Affinity
Affinity is an immersive interactive light and sound installation inspired by the human brain. Each light globe represented a memory, as people approached Affinity different memories could be heard. When people touched the memory a light would trigger, the longer they touched the further their light would travel throughout the sculpture. Affinity features 62 different colour combinations and 112 points of interaction.

PANGOLIN DRESS

The Pangolin Scales Project demonstrates a 1.024 channel BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) that is able to extract information from the human brain with an unprecedented resolution. The extracted information is used to control the Pangolin Scale Dress interactively into 64 outputs.The dress is also inspired by the pangolin, cute, harmless animals sometimes known as scaly anteaters. They have large, protective keratin scales covering their skin (they are the only known mammals with this feature) and live in hollow trees or burrows.As such, Pangolins and considered an endangered species and some have theorized that the recent coronavirus may have emerged from the consumption of pangolin meat.Wipprecht’s main challenge in the project’s development was to not overload the dress with additional weight. She teamed up 3D printing experts Shapeways and Igor Knezevic in order to create an ‘exo-skeleton’ like dress-frame (3mm) that was light enough to be worn but sturdy enough to hold all the mechanics in place

after grant wood
“I am interested in the link between art and technology, how the eyes prioritize, and reality as a subjective experience vs. an absolute truth. As a visual artist, I cannot think of a topic more stimulating and yet so basic, than the act of seeing–how the human brain makes sense of the visual world.” Devorah Sperber

Upgrading the Human Brain

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.

recognition
RECOGNITION

Recognition, winner of IK Prize 2016 for digital innovation, is an artificial intelligence program that compares up-to-the-minute photojournalism with British art from the Tate collection. Over three months from 2 September to 27 November, Recognition will create an ever-expanding virtual gallery: a time capsule of the world represented in diverse types of images, past and present.A display at Tate Britain accompanies the online project offering visitors the chance to interrupt the machine’s selection process. The results of this experiment – to see if an artificial intelligence can learn from the many personal responses humans have when looking at images – will be presented on this site at the end of the project.Recognition is a project by Fabrica for Tate; in partnership with Microsoft, content provider Reuters, artificial intelligence algorithm by Jolibrain.

Computer Visions 2
After more decades of trying to construct an apparatus that can think, we may be finally witnessing the fruits of those efforts: machines that know. That is to say, not only machines that can measure and look up information, but ones that seem to have a qualitative understanding of the world. A neural network trained on faces does not only know what a human face looks like, it has a sense of what a face is. Although the algorithms that produce such para-neuronal formations are relatively simple, we do not fully understand how they work. A variety of research labs have also been successfully training such nets on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of living brains, enabling them to effectively extract images, concepts, thoughts from a person’s mind. This is where the inflection likely happens, as a double one: a technology whose workings are not well understood, qualitatively analyzing an equally unclear natural formation with a degree of success. Andreas N. Fischer’s work Computer Visions II seems to be waiting just beyond this cusp, where two kinds of knowing beings meet in a psychotherapeutic session of sorts[…]

Eunoia II
It is an interactive performance and installation that attempts to display invisible human emotion and physiological changes into auditory representations. The work uses a commercial brainwave sensor to visualize and musicalize biological signals as art. The real-time detected brain data was used as a means to self-monitor and to control. The installation is comprised of 48 speakers and aluminum dishes, each containing a pool of water. The layout of “Eunoia (Vr.2)” was inspired by an Asian Buddhist symbol meaning ‘balance.’ The motif of number 48 comes from Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ (Chapter III), classifying 48 human emotions into three categories – desire, pleasure, and pain. In this performance, water becomes a mirror of the artist’s internal state. It aims to physically manifest the artist’s current states as ripples in pools of water.

Abysmal
Abysmal means bottomless; resembling an abyss in depth; unfathomable. Perception is a procedure of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. Perception presumes sensing. In people, perception is aided by sensory organs. In the area of AI, perception mechanism puts the data acquired by the sensors together in a meaningful manner. Machine perception is the capability of a computer system to interpret data in a manner that is similar to the way humans use their senses to relate to the world around them. Inspired by the brain, deep neural networks (DNN) are thought to learn abstract representations through their hierarchical architecture. The work mostly shows the ‘hidden’ transformations happening in a network: summing and multiplying things, adding some non-linearities, creating common basic structures, patterns inside data. It creates highly non-linear functions that map ‘un-knowledge’ to ‘knowledge’.

CellF
“CellF is the world’s first neural synthesiser. Its “brain” is made of biological neural networks that grow in a Petri dish and controls in real time it’s “body” that is made of an array of analogue modular synthesizers that work in synergy with it and play with human musicians. It is a completely autonomous instrument that consists of a neural network that is bio-engineered from my own cells that control a custom-built synthesizer. There is no programming or computers involved, only biological matter and analogue circuits; a ‘wet-analogue’ instrument.”Guy Ben-Ary

Maurice Benayoun and Tobias Klein
Brain Factory Prototype 2
Brain Factory is an installation that allows the audience to give a shape to human abstractions through Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI), and then to convert the resulting form into a physical object. The work examines the human specificity through abstract constructs such as LOVE, FREEDOM, and DESIRE. The project articulates the relationship between thought and matter, concept and object, humans and machine. Brain Factory uses Electroencephalography (EEG) data captured by BCI. As a brain activity is unique, we developed a novel calibration process of the individual data readings and associated emotional responses within a framework of binary outcomes. This is key for a real-time feedback – a biofeedback – between the virtual generative processes and the brain’s associated response.

skalar

SKALAR is a large-scale art installation that explores the complex impact of light and sound on human perception. Light artist Christopher Bauder and musician Kangding Ray give an audio-visual narration of radiant light vector drawings and multi-dimensional sound inside the pitch-dark industrial space of Kraftwerk Berlin. By combining a vast array of kinetic mirrors, perfectly synchronized moving lights and a sophisticated multi-channel sound system, SKALAR reflects on the fundamental nature and essence of basic human emotions.

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.

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.

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.

Turning Point
Isabel Nolan’s artwork utilizes textiles, steel rods, and primary colored paint to approach questions of anxiety, current events, and the human condition. Her work has a particularly erudite quality, with materials teased and propped to mimic symbolism and images in literature, historical texts, science, and art. Nolan’s work has been exhibited throughout her native Ireland and wider Europe, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Musée d’art modern de Saint Etienne. With her first solo exhibition in the United States fast approaching, artnet News caught up with the scholarly artist to hear about her early diagrams of brains and ideas she is currently entertaining for her next body of work.

塔瓦雷斯斯特拉坎
ТАВАРЕС СТРАЧАН
Invisible Astronaut
“This neon and glass sculpture represents the cardiovascular system of astronaut Sally Ride shortly after her return to earth. The human body adapts to periods of prolonged weightlessness. When gravity suddenly returns, the blood pools in the lower extremities, and blood pressure drops. This condition is known as orthostatic intolerance. Hanging upside down can cause blood to pool around the heart, a potentially lethal condition. The awkward position shown above helps blood reach the brain without causing pooling around the heart.”