Kissing Data Symphony
AWARDS
TASIE 2019 Award, National Museum of China
/ Art & Science Innovation Prize Wu Guanzhong by Tsinghua University Beijing
NFF Netherlands Film Festival, Golden Calf Nomination Interactive 2019
GAAC Global Art & A.I. Competition 2019 Award China
EMARE /EMAP Award, Europe Media Art Platform - Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
Kissing Data Symphony builds on EEG KISS 2016 (click here).
A Communal Kiss Experience
Can we collectively share a kiss?
Can we digitally distribute our kisses and co-create a worldwide Kissing Data Symphony?
World-première:
Poetic Multi-Brain Computer Interface (Multi-BCI) for sharing a distributed communal kiss for 'Kissers' and 'Co-Kissers', AI & Artificial Emotional Intelligence.
Thanks to many partners in different (socio-technological) contexts, it has been performed with specific attention to diverse and inclusive cultural and gender identities.
Ritual. In this world's first Multi-BCI for kissing, both 'Kissers' and 'Co-Kissers' wear EEG headsets. As cyborgs they explore an interdependent corporeal sensation, of a synesthetic neuro-feedback route for perceiving kissing on the skin, in the brain and in the imagination.
KDS simultaneously records both the Kissers' uncontrolled brain activity while kissing, and the Co-Kissers' mirron-neuron activity of watching this kiss resonating in their brains. Together they co-create a real-time streaming communal datavisualisation and sonification - confluent in a Shared Reflective Datascape.
The KDS ritual was developed by Lancel and Maat over time, with participants, and exists of a set of actions that include listening, kissing, watching, autonomy of spatially sensing and moving on a distance or in close proximity, taking responsibility and care, followed by a shared dialogue. This tender ritual is carefully hosted by the artists.
Participants explore manifold personal feelings, interpretations and connections with the EEG data-traces and each other, fueled with personal memory of intimate experience of kissing and caressing. The emerging EEG data traces have shown to evoke tender, strange, unfamiliar (non-)human relations and emphatic relations among participants.
Kisser: “I had the feeling that my kiss was borne by the people around me."
Co-Kisser: “I felt like being part of their kiss, very intimate..."
Find participant reactions on: vimeo.com/481274422 and Artists Texts.
"In science, digital data represents things. In art, digital data points at itself for reflection."
Free to Thimoty Morton 2018.
Data patterns and privacy; meaning and mystification.
Critically, Lancel and Maat created a Multi-BCI for intimate, shared corporeal (brain) experience in merging realities. While increasingly, use of Multi-BCI's commercial BCI's focusses on group-emotions for AI and Big Data, control and automation, Kissing Data Symphony is a 'Reflexive DataScape’: provoking dialogue, reclaiming agency for public data-interpretation and authorship. Instead of trusting on data to direct, represent and interprete our (brain) activities, KDS explores a mode of living with data patterns as 'Co-Actors’ for a new form of shared meaning making through storytelling. To establish an aesthetic distance (Kwastek 2016), the data are ambiguously presented as both clinical recordings, and unfamiliar signals that mystify the secrecy of a kiss.
This experimental approach has shed new light on research into domains of AI Artificial Intelligent Emphatic Design, for ordering data patterns; critical shared data appropriation; interaction design in public spaces of merging realities.