Workshops

Behavioral Matter Workshop Centre Pompidou, Paris

March 15 – 17  2019 :
“Behavioral Matter” : Public research-creation workshop for international participants

I’ve been invited to participate in a big research-creation party at the Centre Pompidou with many fellow digital romantics, post human dreamers and hyper geeks.  I don’t have that many details beyond the fact that I’m in a group concerned with inter-species communications, and that perhaps I can collaborate with others to communicate with pigeons through my emotional biosensors, harnessing the power of our emotional bodies to simulate pigeon coos, squawks and wingflaps.

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I’m excited to see the great exhibition and also to meet some interesting artist-researchers. Information below en français…

15 – 17 mars 2019 :
“Behavioral Matter” : workshop de recherche-création international et public

Au sein du forum du Centre Pompidou, 12 modules thématiques (machine learning, comportement de la brume, internet des objets, matérialisation de données, microbiotes, impression 4D,…),avec la participation de plus de 70 créateurs, chercheurs, étudiants et étudiants-chercheurs.
Centre Pompidou * Forum, en face de la librairie * 11h-19h
Visites organisées les 16 et 17 mars (inscription sur place), restitution publique dimanche 17 mars à 16h.

Le projet “Behavioral Matter“ est mis en place par EnsadLab, le laboratoire de recherche de l’ École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs
(EnsAD – Université PSL, dans le cadre de l’exposition #LaFabriqueduVivant (cycle Mutations/Créations 3), avec le soutien de la Chaire « arts & sciences » de l’École polytechnique, de l’École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs – PSL et de la Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso et avec le partenariat du Cluster “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material” de Humboldt State University de Berlin et du fonds PERSPEKTIVE pour l’art contemporain & l’architecture, une initiative du Bureau des arts plastiques de l’INSTITUT FRANÇAIS, soutenu par le Ministère de la Culture et le Goethe-Institut.

Affective VR Workshop

Welcome

Welcome to the Emotional Data and Unity/VR workshop!  This workshop is hosted by Erin Gee, a Canadian artist and researcher who has worked in emotional biodata and art since 2012.  She has created work for emotional biodata and robotics (Swarming Emotional Pianos, 2014), children’s choir (Song of Seven, 2017), and now for VR with her latest work Project H.E.A.R.T (2017).

She is an active promoter of open-source and feminist culture, and publishes all of her technical work (Arduino code/Unity code) under the GNU GPL 3.0.

What is the GNU GPL?

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.

TLDR: You may use, modify, redistribute this code for free.  If you redistribute, you must acknowledge my original authorship, and you must always allow other people to also modify and redistribute for free.  Any violation of this agreement means that you are breaking my copyright!  If you do modify aspects of this code, please share the love and contribute to the GitHub.

If you are not sure how to contribute to a GitHub project, feel free to contact me at erin dot marie dot gee at gmail dot com (or just the contact form on my website) and I’ll set you up!

For the full documentation of GNU GPL v3, click here.

Contextual Resource Section

BIOSENSORS IN GAMES

April 13th, 2011

Jacob Aron first reported on a variety of games that were taking advantage of biosensing technologies in an article published in New Scientist.

Aron, Jacob. (2011). “Emotional Video Gaming Makes the Action Real.” New Scientist.  Accessed November 15th 2017.


October 2016 – BfB Labs’ emotionally responsive game “Champions of the Shengha,” is dependent on a user’s emotional control — measured by a heart rate sensor — for success.


October 2016 – Nevermind is an adventure game where you explore strange worlds and solve puzzles to unlock a mystery that lurks within each “patient’s” inner psyche.  The Windows and Mac versions of Nevermind use biofeedback technology to detect your feelings of stress while playing, dynamically responding to those feelings to affect gameplay.  You can also play the game without this technology. http://nevermindgame.com/


BIOSENSORS IN CINEMA

Published by The Verge on 18 Jul 2017.

Lauren Goode goes inside Dolby’s little-known biophysical labs, where the company has been embarking on a five-year project to track people’s emotional responses as they watch movies and TV shows.

Biosensors are used by Dolby to study viewers’ emotional responses to

  • Aural frequency ranges
  • Dynamic color ranges
  • Audio volume as well as screen brightness
  • Music and sound effects

VR and Empathy – A reading list

Ebert, Roger. (June 23, 2005.) “Ebert’s Hall of Fame Remarks.” Roger Ebert’s Journal. Accessed November 15th 2017.

Bye, Kent. (January 31, 2017). “VR as the Ultimate Empathy Machine with Gabo Arora.”  Voices of VR Podcast.  Accessed November 13th 2017.

Hamilton, Kathryn. (February 23, 2017). “Voyeur Reality.” The New Inquiry. Accessed November 15th 2017.

Yang, Robert. (April 5, 2017). “If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you have taken their shoes”: empathy machines as appropriation machines.”  radiator design blog.  Accessed November 15th 2017.

Scientific Resources

In this section you will find information on the science behind how emotion is generated by the brain, and how it can be “read” by sensing instruments.

