Artists Statement
Can I kiss you online? How does your kiss feel in E.E.G. data?
Can we transfer a kiss and it’s intimacy online? Can we measure a kiss and what kissers feel together? Do we want to save our private kisses in a transparent database – to be used by others?
In E.E.G. KISS the artists investigate how a kiss can be translated into bio-feedback data. They deconstruct the kiss, to reconstruct a new synesthetic kissing ritual. In a Global Kiss-In, through feeling, seeing, hearing, touching all participants together share a kiss.
The artists: “Tele-presence technologies extend our bodies beyond biological boundaries in time and space, but they prevent us from touching. In a poetic, electric environment for kissing and measuring, for synchronizing and merging, we research a shared neuro-feedback system for networked kissing.”
Performance installation: Digital Synaesthetic EEG KISS
In performances and live kissing experiments with Brain Computer Interfaces, visitors are invited to kiss. While kissing and wearing E.E.G. headsets, their brainwaves are measured and visible as E.E.G. data. A floor projection encircles the kissers with the real time streaming E.E.G. data, as an immersive data scape. A soundscape is generated by the Brain Computer Interface, which translates the real time E.E.G. data of ‘kissing brains’ into a algorithm for a music score: an E.E.G. KISS symphony. The public around is part of the kiss, of the sound and of the immersive E.E.G.-data-visualization; both as an aesthetic experience as well as based on acts of kissing resonating when mirrored in the brain. For full text see: lancelmaat.nl/work/e.e.g-kiss
- Artists and researchers Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat (Lancel/Maat, based in Amsterdam, NL) are considered pioneers exploring the tension between embodied presence, intimacy and alienation, social cohesion and isolation, privacy and trust in posthuman bio(techno)logical entanglement with (non-)human others. They radically deconstruct and re-orchestrate automated biometric control technologies neuro-feedback and sensory perception, to create poetic Trust-Systems. lancelmaat.nl