Artists Statement

Exhibition. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21

Bastien Didier is an ISEA2023 selected artist

Mental garden allows everyone to create, collect and share memories materialized by mental flowers. Mental Garden is an interactive experience based on the collection of brain waves. The experiment aims to create a collection of stored, shareable and exchangeable mental flowers. The device allows visitors to record a mental memory in a time-stamped digital capsule then uploaded on an eco-friendly blockchain to be authenticated.

Thus, each user is invited to equip themselves with the headset and start recording to monitor their brain activity. As he thinks about his memory, his brain activity is translated to generate a digital plant which is the materialization of his thought. With the different creations, a mental garden is created representing the mental memories recorded by the visitors.

At the end of the experience, the visitor’s creation is minted on OpenSea, the decentralized NFT marketplace. Each visitor then becomes an artist and has the opportunity to share or sell their owned artwork. Through the collection, every creation contributes to a collective artwork.

The real-time generative design is made possible thanks to brain-environment interfaces allowing everyone, regardless of gender, age or physical condition, to generate their mental flower in an inclusive way.

Thinking about the garden means having to go back to the foundations of the world and humankind. The garden offers a form of appeasement, calm and serenity. Let’s cultivate our mental garden!     https://studio.mentalista.com/mental-garden

• Bastien Didier (FR) is Founder & CEO at Mentalista. Born in 1994, Bastien Didier aka Gille De Bast is a designer and engineer graduated in design technology from Sorbonne University and École Estienne, Paris. A designer in the research sphere, Bastien DIDIER is a specialist in human to machine interaction, algorithms, neurosciences and artificial intelligence. He explores the field of brain-environment interfaces using brain waves as creation material.Mentalista studio (Paris, FR) is a deeptech design studio part of the Mentalista company. Created in 2017, Mentalista is a deeptech company specializing in brain-environment interfaces. Our technology empowers people to let them control objects with their mind: moving a prosthesis, controlling smart home lights, ordering a pizza or becoming a superhero during a levitation experiment… We have created the Mentalista studio to raise awareness and design new uses, allowing as many people as possible to discover our technology ecosystem and converting people to brain-environment interfaces. https://www.linkedin.com/in/bastien-didier-mentalista/?originalSubdomain=fr https://studio.mentalista.com/about