Ralf Dombrowski/ Münchner Feuilleton on Mind the Brain!

A wonderful text on Mind the Brain! from Ralf Dombrowski at Münchner Feuilleton:

Mind the Brain! in Münchner Feulletin

Here’s an english translation:

VISUAL ARTS, FILM

"Mind The Brain!" - A VR installation in Munich

By Ralf Dombrowski on June 16, 2021.

The VR project "Mind The Brain!" makes artistic thinking visible and tangible. A border crossing.

"Mind The Brain!"

Through the brain to freedom

mind the brain

It is a privilege of science fiction to declare the thinkable into the doable. Wade Owen Watts, called Parzival, doesn't have to worry about slipping into his suit to make contact with the virtual world of Oasis. He can focus on uncovering evil machinations of a totalitarian corporation in "Ready Player One," all thriller, pretty Hollywood, far from an actual technical feasibility. Although - if one leaves behind the clichés of script-conforming narrativity, the idea of freeing the brain and its impulses from simple stimulus-response schemes to achieve an open space of perception, sensation, design, develops a steadily growing fascination. "We quickly found the theme," says Oliver Czeslik, author and media artist from mYndstorm productions, who launched the "Mind The Brain!" project together with digital expert Kathrin Brunner, "the brain as the center of the narrative. As well as the goal of making you not just a voyeur, but an actor and co-creator, and me not just an author or director. So to give you the possibility to develop your own creation, your own narration, to let yourself be inspired, also to recognize your own limitation and maybe to leave it behind a little. In that, the brain provides the basis for open systems, open societies, and the power behind that, without constantly getting directives from the outside."

The idea sounds beguiling, but the path to its realization proved to be a mental and logistical marathon of continual reorientation: "The goal from the beginning was to achieve a poetic space-and before that, through various stages, a sensitization to it. There was a stage model at the beginning that had a lot to do with physical art space, with an expanded concept of art, with Beuys and an idea of slowly introducing people to their freedom." To do this, different disciplines had to be brought together. Over the course of four years, more and more experts joined the team: the arthouse director Fred Kelemen, researchers from the Bauhaus University Weimar around Juliane Fuchs, Munich BCI experts, experts from Brainboost GmbH around Tobias Heiler, scientists from the Research Center Jülich/Human Brain Project, VR specialists, 3-D artists and programmers with Sebastian Esposito, Daniel Lichtenstern and Marc Hermann, as well as the sound composer Nirto Karsten Fischer. Everything was financed largely from their own resources. When these ran out, the FFF Bayern stepped in, making the actual production possible in 2020. Czeslik and Brunner's task was not only to deal with the perspectives of open narration, but also to bridge the communication thresholds of the individual trades.

The first room of the brain journey, for example, consists of a kind of cathedral, into which a formal aesthetic of expressionism was to be integrated according to artistic specifications, including meaningful lighting. Clear for the artist, uncharted territory for virtual reality programmers: "VR, for example, had hardly any idea of how light works in large spaces, what effects are created by it for someone who is his own camera. That, in turn, was a challenge for a cinematic director who doesn't have a camera, but has to think of the other person's particular camera as a starting point. Working together, we developed a kind of virtual shooting, laid tracks and drove a total of eight virtual dollies through the imaginary space. I don't think anything else like this has been tried before; in any case, we needed the experience of very different professionals. In the end, however, it would have been nothing at all without the technology department, which pioneered the transfer of BCI (Brain Computer Interface) signals to virtual reality with tools like Unity. Crossing that point, that was the crux of the matter. How we set this contact in a meaningful way and whether the images can not only receive the signals, but also transform them. In addition to this technical aspect, the question of content was how far we can go with our claim to let people have their freedom, or how clearly we have to prescribe structures."

In any case, all levels lead to the poetic space at the end of "Mind The Brain! Brain travelers are given a sensor network, VR goggles and headphones to get in touch with the visualized spaces and structures of the brain. The signals received control, among other things, the time spent in the individual modules, transitions, directions of movement, reaction intensities. From room to room, the level of abstraction increases on the one hand, and on the other hand, the freedom of one's own design increases, all the way to poetic space, in which the BCI control allows swarm structures to be designed according to archetypal images, among other things. Here the decision was made to refer to a reservoir of images that has been described as a pool of existing patterns since the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung. For archetypes are primordial imprints of the unconscious, which find expression in certain signs and images. They are relatively freely coded, stored in the depths of the brain and also in the "unconscious" of the system of "Mind The Brain!".

It is up to the imagination of the individual which of them he or she is able to bring out into the poetic space. Images of life, death, laughter, love - images from the horseman of death to the butterfly of happiness. Images that an individual creates and that are also left to him: "We also refuse the data as soon as they have been sent. Nothing is stored there; we thus give it back to the individual. Despite everything, there are enormous amounts of data that are processed. Based on the interpretation of this data, we can filter out emotional states that translate into movement. And from these movements, the images then morph. This creates our own chains of images and relationships that are independent of the system that creates them. They function only through momentary sensation, experience. A mirror image, a dance that reacts to you, without control from the outside. What emerges is up to you." The project has gone through four years and many struggles since its inception. If the hygiene bureaucrats of the district administration department don't hand out padlocks again at the last minute, people will be able to go on a journey in the Blitz Club on Museum Island three times a day. One person in the audience at a time will be wired up, and everyone else can accompany him or her on the image-opulent neuro-travel with sound and projection. An intoxicating, perspective experiment: "Because most of the receptors of our neurons lie unused, because we always use the same ones to achieve something. To break open this structure once with the possibilities of our own brain, that is actually the goal." ||

MIND THE BRAIN! - A NEUROREACTIVE VR INSTALLATION

Blitz Club | Museum Island 1 | July 2-5