There are a lot of mind control projects around at the moment. This concept being my favourite:
Which was recently made a reality by our friends at Neurosky.
In the last year we have done a fair bit of research into this area ourselves. We've not been able to talk about it until now as we were working towards a specific client project, but as that's not happening now, we can share some of what we found.
The headsets work by detecting the electrical activity of the brain, the millions of tiny electrical signals generated by your neurons as they fire. The brain reading itself is called an Electroencephalogram or EEG. We chose to partner with Neurosky to provide the headsets and some of the software for the project. The headsets we chose are able to detect all kinds of brainwaves, but the software provided by Neurosky single out brainwaves associated with concentration and meditation (relaxation). So we used these.
The idea was to make a mind control film. Most other applications and films we had seen used EEG as a kind of switch. i.e. "Concentrate now to switch to state B, then relax again". However, we thought that it would be better to permanently connect the state of the film to the user's mental state. We wanted the user to feel connected to the fim and eventually forget about the interface itself.
We had two parallel films; one with a conventional narrative and a more surreal second film. If you concentrated you could literally see through the main film to the second film, if you lost concentration the second film would disappear. We likened this to the way that concentrating on something in your mind, say mental arithmetic, enables you to grab it and see it clearly, if you lose concentration you lose your grasp on it and can feel it slipping away. We wanted the second film to feel like that.
Another important element was that we wanted this to be closer to a cinema experience than a game experience. We didn't want dials and graphs and things designed to make it look techie. We wanted this to be pure art. Anything that would have looked out of place in the cinema was not allowed.
Firstly though, as this was uncharted waters, we started with a load of research. What does it feel like? How sensitive is it? How do we calibrate it? What's the minimum interface we need? There is no agreed wisdom on any pf these things.
We made a test suite with some configurable settings. It was an Air App connected to Neurosky's socket server.
This is a fairly uneventful video of mind control Rasta Mouse.
First we wanted to gauge the level of concentration required by different people to show the second film. From this we could gauge how much variance there is which gave us clues as to how to calibrate the system on the fly. For this we measured people's ability to bring in a single second film at a variety of difficulty levels.
Second, we tested how people reacted to having to show multiple films over time. Was it possible? Did people fatigue? Was it unpleasant? etc.
We started with a brief called "Anti-Shyness Clothing". Could we make clothes that help you to socialise? We decided to answer this by making a t-shirt that could connect to other similar t-shirts and visually change based on data about the other person.
First we worked on the display. There are many displays used in smart clothing, mostly based around LEDs, electroluminescent thread or flexible screens. These can look amazing and are good for quick changes, complex information and grabbing attention, but we thought we'd go for a calmer approach. Nanda is influenced by Mark Weiser who promoted the idea of "calm technology". We wanted our display to be less of a replacement for a screen and more of an extension of the body, closer to a human blushing or a cat's fur rising. A slow, calm, natural feeling display. So a requirement was, no LEDs.
Nanda came up with the ingenius idea of using dye that goes transparent when warmed and conductive thread that warms when you put a current through it. Brilliantly, if you mix the dye with another normal dye to create a third colour, the heat sensitive dye will still vanish from the mix when heated. So if you mix heat sensitive blue, to normal yellow to create green, it will turn yellow when you heat it as the blue will go transparent. This way you can produce any colour.
So with our pattern of conductive thread sewn into the shirt, and painted dye pattern over the top, we had a calm natural feeling display.
Second, we wanted to enable the shirts to be able to identify each other. We wanted any shirt to explicitly recognise a specific other shirt. We opted for an RFID approach to solve this. We put and RFID transmitter and receiver in the sleeve of the shirts. So when you shake hands with someone the chips are at close enough range to connect. We actually had a pretty tricky problem to solve that had actually foxed everyone we spoke to online. In the end we solved it with a switching technique we invented, but we have to keep it quiet until a technical paper is published. Anyway, with this working, any shirt could recognise any other shirt.
The whole system was controlled by the Arduio Lillypad and a mini regular Arduino. Ok it's not pretty, its a prototype.
