1E9 Community on Mind the Brain!

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1e9 Community: Mind the Brain!

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1E9 magazin, June 2021

Art with brain-computer interface and VR: A dance with your own brain

Magazine

Cover Story

Virtual_Realities

Culture

Wolfgang

Editor in Chief

June 26

The artwork Mind the Brain! combines two technologies that are rapidly evolving with a whole new form of narration. Viewers become co-creators, traveling through the human brain in virtual reality. What they experience is influenced by their own thought activity. The artwork will celebrate its premiere at the beginning of July. We were already able to try it out.

By Wolfgang Kerler

The unusual experience begins before I even put on the VR glasses. Because first, Kathrin Brunner from mYndstorm productions carefully pulls an electrode cap over my head - a rubber-like net to which nearly two dozen sensors are attached. This simple brain-computer interface, also called an EEG cap, is supposed to measure my brain activity during the experience. By electroencephalography, or EEG for short. To make this work, Kathrin spreads a salt paste on the underside of the electrodes and then presses it against my hair, my forehead, the back of my head. The paste ensures better conductivity and thus a better signal. After all, electrical impulses must register through the bones of the skull.

The technology does what it is supposed to do. A look at the laptop connected to the cap shows that. There, various curve diagrams provide information about what my brain is currently doing and which of its areas are particularly active. With a trained eye, the data obtained could be used to determine, for example, whether I am concentrated or stressed, whether I am focusing on something or sleepily dozing off. Diseases such as epilepsy are also diagnosed in medicine using EEG.

We were able to try out the Mind the Brain! experience at a press presentation in May. - with VR goggles, electrode cap, headphones and mask. Image: Kathrin Brunner

It's a bit eerie to watch your own brain waves on a monitor. Could it reveal any secrets about me? But Kathrin Brunner reassures me: "We can't and don't want to read minds with this - and in the Experience there is no direct one-to-one connection between input from your brain and output in the VR goggles. The connection is game-like," she says. "There's also no goal. So you can't do anything wrong or right." Now I put on the VR goggles - and the journey through the brain, the dance with my brain begins.

Flashing neurons and strange shapes made of luminous particles

I glide gently through an organic, warmly lit scenery whose shapes look familiar even to me as a medical layman: They show the human brain from the inside. The journey is accompanied by spherical sounds, giving the experience an almost sacred character. A first highlight: the neuron forest. A huge dark room full of nerve cells connected by synapses. Again and again they flash. Are these my thoughts?

Even more acute is the question of what is actually part of the script here - if there is one at all - and what I trigger with my brain waves when I find myself in the middle of a pulsating cloud of glowing particles. Sometimes I see only diffuse structures, sometimes concrete shapes appear. An embryo, a spider, a face. I don't want to reveal much more about the contents of the Experience here. How long it lasted in the end, I can't say. Ten minutes? Half an hour? All I know for sure afterwards is that I am deeply relaxed.

An embryo of luminous particles. Whether and how long you see it depends on your own brain activity. Image: Myndstorm

The inspiration for an artwork that mixes a brain-computer interface with virtual reality and sound came from, of all things, a medical emergency. Four years ago, theater and screenwriter, actor and director Oliver Czeslik suffered a stroke. "I don't want to say that the stroke was helpful for my life," he says in an interview with 1E9. "But because of this dysfunction of my brain, I suddenly got into experiential spaces between fiction and reality. That was beautiful and scary at the same time. After that, I became interested in getting back there - and taking others there."

He now spent more than two years working with his wife Kathrin Brunner, a digital media expert, on the unusual VR experience Mind the Brain! . They were supported by a team of more than 20 experts from technology, science and art. This was necessary not only because of the technology that was used: VR and a brain-computer interface, which is also being experimented with for novel video games . The brain itself also provided the effort. Although we use it permanently, it is far from clear how it actually works. It remains a mystery.

The team included Tobias Heiler from Munich-based neurofeedback start-up Brainboost and director and cameraman Fred Kelemen. The Jülich Research Center, which researches the human brain as part of the EU-funded Human Brain Project, supported the work. Funding was provided by the FFF Bayern. And even bystanders, who were able to try out preliminary stages of the finished artwork over the course of two years, contributed through their experiences.

The brain appears like a cathedral in the VR experience, which is artistically designed but still based on scientific findings. Image: Myndstorm

In theater or film, there are so many structures into which narratives must fit, says Oliver Czeslik. The stage, the technology, actors, direction, audience. "Yet we have everything in our brain. Our brain has billions of neuronal connection possibilities, which makes so many narrative paths, poetic paths possible that we normally don't discover at all." With Mind the Brain! he wants his audience to become "chief storytellers," he says.

Premiere in Munich

But which parts of my experience did I actually trigger by thought power? And which not? "What you were now and what you weren't, that's not the decisive question at all," Oliver Czeslik answers. It's about the unconscious. But Kathrin Brunner adds a technical explanation: "The frequency of the thought flashes in the neuron forest is directly controlled by the EEG," she says, "which means that you can evoke very many, you can evoke very few. And when you look for them, you can't even catch them."

The pulsing of the luminous particles also depends on one's brain activity - and whether or not one can clearly see shapes and figures in the cloud of particles, she adds. "The spider is a good example, it very much disappears if you have a strong reaction to it."

Those who want to try the Experience for themselves can do so in early July at the Blitz Club in Munich . That's where the official premiere is. Individual guests will be wired up in a "BlackBox" and equipped with VR goggles. The others can experience the journey through the brain by means of projections. This turns it into a collective experience - and a bit of an ode to our still mysterious organ.