Yuri's Night Bay Area 2008

This year, myself and two YNBA veterans (Gautam Agarwal, Jonathan Toomim) are participating in Yuri's Night with some biofeedback-related art-tech projects we hope will be both intellectually as well as aesthetically engaging. See below for more information on this amazing worldwide expo/art-show/party as well as information on our two projects, Mindchill and Introscope.

[from http://ynba.org/2008/overview.php:]

Yuri's Night Bay Area is a massive celebration of space, science, art, music, and technology . Once a year in over a hundred places all over the world, Yuri's Night commemorates the anniversary of the launch of the first man in space , Yuri Gagarin, and the launch of the first Space Shuttle exactly twenty years later. Starting in 2007, Space Generation teamed up with the NASA Ames Research Center for the first time, along with a team of amazing volunteers, to host the largest Yuri's Night celebration ever held in a massive hangar on Moffett Field in Mountain View, CA.

Yuri's Night Bay Area taps into the San Francisco area's unique energy to bring together scientists, artists, technologists, musicians, and space enthusiasts in a fusion of celebration and education that is unlike anything else you've ever seen. In 2008 the event is growing to twice the size, bringing in more hot musicians , more brilliant scientists , more amazing artists , and the all-new Festival of Ideas .

Learn more about Yuri's Night Bay Area from NASA!

Mindchill and Introscope

by The Infodelic Ectomorphs (i.e.)

(Gautam Agarwal, Tim Mullen, Jonathan Toomim, Geoff Brookshire)

Philosophy:

Changes in the world are tightly coupled to changes in our being. While the rapid transformation of the earth becomes more evident, the concomitant acceleration of our thought processes remains invisible. The sensorium created by our technology tends toward finer spatiotemporal scales, making the potentially dire trajectory of the slow and vast processes that sustain life as we know it more an intellectual concern and less a salient experience. We hope to engage Yuri's Night attendees to broaden their scope of awareness through the use of biofeedback. The body is a microcosm of the planet, a complex web of interactions where one ebb leads to another flow. Through biofeedback, users will experience such a coupling between external events and internal states. Along with techniques such as meditation, biofeedback may be useful in exploring the intricate relation between the mental and physical world. We believe that developing an ecology of mind may be a crucial step in understanding and restructuring the immense energetic transaction we are engaged in with our planet today.

Description:
Subjects' galvanic skin response (GSR) and brainwaves (EEG) will
control an audiovisual environment that informs them of moment-to-moment fluctuations in their level of arousal (GSR) and general cognitive state (EEG).

Mindchill: Changes in sympathetic activity have been shown to correlate with changes in emotional arousal and stress levels. We will measure this change using a galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor. The user's skin conductance will be measured continuously and his/her arousal will be represented as water in its solid, liquid, or gas states. As a user becomes more aroused, she will cause water to thaw or boil; as she relaxes, she will cause it to condense or freeze. This will be attempted in real-time using a thermoelectric junction, with close-ups of ice-crystal/gas-bubble formation streamed through a webcam and projected in real-time on a screen in front of the user. Alternate feedback modes will include coupling the GSR to time-lapse films of plant growth, ice crystal formation, polar ice melt or other engaging natural processes. Users have the option of being presented with a series of verbal or visual stimuli to trigger emotional responses.

Introscope: Electroencephalograhy (EEG) is a method for measuring the electrical activity of the brain using electrodes placed on the scalp. This project will focus on coupling a user's brain dynamics to an audiovisual environment, affording the user visualization and enhanced control of the ongoing electrical activity of the brain. The EEG signal will have independent and simultaneous auditory and visual representations. Two separate auditory representations will be selectable. In the first, the EEG be transformed in the frequency domain to a range audible to humans and then played through speakers and/or headphones. A number of filters may optionally be applied to increase the saliency of EEG features that correlate well with the quality of subjective experience. The second will analyze the EEG for certain discrete electrophysiological events which will be used to guide a software synthesizer-based music generator. Visual representations will be produced with an array of bright multicolored flashing LEDs. After nightfall, the high contrast between the LEDs' brightness and average ambient brightness will reduce the saliency and visibility of the subject's physical surroundings, facilitating the fusion of the internal and external worlds and carrying her through a journey of her own creation. Additional LED pods will be placed in the area in a dance light-like manner for spectators' enjoyment; the algorithm used to control the audience LEDs will be adjustable independently of that of the subject's dedicated LED pod, and can be turned off selectively.

Version 1.0 of our home-grown GSR-thermocouple system.

Two members of the i.e. team testing out Mindchill

(left: Gautam Agarwal, right: Tim Mullen)