Brain-Computer Interface Projects

In-progress: Forests of the Mind

Forests of the Mind is an interactive video installation which viewers navigate and alter with their brainwaves. This project is currently in production with help from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Using electroencephalography (EEG), this large-scale media work asks viewers to reflect on vision and memory as they make their way through an interactive moving image narrative. Here, states of mind simultaneously affect the works while being altered by them. The limits between the tangible and the imagined begin to curiously disappear. Viewers are active participants whether they witness another’s interactive navigation of the work or partake in the navigation themselves.

This work explores memory – how we remember, and how memory morphs every time it is recalled. A computer captures data from the viewer’s brainwaves (aka state of mind) and uses them to select clips according to levels of relaxation and attention. In this way, the viewer’s state of mind affects the experience they will have of the narrative in a physical way that can be witnessed by other viewers. In effect, each interaction with the work will produce a unique variation on the narrative.

Mercurial Sights

Mercurial Sights explores the recollection of long-term memory. Some memories are so clear it’s almost as though we were reliving them. Some of our bodily impulses are the same when faced with an actual live event as with a recalled memory. They can seem to play back as clearly as a scene from a movie. However, these scenes change with every recollection, and can never be shared accurately. What if we could create models to communicate these inner visions with each other, and to better visualize the possible ways in which we sift through these scenes in our mind’s eye?