Neuromatic Game Art
Critical Play With Neurointerfaces
Description
The genres of game art, game design, art and games are gaining in importance in the context of artistic research because they allow empirical methods and direct experience. Ludic experiments in the form of neurogames and the transformative potential of games serve as a theoretical framework for a discourse on publicly conducted artistic experiments, resistance to social conditions and the handling of personal data.
Our research goal is to create a new form of experimental game art – the neuromatic one – in order to raise new knowledge about cognitive conditions, ethical questions about biometric possibilities and limits of technologies, and ultimately to transform increasingly present demands for self-optimization into self-expression.
Recent News
# October 2021: “Narrenturm” Mindgame: Mindworm Blaster
In this situated game, a „Neuromatic mindobject“ is presented – a non-human actor that draws human input data. 300.000 data points are used to generate a continiously evolving, organic structure via code. The data is from the “player”, him/her/they, recorded with one of our latest mind reading devices – a professional 32-channel EEG as a part of the research project Neuromatic Game Art.
# August 2021: CARPA 2021 – Brain Dérive & Detournement
With this game performance we aim to introduce a new form of technological writing in artistic research. We apply the technical settings of the actual Status Quo of Artificial intelligence in writing, generative neural network models. We use a certain “ludic method”, a concept developed within the Ludic Society project. We discuss pre-trained transformers as autoregressive writing styles, connect Deep Learning, automatic writing and choreography.
As the departure for our proposed technological ‘détournement’ we use the contextual setting of a philosophy reading and explore how we can feel rather than understand the text. The concept of Dérive, deliberated from Debord´s notion and interpreted into Alice Becker-Hos playful interpretation, is approached through philosophy of technology, artistic research and neuroscience. What happens to the notion of activistic play when technology is choreographing, writing and analyzing our moves in the game?
Equipped with a brain-computer-interface we invite online audiences in a LIVE ONLINE writing session. Focusing on technology bias we approach reading as a performative act situating the philosophical content in practice and approaching audiences as an oracle-intelligence. In this way the setting, the game-mechanics and the audience activities acknowledge the session itself as a assemblage, subversively performing (doing), underlining and showing without telling what is at stake. At the end of the game loop a second new text is generated. The words and concepts of the attendees have been algorithmically fed into a Generative Pretrained Transformer in order to generate endless versions of it… into the loop! The artistic research question concerns the generation of ethical and political questions concerning the measurement of the self.
# July 2021: EEG Workshop
With an introduction and experiment configuration by neuro-scientist Shiryhiy Zahra Shirzhiyan PhD. Co-development of current/future experiment design.
# July 2021: Dérive performance – Critical Philosophy Play
In a performative card game, we orientate ourselves on a reinterpretation of Dérive and Detournement as a mind game. AI ethics, generative text and performance are grotesquely coupled with an interpassive mind reading device. We invite you to indulge yourself: the staged generation of artistic research texts, the oracle of neuro interfaces and somatic experience. We play sensory expansion and introspection in the fog of time.
Images:
GPT2 poetry Game, Performance with Mindclouds Installation, Staging Philosophy with Mark Coeckelbergh, Mind_Future Telling Card Game
# June 2021: Appearance!
Appearance as part of “Virtu(Re)al Playgrounds – How to digitally expand a city”.
# June 2021: Entangled Thoughts: 32 channels mycelium wood walk film
2021, 15 min.
A discursive reflexion of the artistic research project in six chapters. An artistic research documentary film.
# May 2021: EEG and VR Experiment
On the 5th of May 2021, we tested the prototype for our philosophy performance, gathered EEG data and explored a Virtual Reality of our AAA THP installation.
At Zentrum Fokus Forschung, Rustenschacherallee 1020 Wien
# March 2021: AAA ThP: ARG ALT Artivism Thunder Play
Margarete Jahrmann,Thomas Wagensommerer, Louise Linsenbolz, Georg Luif, Stefan Glasauer. An Area7lab production
Multiplayer open world game environment in dual play mode: Neuromatic Devices for audiovisual representation of the 5 frequency bands of the brainwave spectrum with consumer EEG head bands, EEG generated mind sculpture, generative brain sound, brainwave object, photogrammetric environment, for live players and NPCs, embracing spatial distance and mental closeness.
Live performance premiere at CIVA Contemporary Immersive Art Festival 2021.
# November 2020: 2020 Neurointerfaces as means of Artistic Research or Expanded Game Art.
Neurocontrollers of games are new consumer interfaces to the inner self, if we consider that they unfold as factual neuro-interfaces that evaluate our personal data and general human condition. Biometric data is gained in everyday life by mobile phones or health wristbands. The ethical dimension of the use of neuro interfaces is hardly questioned.
(more…)# November 2020: Ludic Lunchtalk: Moritz Grosse-Wentrup – Brain-Artificial Intelligence Interfaces
The introduction of machine learning into the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which began almost two decades ago, enabled unprecedented performance. Today, machine learning algorithms have become an indispensable component of a BCI. Machine learning, however, has undergone a radical transformation in the past two decades, resulting in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that surpass human performance in many real-world tasks. I argue that it is time for the BCI community to embrace these developments and build Brain-AI Interfaces (BAIs), i.e., systems that leverage the power of modern AI systems to enable natural human-computer interaction. In particular, I argue that to realize BAIs we will have to move beyond our dominant decoding paradigm, in which we determine a priori the labels we intend to decode from neural signals, and let the AI system decide the level of granularity at which cognitive processes are represented in neural signals.
Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Moritz Grosse-Wentrup
Bio: Moritz Grosse-Wentrup is full professor and head of the Research Group Neuroinformatics at the University of Vienna, Austria. He develops machine learning algorithms that provide insights into how large-scale neural activity gives rise to (disorders of) cognition, and applies these algorithms in the domain of cognitive neural engineering, e.g., to build brain-computer interfaces for communication with severely paralyzed patients, design closed-loop neural interfaces for stroke rehabilitation, and develop personalized brain stimulation paradigms. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the 2011 Annual Brain-Computer Interface Research Award, the 2014 Teaching Award of the Graduate School of Neural Information Processing at the University of Tübingen, and the 2016 IEEE Brain Initiative Best Paper Award. http://neural.engineering/