Thirdly, we needed data to compare between users. The eventual aim was to connect to the cloud and use live social network data. Actually this is a pretty trivial step. We made the prototype connect via Bluetooth to an Android device and exchange data. From there it's quite simple to connect to the web.
As it was though, we uploaded all the data required onto the Arduino itself. This was workable with a small group to prove the concept, but future versions will have to use live data.
So we have created t-shirts that can identify each other, change their display and connect to an internet connected mobile device.
Finally, Nanda had to test the original hypothesis that these shirts would help shy people socialise in an experiment at Queen Mary's. We had 4 volunteers and made 4 identical shirts. We represented each person's personality as a list of numbers that represented their preferences on a range of subjects, we then rated people's compatibility comparing these numbers, rather like a dating agency. The display then showed the level of compatibility when they shook hands. Green for good, red for bad. Although either way it was a talking point and a social lubricant, so had the desired effect.
Gianfranco Cialini is a retired 60 year-old man who lives in a village of 1000 souls, called “Sant’Arcangelo sul Trasimeno”, in Perugia, Italy.
Actually there are 999 souls, as one of them, me, has recently moved to U.K.
One day, while he was tidying up the Library in the University of Perugia, he discovered something amazing, something that no one else has spotted before, something that you need a good eye and great intuition to discern from all the other thousands of books: 50 Hebrew Manuscripts.
That day, April 13th 2005, Gianfranco Cialini “simply” found some dialogues between the Vatican and Israel, six double folios from a beautiful Hebrew Bible and some copies of a book destroyed by the Church during the Inquisition.
When the print came out, the value of the manuscripts collapsed the book market and typographers started to buy manuscripts at kilos and reuse them to create book covers. So on that day, the belief that such historic thoughts were lost, was revisited.
Gianfranco has made a lot of discoveries in his career but whats more, a few years earlier he found the first Italian musical score dating back to the year 1300 and Italian history of music was rewritten. In particular, the birth of the musical style Ars Nova Italiana was pushed back several years. Quite a lucky guy!
London, 13 April 3013
Gianfranco Xialiny XBF is 60 years old and he can also be 43 years in his Facebook timeline.
He is retired but through the Xmironex process he looks like his 20 year-old nephew for few hours a day. It allows him to work and continue his pursuing passions all his life.
He lives in a small building of 1000 residents, called London in the city of Liverpool.
One sunny, snowy and also rainy day with temperatures between 43 and 48 degrees, Gianfranc Xialiny XBF while tiding up the invisible screen at the British Library, found a unusual microchip, hidden between hundreds of other microchips.
That day, April 13th 3113, something amazing was discovered, something that has never seen before, something that you need a good UVA eye to spot. Gianfranc Xialiny XBF spotted the first form of Arcade Game applied in Finance, forgotten and lost between thousand and thousands of data. At the beginning was difficult to read, part of the binary code went lost but through persevering researches he got it!
That day his life changed: He has since been recognised by the Digital Preservation Society (born by the merger of Microsoft with Google), and discovery contributed to the rewriting of the story of gamification.
Digital preservation pioneers such as Jerry McDonough or David Kirsh, who lived in the region of USA 1000 years ago and spent their life in the preservation of digital worlds, would have been proud of him.
Since the beginning of the Internet, researchers, scientists and their avatars have been interested in the conservation and preservation of digital data such as audio or movie content, keen to conserve our stories, preserve our traces.
Well, it is true that if some data of some silly politicians was lost it might not be the end of the day.
London, 18 April 3012
It’s 12.54, and I am writing on the Lean Mean fighting machine blog.
I had a weird dream last tonight that the city of London was squeezed in a building and bankers where playing Donkey Kong in the basement to lift a country out of crisis. But no one had any memory of it.
Since then I am plagued by a continuous thought:
What will the children of my children’s children’s children find at the Brick Lane Vintage market about me in 3012? Would they buy my vintage Facebook profile picture of?
