Published in · 6 min read · Apr 17, 2021
Written By: Hannia Barrera and Naveli Garg Edited By: Mateo Pitkin and Sherin Lajevardi
The world is a strange place right now. Downright surreal even. And it is hard to deny that there are a lot of emotions at play but what is there to do when you can not draw your feelings? EEG art.
As humans and technology evolve together, human-machine collaboration has becoming increasingly more popular. After all, making art is not a direct way to change our thinking or change ourselves, but rather a way of seeing and expressing ourselves. In other words, it is a a way of seeing our inner world — our thoughts and beliefs, our feelings and emotions, and our loves and aversions. This is exactly the opportunity that EEG art aims to provide by showing us patterns produced by our brains’ electrical signals when triggered by an event or feeling.
What is EEG?
According to the Mayo Clinic, an electroencephalogram (EEG) is “a test that detects electrical activity in your brain using small, metal discs (electrodes) attached to your scalp” (Health Information, Mayo Clinic). The electrodes detect tiny electrical charges in voltage that result from the activity of your brain cells. The charges are amplified and appear as a graph on a computer screen, or as a recording that may be printed out on paper. The popularity of brain-computer interfaces and the constant use of EEGs have led many neuroscientists and art researchers to explore the diversity of mind cybernetic methods and expression forms in EEG art.
What is EEG art and how does it work?
Random Quark is a creative studio managed by Theodorous Papatheodoru and Tom Chambers, both of them are technology enthusiasts and developers who started to equip individuals with commercial EEG headsets in a room with dim lights and free of noise. Then they proceed to ask them to close their eyes and think of an emotionally charged memory, happy or sad. The device then continues to scan the brain’s electrical activity from the left to the right and creates a dataset that forms an insight into the individuals’ memory and mood at that time specifically. To determine what people are feeling, random quark relies on a theory called lateralization of emotion which basically says that activity in the left side of the brain is associated with positive feelings while increased activity on the right is linked to negative feelings. “We measure the asymmetry between left/right hemispheres as well as the overall activation of the brain (alpha/beta/gamma waves) and we plot this data in a 2D valence-activation graph which is known as the Geneva Emotions Wheel where all the human emotions are plotted” (“Watch your raw memories become mind-blowing abstract art”). Random quark filtered and reduced the emotions to 7 major ones — joy, sadness, anger, love, disgust, fear, surprise — and measured only them, giving them a score. The feelings are ranked by intensity, with a confidence level for each one. Then, the system picks only the first 2 emotions and proportionally assigns a unique shade of color to each particle of the system.
Geneva Emotions Wheel (Research Gate)
Case Studies:
The Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Emoscape aims to “combine scientific rigour with creative magic to help professionals in the health and wellness space” (Saatchi Wellness Website) so they asked Random Quark (RQ) — a London-based creative technology studio whose purpose is to create immersive experiences that make enormous waves through the use of art and technology — for a machine that would create digital paintings from brainwaves. They have conducted different case studies where they were able to resonate with awards juries, clients, and the world’s media to launch first online, then at a leading London gallery, the digital images of brainwaves from which RQ extracted through EEG emotional data. This type of art can be found throughout their branding as an accent of color, highlighting sections and key pieces of information, and reminding us of what drives human behavior.
The case studies involved asking a person to recall an emotional moment in their past while wearing the EEG headset. The individual’s brainwaves were then processed and the recorded emotions generated very complex patterns. For example, a person thought about the birth of her son and the algorithm produced a specific brainwave for that memory. Other examples include people recalling the moment when they got their first job or went shark cage diving in South Africa. Many researchers and artists were delighted with the product since it looked highly complex and the non-repeating patterns of color. The digital paintings were framed and exhibited in the Truman Brewery gallery space, East London (Random Quark website).
Digital painting based on the emotions from the experience of “birthing” (Random Quark website)
The introduction of new forms of art like this one by Random Quark and Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness can also present some challenges. The most relevant one being how important it is the fundamental to successful communication. Especially in a world that’s becoming more automated and less human, we want to investigate how technology can help us gain a better insight into how others feel. Besides only using EEGs in order to produce digital images from a person’s feelings, Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness are planning to partner with Goldsmith’s University and IBM Watson, to develop an algorithm that takes live tweets, looks for words indicative of emotion, then interprets this data as art to dramatize how “the world is feeling” (The Saatchi and Saatchi Wellness Website). Therefore, a real-time version of the swarming visualization made from an emotional analysis of live Tweets was created. The moving digital painting — which represented the emotional state of the world at the present time — captivated visitors to the Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness homepage of their website.
The emotional state of the world at present time (Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness website)
As our world progresses, new revolutions in technology make it possible for scientists to gain unprecedented insights into the human mind just the way EEG art is doing it right now. Despite all of the remarkable advances in neuroscience, the brain remains as magnificently mysterious as ever, and which field better than neurotechnology to examine this paradox. Many creative individuals possess the curiosity and the drive to investigate the implications of scientific breakthroughs, using mechanisms of the brain not just as subjects in their art practices, but also as tools with the help of the electroencephalogram (EEG). Tom Chambers, one of the Random Quark founders says, “What we see as the future of computing is a way of giving computers context so they can make better decisions. When you talk to Alexa or Google Home if they can understand how you’re feeling it can engage with you in a more intelligent way” (Chambers for Mashable Interview). This means that possibly, in the future, computers will be able to understand more context-like emotions. This can ultimately enable them to become more adaptive, with applications such as adjusting your home environment to suit your mood when you come back from a long school day. Wouldn’t that be quite incredible? Maybe the next time we are reading a story or worrying about forgetting about a moment we will be able to recreate them through our very own brain’s art and access those feelings we thought we had forgotten.
Mezzofiore, Gianluca. Watch your raw memories become mind-blowing abstract art — Mashable,
https://mashable.com/2017/06/24/brainwaves-painting-eeg-art-memories-emotions/. 24 June 2017.
“The Art of Feeling” Random Quark,
https://randomquark.com/case-studies/mindswarms.html/.
Accessed 10 Feb. 2021.
Random Quark. The Art of Feeling- Turning Brainwaves Into Paintings, 2017. Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=217_qAkj8Wo.
“The Art of Feeling: The first website to respond to the feelings of the world. ” Saatchi and Saatchi Wellness,
https://www.saatchiwellness.co.uk/case-study-the-art-of-feeling.
Accessed 10 Feb 2021.
