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

World-première:
Communally kissing through a Multi-person Brain Computer Interface (Multi-BCI) based on EEG, AI & Emotional Intelligence.

A Communal Kiss Experience
Touching takes place on the skin, in the brain and in the imagination.
Can we collectively share a kiss?
Can we digitally distribute our kisses and co-create a worldwide Kissing Data Symphony?

Performance Description This perfromance builds on E.E.G. KISS 2016 (click here).
The poetic and innovative Kissing Data Symphony premieres a communal ritual in which both Kissers AND Spectators ('Co-Kissers') wear EEG headsets for sharing a kiss-experience. Recordings of both the Kissers' brain activity, AND the Co-Kissers' mirror-neuron activity - of watching the kiss resonating in their brains - real-time merge to co-create a communal datavisualisation and sonification, confluent in an immersive 'Shared Reflexive Datascape'.

This tender ritual is carefully hosted by the artists. It has been performed worldwide, with specific attention to (neuro-)diverse and inclusive cultural and gender identities. Developed with participants in an iterative process, it exists of a set shared actions of listening, kissing, watching, autonomy of moving in time and space and sensing proximity; of taking responsibility and care; and a shared dialogue. It invites participants to meet via a shared synesthetic neuro-feedback journey, to explore interdependent corporeal sensations.

Experience
The public performance of kissing and caressing, with the emerging EEG data traces, have shown to evoke tender, strange, unfamiliar yet emphatic relations among participants with each other - and with the visualized and sonified data. 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, or caressing each other's faces.
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, the KDS Reflexive DataScape provokes awareness and dialogue to reclaim agency for public data-interpretation and authorship. Instead of trusting on data to direct, represent and interpret 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. The artists establish an Aesthetic distance (Kwastek 2016) through a form of physical and intimate datafication that ambiguously hovers between familiar clinical recordings and unfamiliar data signals - mystifying the secrecy of a kiss.

Future
In a broad societal context, KDS has shed new light on interdisciplinary research into Art and Media Theory, and Social Studies; AI Artificial Intelligent Emphatic Design (for data collections, pattern recognition, and critical shared data appropriation); Interaction and Participatory Complex System design. It has stimulated dialogue on a shared sense of reciprocity, vulnerability, responsibility and empathy, in public spaces of digital cultures and merged realities. The artwork's next development expands its focus on human and non-human (data) connections to plants and flowers, see here.

SHOWS.
LABoral, Gijon Spain 2021. In collaboration with EMAP European Media Art Platform and the European ARTificial Intelligence LAB. Curator: Karin Ohlenschläger. Virtual Exhibition and Lecture. Kissing Data.
Werkleitz Halle 2021, Germany. Member European Media Art Platform & Creative Europe Programme. Curator: Peter Zorn. With Coralie Vogelaar and Arjon Dunnewind. Kissing Data Symphony.
Ars Electronica Festival Linz 2019. Exhibition: 'Out of the box'. In collaboration with EMAP European Media Art Platform and werkleitz. Curator Peter Zorn. Kissing Dat Symphony.
TASIE 2019 Tsinghua University, Art Science Innovation Exhibition National Museum of China, Beijing. "AS Helix: The Integration of Art and Science in the Age of Artificial Intelligence." Kissing Data Symphony.
NFF 20219 Interactive Expo, at Impakt Utrecht. Curator: Paulien Dresscher. Kissing Data Symphony.
2019 OCT Design & Art Gallery Shenzhen Lecture series 'The Entelechy of A Hypernatural Generation', with Stefano Mancuso, Zheng Bo and Paola Antonelli (MoMa, New York).
2019 RIXC center for new media culture, Riga, Art Science festival. Curators Rasa Smite, Raitis Smiths. Kissing Data Symphony.
ISEA 2019 Gwangju South Korea. Curator: Roh So Yeoung. Exhibition 'Lux Aeterna'. Intimate Data Symphony.