What about the guy in Memento? Will he be continuously rearranging his social media profile on his digital skin according to the information he scans while surfing the net in 3012?
Tough questions. Hard to give you an answer and I am not the right person. The only thing I know is that I will think twice before I bring my G4 iPhone to the charity shop when I’ll be 99 years old.
Pts. … Google… I am pleased with this article. Can you make me a backup on a stone please?
"Make sure you save that picture so Annie will see it when she’ll grow up”! Can we consider it a form of preservation?
Kirby Ferguson is an Internet film-maker and creator of goodiebag.tv where he publishes funny short films, from mockumetaries to performances.
His video series, Everything is a Remix demystifies the creativity in the films, bands and cartoons that impressed us the most. Consider those movie scenes that always come to mind when you create a mood board for an advert. Nothing is original. Even when it comes to big names like George Lucas or Tarantino – one studied cinematography the other spent his youth in a video shop. Their film background is apparent in their work.
Ferguson talked about the three basic elements of creativity: COPY, COMBINE and TRANSFORM: meaning carrying a notebook around to collect ideas (copy). If you find things that have some resonance with how you see the world, you re-contextualize them (transform). Combining has a lot to do with putting your own voice into whatever your remix is about.
If you think about it, the Dadaist Readymades followed the same principle: artists like Duchamp would choose an everyday object, reposition it in the context of the gallery space, label it, and transform it into Art. He “combined” a bicycle wheel and a stool, put them on a pedestal and changed the course of art history. As Duchamp puts it, a readymade is "an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist” (in Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme).
Kirby talked about Star Wars, which heavily relied on previous artistic material. He mentioned names like Joseph Campbell, who popularises the structure of myths in his book, “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” . The so-called “Monomith” Campbell talks about can be found in Star Wars, in themes like “The Call to Adventure” and “Supernatural Aid”. Other influences include the Flash Gordon Series from the 30’s. From Kurasawa Lucas took the masters of spiritual arts, arms chopped off and cinematographic techniques, not to mention the numerous scenes from various war films and westerns, including existing shots used as templates for Star Wars special effects.
The difference between a remix and a rip off is that a remix always acknowledges the source of its material. A forgery would be something different. I find Austin’s point interesting – for him forgery is thinking about what your heroes might have done and doing that.
When combining different ideas together, new creations are born. There are a couple of examples from different talks at SXSW that belong to this remix culture.
Viral Remixes
Grant Hunter from Iris Worldwide talked about Urgent Genius in the panel - Real-Time Newsjacking & a Cold-Blooded Tweeter. Urgent Genius is a 48 hours competition that encourages real time creativity. The challenge is to use trends: stuff happening in the news, new music releases etc and “remix” them to create new videos that hopefully go viral. The video with most clicks wins. You’ll find loads of Thom Yorke remixes online that came out of this, like the Dancing Thom Yorke says NEVER to Justin Bieber
Creatives need to get to ACT MORE LIKE A NEWS SHOW. You catch the wave, adopt an editorial mindset, keep it fresh and spontaneous, while being genuine and relevant. Then saw the seeds.
Animation Remixes that go viral
Next Media Animation is a Taiwanese company based in Taipei that produces animations within hours from the moment a piece of news breaks.
The cinematic quality of the animation is less important. What matters is the particular sense of humour in the writing and the proximity to what’s happing in the world right now.
Next Media Animation on SXSW:
Art Remixes
Nova Jiang is an artist in residence at Eyebeam Art and Technology.
She believes that art is not something rational, but a free association of things, which means that everyone can make art.
The Creatomatic randomly brings together everyday objects to inspire people to create innovative artworks.
Imagine you have a pair of scissors and a compass at your disposal to create a new and possibly useful product. This is how someone created the GPS scissors – an invention that helps you cut a piece of paper in a straight line. Genius!
The remarkable thing about this project is that every participant got to use their own skills to produce their inventions. A furniture design student combined a candle and a cloud to create a wax chandelier that burns itself. Someone with a background in mechanical engineering designed a tea bag catapult plate.
