Owning Our Madness
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Whyte&Zettergren
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Owning Our Madness is a pre-study initiated by Whyte & Zettergren on how mental illness, PTSD, and historical traumas impact artistic expressions.
Today's society is marked by conflicts, violence, and environmental disasters, which create generational traumas and increase mental illness both locally and globally. We aim to investigate how these psychological effects shape art and how art, by processing and visualizing traumas, can contribute to healing on both micro and macro levels. The project aims to explore this synergy and its role in artistic renewal.
Historically, culture, religion, and rituals have been used to provide comfort in times of mental illness. PTSD treatment with art therapy is believed to help heal the brain's structures and functions damaged by trauma. In the pre-study, we will gather knowledge through interviews and practical sessions. By experimenting with methods to visualize the body's changes during trauma, we aim to develop techniques that combine choreography, moving images, and neurotechnology (EEG and EMG). We are exploring the stage of chaos and transformation that unites the creative process and trauma processing to develop a new artistic method.
The question of the 'mad artistic genius' attributed to the creation of groundbreaking art is long-lived, but is there any truth to it? The goal is to lay the foundation for a future project where more participants contribute to exploring the connection between mental illness and artistic innovation. The pre-study is supported by seed money from Kulturbryggan, Konstnärsnämnden.
Passive BCI in contemporary performance
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Tim Sayer
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
300 word supporting statement
The aim of this research is to explore, in artistic practice, the concept of ‘cognitive ambience’, which I have developed in the book chapter “Using EEG to explore cognitive-cultural networks and eco-systemic performance environments for improvisation”. I have done this in the creation of a piece entitled ‘Mondrisonic’ which opened the 4th International Performance Studies Network Conference at Bath Spa University in 2016.
This exposition provides the following contextual information:
• Book chapter
• 2 Documentary films
• Proof of performance
• Code
• Score
The claim for new knowledge in this submission is not for the approach to coding the system, which uses Processing for the visuals and Supercollider for the audio, but for the fact that the data used to feed into the closed loop performance system, results from harvesting the passive EEG signal from one of the performance participants. This participant is directing their attention towards something other than actively being a performer in the piece but whose attentiveness to the piece is nevertheless affecting how the piece develops, an approach that I believe to be new and novel in creative work utilising BCI.
There are currently two proposals for further performances pending, one at the ICMC2020 and the other at the IASPM UK and Ireland Biennial Conference.