What is Emotion

Emotion is a multi-component response to an emotionally potent event, causing changes in subjective feeling quality (psychological dimension), expressive social behavior (behavioral dimension), and physiological activation (physiological dimension) of the subject. (Kreiberg 2009)

Psychological/neurological frameworks for understanding emotion itself are articulated very well by Dr Lisa Feldman-Barrett, a scientist at Northeastern University.  She speaks particularly of the complexity of the human body, which might be experiencing a host of physiological effects from the ANS system, and how these are interpreted and perhaps also constructed by language.

On her website you will find many plain-language resources for emotional understanding from a contemporary neuroscientific point of view under the heading “Articles.”

How Scientists detect Emotion

The physiological techniques presented at this workshop were made according to psychologist Dr. Sylvia Kreibig‘s 2010 review of 134 publications dating from the 1970s to the 2000s. While the techniques viewed in this document are not weighted for “success” of the cited studies, and the literature clearly shows that there is no one “technique” for applying these skills, this document that has been cited over 1000 times in scientific literature since its publication, including over 200 times in 2017.

Source:

Kreibig,Sylvia D. “Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review.” Biological Psychology 84 (2010) 394–421.

 

Continued research
If you would like to continue keeping up with scientific research in this area, an academic journal search using the databases PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, and PubMed is recommended with the following search terms:

[emotion] and [autonomic nervous system or cardiovascular or cardiac or heart or respiration or respiratory or electrodermal or skin conductance]

 

Technical Resource Section

Unity Tutorials

This section is dedicated to technical resources, tutorials and code to get you started playing around with the biosensors.

Mirza VFX teaches amazing tutorials in particle creation.  Plug your biosensors in to manipulate beautiful particle-driven environments.

(Inspiration: Mufson, Beckett. (Aug 29, 2014) “A Team Of Artists Are 3D-Printing Their Emotions As Abstract House Decorations.”  Creators Project.  Accessed November 15th 2017.)

GitHub

Hardware Resources

Materials list for Erin Gee’s BiodataTrio PCB board.

Don’t forget to prepare your PulseSensor before you use it!  Click here for instructions on how to apply the protective decal and provide a gluegun seal.  The rest of the advice you can take or leave, but these two steps are ESSENTIAL to the longevity and accuracy of your device!

When buying cables to build your sensors – Look for cable that features 2 signals that are shielded.  The biosensors are picking up on very, very sensitive electrical information from the body – any disruption in the electric field could make your readings less accurate.  Especially if the sensor cables are placed near to one another!

To prevent this, you can either buy shielded cable (like this) and solder the silver shielding to your ground connection (pick whatever you like for the other two, maybe red for power and black for signal?)

Or if you’re in a pinch, you can just twist the ground wire around the signal wire that you are trying to protect from outside interference.

Here’s a link to my Respiration Belt Instructable.  After a few years I didn’t find that a respiration belt was as interesting to me because the belts are awkward to strap into for the average person, but if you’d like to go for it, here is a simple way to make it happen!  This signal is perhaps best amplified, and you might need to calculate the relative drift of the elastic and account for it as an offset in order to capture things like when someone is holding their breath.

Ideas Lab Denmark

I will be giving a unique and in-depth workshop hosted by Emotional Data Lab (Aarhus University), Interactive Denmark and Ideas Lab in Aarhus, Denmark from November 21-23.  The workshop consists of 3 three-hour sessions where I will share my materials and experiences with incorporating physiological markers of emotion into the VR-compatible Unity environment.

Participants will be placed into “teams” in order to work together, experiment, and discuss the promises, problems and potential of using biosensors to capture a user’s emotional experience through digital tools.

KidzLab Montreal

KIDZLAB September 28-29 2017

Perte de Signal is happy to announce the launch of its first edition of KidZlab, a 4-day digital arts festival for young creators: “Un laboratoire d’innovation pour l’imaginaire.”

For this first edition of KidZlab, I presented a workshop entitled “Strange Theremin” – teaching teams of young people to work in groups to assemble a circuit that allows them to manipulate musical tones with their skin conductance.  This new musical instrument allows students to explore touch, sweat, and emotional engagement as a potential musical material.

Here’s what my young students had to say:

 

The event also featured very interesting workshops by artists:

Eric Cariat (BE) – Stephanie Castonguay – Maxime Damecour – Erin Gee – Alice Jarry – Roby Provost-Blanchard – Alexandre Quessy

at Perte de Signal 5445 De Gaspé – Espace 107 (RDC) Montréal.

With thanks to:

Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec
Wallonie-Bruxelles International
KIKK Festival 2017
Les Journées de la culture
Le Fab Lab du PEC

For more information (in French):
https://perte-de-signal.org/kidzlab-festival-dart-numerique-pour-le-jeune-public/

KidZlab Laboratoire d’innovation pour l’imaginaire from PERTE DE SIGNAL on Vimeo.

Artist talk and Catalogue Launch for Vocales Digitales

I will be giving an artist talk on Saturday April 23rd at Hamilton Artists’ Inc. to support my solo exhibition Vocales Digitales.  The event will also feature a catalogue launch, featuring a bilingual publication that includes essays by philosopher Eric Lewis and curator Maiko Tanaka.

The next day on Sunday April 24th I will be giving an artists’ workshop that introduces the Teensy microcontroller through basic electronics and biosensors.