Ridge of Sentiment
Ridge of sentiment’ is an interactive projection mapping which adapts human’s brainwave and with nature theme through the visual and the sounds of nature.
Introduction
Have you thought about how your brainwave looks like?
Have you been influenced by nature or put your influence on it?
‘Ridge of sentiment’ utilises mainly the machine called EEG(Electroencephalography) which detects a person’s brainwave applying electrophysiological monitoring method. In this project, the EEG scans your attention and meditation levels, capturing them in current time. The real time candidate's brainwave is visualised via the projection mapping, and also sound of nature is demonstrated.
Through ‘Ridge of sentiment’, I intended to represent the interaction between the humans and nature. I reckon that the biggest similarity between brainwave and nature is the diversity. The most of the elements I used in this project were deeply inspired by nature. I represented this concept through the sounds of nature and the graphical projection. The visual concept presented through the hexagon shape object structure.
Concept and background research
My initial questions before I had schemed this project were how computational factors can affect the nature, and the way human’s brain gets influenced by the digital materials and the nature around us. I investigated the relations between brainwaves and art specifically figuring out the way to influence art piece structure in relation to human’s emotion represented in brainwave forms. Moreover, the investigation which I implemented encouraged me to gain a general knowledge about how brainwave works and practised with brainwave machine called EEG.
During the specification of the theme, the greatest agony was making the connection between the points of interest; Especially nature and brainwaves those I desired to represent via the project. As a result, I ended up discovering the similarity among various factors. I decided to the coherence as ‘diversity’. Also ‘chaos theory’ has inspired me in terms of underlying a state of disorder.
The core questions which I try to represent in my work are:
What if the diverse nature may be the container for the chaos system which I preset using computational object and existing within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems? What if that tangled chaotic systems can be manipulated by brainwaves?
From my perspective, not only nature has enormous diversity such as colours, shapes, sounds and etc, but also brainwaves are partly predictable and appear in different forms. As a result, I subtly utilised the concept which includes nature, brainwave and digital material by means of visuals which is generated by codes, sounds and object I mapped.
Visual
First of all, I have got inspired the hexagon shaped object by honeycomb and nature hexagon basalt column in the Giant’s Causeway of Northern Ireland. Those are created only by nature itself and none of the human has manipulated those original shapes. Generating the biggest amount of outcomes with the minimal power is one of nature’s fundamental aspect, and the hexagon shape is ideally fit for this purpose.
Secondly, the colours I selected to create graphics are mainly came from the natures especially flora and sky. The core characteristic of nature pallet is high saturation and vivid ratio, so I intended to avoid an indistinct spectrum like pastel tone. Also, to represent the brainwave more efficiently, I was graphically inspired by Mindswarms by Random quark (Theodoros Papatheodorou and Tom Chambers) in terms of the colourful visuals, curved waveform and how candidate’s real time feeling state affects visualisation.
Brain Waves
There are 5 types of brainwave forms; Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta and Delta. Each brainwave refers to the different condition of the brain Gamma, Beta and Alpha are the awakening statement and Theta and Delta are activated during the sleep. In my project, I used eSense Attention/Meditation Meters. Beta is related to attention level which is a user’s mental focus or concentration. Meditation level is connected to Alpha and it measures calmness or relaxation.
Between those two parameters, attention level is more attractive to me so, I mainly aimed to calculate the audiences’ real time attention status in the congested exhibition place affected by external factors such as noise and visual disturbances. At the same time, meditation statue among the crowded ambience was also fascinating.
Sound
All the sounds I used extruded from nature and affected by brainwave status (apart from background wind).
Attention level is related to the ocean sounds. Rain soundscape refers to meditation level.
When meditation level is low, the audience can hear the thunder. On the other hand, crispy wave noise means high attention level. Additionally, there are particular wave ranges which represented through birds and wasps sounds.
