So, we’re fresh off of hosting a MusicMakers hacklab in Berlin on the theme of Emotional Invention. And in an accidental synchronicity, this week Blitzkickers talk to the creator of an interactive installation for last year’s Amsterdam Dance Event that used sensors to project emotions into a spectacle of color and light.

The resulting scene looks like something out of Close Encounters – hues amidst the fog and a flying saucer ring around the crowd.

The idea: get twenty participants to volunteer to wear headsets and bio-signal sensors, via EMOTIV brainwave headsets, heart rate, and skin response. (Some might get pedantic and say those headsets don’t really measure EEG or brainwaves per se, before someone jumps in and corrects me.) These were transmitted to the visual installation in real-time.

Here’s a short film showing the results:

Blitzkickers also talk to interactive artist Nick Verstand, who lead a team including Nikki Hock and Children of the Light (among others). One of the more interesting comments in that interview relates DJing to collaboration in transmedia art:

What I really like about DJing is the ‘1+1 is 3’ principle that you have with records. You are in a relation with your audience — you can pick records of other people and combine them in a way that you, the audience and the records become more than these parts separate from each other.

That’s how I see my projects as well — I collaborate with other artists, whom I always include in the credits. They are kind of my records now, if combine them in a right way, then the result is always more. I think there is a really strong link with DJing.

We actually know Nick, as we were one of the first to exhibit his work ANIMA, in Berlin at Unrender / Lehrter Siebzehn. (That’s the site of the film here, in fact.) ANIMA also made a debut at ADE.

Apart from artist Fatima Yamaha, the project included loads of additional collaborators: Pandelis Diamantides, Showsync, TNO, EagleScience, Red Light Radio, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Check out the full interview:

Video Cuts: NICK VERSTAND AND POLARIS TO POWER OUR EMOTIONS [blitzkickers]

Via CDM

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