BRAINSTORMING
OCTOPUS BRAIN STORMING:
EMPATHY
Collaborative live experiment & performance by Victoria Vesna and Mark Cohen.
Premiere Invitation Only event: October 7th, 12:00 – 1:30pm
Luskin Conference Center Grand Opening
OCTOPUS BRAIN STORMING: Empathy performance is a unique amalgam of audience
participation and viewing, neuroscience and emotions investigation, and artistic expression. The
artist and scientist join forces to create a unique experience of live experiment as a performance
engaging the public directly.
The project premiered in conceptual form at the Beall gallery of Art & Technology and then was
performed as a preliminary public experiment at the SONOS studios in 2015. This upcoming
performance at the Luskin center will be a premiere of a fully functional EEG version with a
focus on sharing emotions and empathy.
The EEG sensor array will be embedded into color lit octopus crowns, giving the participants
ceremonial presence while at the same time evoking the biological world of an octopus
symbolizing embodied intelligence. The audience will have an opportunity to witness the power
of non-verbal communication, sound and color in relation to our shared brain waves – in real
time!
OCTOPUS BRAIN STORMING will utilize signal energy spanning the range from 8 to 12 Hz,
the so-called “alpha” band. Following research on steady-state evoked EEG potentials
performed in Dr. Cohen's lab, it is anticipated that the participants will be able to learn to shift
the base frequencies of their own alpha rhythm to match the average.
For this iteration they were joined by Art Sci collective members Daniel Belquer
(programming), Dan Wilkinson (data analytics), Cameron Rodriguez (technical advice)
and media artists Mick Lorusso, Dawn Faelnar, Hsin Yu.
Victoria Vesna and Mark Cohen did an initial test of the concept at the Sonos studios
gallery and this performance was enthusiastically accepted by the public and received a
short write-up in Insomniac, a music review magazine, “Live experiment Explores How
Brainwaves React to Music and Color”.
Specially commissioned audio recordings, made by jazz artist, Kenton Chen, contain eight
separate overlapping vocal recordings that are part of a single piece, like eight separate
instruments in an octet. The brainwave synchronies control the mix of these audio tracks. Each
of the audio tracks emanates from a different location in the room, giving increased spatial
depth to the experience.
Dr. Victoria Vesna is Professor in the department of Design Media Arts and Director of
the Art Sci center. She is visiting Professor at the Empowerment Informatics Program at
the University of Tsukuba, Japan and Interface Cultures, University of Art, Linz, Austria.
Dr. Cohen is a neuroscientist and early pioneer of magnetic resonance imaging. He is
Professor-in-Residence in the departments of Psychiatry, Neurology, Radiology,
Biomedical Physics, Psychology and Bioengineering. He is also a musician.