Neuromatic Game Art: Critical Play with Neurointerfaces AR 581 by Jahrmann Margarete

Game Art currently undergoes a rush of presence and importance in the context of artistic research, as it informs methods of insight and experiments. This happens at the same moment as new mobile interfaces linking body, brain, and electronic networks become available in a subtly gamified world. Ludic Theory, the concept of Flow, and the transformative potential of play will serve as theoretical frameworks for a series of publicly performed artistic experiments evolving around neurointerfaces.  Hypotheses / research questions / objectives According to our hypothesis the everyday availability of neurointerfaces will create new dimensions of social and ethical questions reaching from of privacy and surveillance to self-optimization, but will also carry the potential for new forms of creativity and interaction. As arts-based research question we take up the challenge to critically evaluate neurointerfaces as technological devices of potential everyday use. Our research objective is the creation of a new form of experimental game art – the neuromatic one – to contribute new knowledge, awareness, and resilience, and to elucidate ethical questions, possibilities and limitations of technologies that intrude the individual brain and to ultimately change self-optimization into self-expression.  Approach / methods In a series of staged and performed artworks informed by Game art, concepts of Flow and play, we will create a hybrid interplay and inquiry of questions around personal data and brain measurement informed by the neuroscientific research and techno-philosophical discourse that accompanies the project. By artistic re-engineering neurointerfaces will be transformed from intrusive measurement devices into participative and creative tools.  Level of originality / innovation The present project constitutes a unique, original, and urgently needed critical but playful artistic examination of an emerging technology. The prototypes and artefacts of our research, a new innovative form of modified playful neuromatic devices, will be the seed for further artistic and philosophical use.  Primary staff involved in the project The highly transdisciplinary project is carried out by five experienced researchers from complementary fields. The leading roles are held by artistic researchers. Margarete Jahrmann is an experienced artist, professor in the artistic research PhD program at Angewandte Vienna and in Game Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. Ruth Schnell is a leading media artist and holds the chair for Digital Arts, Angewandte Vienna. The techno-philosophical research line is led by Mark Coeckelbergh (University of Vienna). Stefan Glasauer (Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg) guides the neuroscientific research. The group will be complemented by several young emerging artists and researchers.

Multiplayer open world game, accessible via consumer BCIs (brain computer interfaces) with a dynamically generated collective mind sound-sculpture for 4 live players and unlimited number of virtual flaneurs/audiences with chat functions and talking Non Player Characters (NPCs). Non player characters named with 3-letter abbreviations of online life (LOL, AFK…) talk in obscure nonsense languages. Players can log in with EEGs (Muse) anytime or visit online live performances with a more extreme sound and visual progress/diffraction and enter a game in a collapsing photogrammetry world. The more brain signals get into the world, the more it erodes. Players are represented as diamonds, they elevate into Diamond net space. The environment is a meditation game for live generated movies. Its voices refer to Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra.

The game environment starts as version of an aesthetic view

and use of glitches of “found photogrammetry” (google) of a historic social meeting place with a fountain with naked figures in the center of Vienna. We adapt this tradition and transfer it as “exhibition” space to strip our own inner brainwave spectrums as instrument for a concert at the fountain.

The brainwave object as metaverse fountain sculpture for live performance with EEG interfaces includes a hidden reference to the pandemic: a simulation of distance regulations for game characters expressed as bounding boxes, which secure spatial distance but allow mental closeness. Infection starts during the concert. God mode is the consequence.

Besides the performance sessions the environment always can be entered. A stored version of a brain data object serves as interactive playground/ multiuser game with the aim to foster an implosion into a de-constructivist experience around the Donner Brunnen, a historic Vienna site of social contact, performance (Valie Export), exhibition, and erotic attraction, where a new virtual fountain sculpture is generated live by 4 EEG players. Up to 100 players can meet there without EEG and watch the play in the Thunderdome. The EEG input provides real-time modulation of sound and of a brainwave object, which erodes over time into a Hua Yen Diamond net. The game is a photogrammetric world for live performances with EEG interfaces. The game also includes a simulation of an experience model of bounding boxes for NPCs and player avatars, a collective goddess avatar. It builds on a pandemic model of spatial distance and mental closeness.

AAA THP: ARG ALT ARTIVISM THUNDER PLAY

NEUROMATIC

GAME ART

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