe is at the core of our being and is the root of our shared humanity.

brain art
To capture their strikingly chaotic and spontaneous forms, the neurons in Self Reflected are painted using a technique wherein ink is blown around on a canvas using jets of air. The resulting ink splatters naturally form fractal like neural patterns, and although the artist learns to control the general boundaries of the technique it remains at its heart a chaotic, abstract expressionist process.

Silent Barrage

Silent Barrage has a “biological brain” that telematically connects with its “body” in a way that is familiar to humans: the brain processes sense data that it receives, and then brain and body formulate expressions through movement and mark making. But this familiarity is hidden within a sophisticated conceptual and scientific framework that is gradually decoded by the viewer. The brain consists of a neural network of embryonic rat neurons, growing in a Petri dish in a lab in Atlanta, Georgia, which exhibits the uncontrolled activity of nerve tissue that is typical of cultured nerve cells. This neural network is connected to neural interfacing electrodes that write to and read from the neurons. The thirty-six robotic pole-shaped objects of the body, meanwhile, live in whatever exhibition space is their temporary home. They have sensors that detect the presence of viewers who come in. It is from this environment that data is transmitted over the Internet, to be read by the electrodes and thus to stimulate, train or calm parts of the brain, depending on which area of the neuronal net has been addressed.

ciclotrama
the artworks have gone through 17 different iterations since 2010, each involving some form of ropes that seem to branch through the air and splay onto surfaces like fractals or a network of neurons.

purkinje neuron from the human cerebellum
Ramón y Cajal’s theory described how information flowed through the brain. Neurons were individual units that talked to one another directionally, sending information from long appendages called axons to branchlike dendrites, over the gaps between them.
He couldn’t see these gaps in his microscope, but he called them synapses, and said that if we think, learn and form memories in the brain then that itty-bitty space was most likely the location where we do it. This challenged the belief at the time that information diffused in all directions over a meshwork of neurons.

روكسي باين
רוקסי פיין
ロキシー·パイネ
록시 페인
inversion
Paine calls the series “Dendroids,” a name that combines dendron, Greek for “tree”, and “oid,” a suffix meaning “form.” But the title is more nuanced. Other words derived from dendron refer to branching systems, and in zoology “oid” denotes a creature belonging to a higher level of taxonomy. So “Dendroids” aren’t just tree forms, but allusions to branching structures from neurons to rivers to genealogical charts. And a viewer may be moved to consider the congruencies among such disparate but related systems.