Reality Bending Lab › News › Unicity through Complexity: EEG attractors at the OHBM BrainArt exhibition
Unicity through Complexity: EEG attractors at the OHBM BrainArt exhibition
My art project, NeuropsyXart, was selected for the 2023 Brain Art Exhibition, organized by the BrainArt Special Interest Group of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, which in 2023 was in Montréal, 22-26 July. The theme was The Multifaceted Brain: Adaptation and Diversity. In July it went up on two easels on the exhibition floor (pic or it didn't happen).
Unicity through Complexity
The piece is two canvases, 1.5m by 1.5m, facing each other with just enough room between them for one person to stand. Each canvas is an EEG attractor: eight minutes of one person's brain activity, at rest, eyes closed, drawn as a single continuous line. One of them comes from a neurotypical person and the other from a neuroatypical person, and the only thing asked of whoever stands between them is which is which.
Neither canvas was composed, which is what makes that a fair question to put. What is on them is a property of the sitter's own physiology rather than of the artist, who is merely a facilitator, a tool.
What is an attractor
The usual way to draw brain activity is as a signal unfolding over time: a wiggly line, time along the bottom. An attractor plot - i.e., a state-space embedding - drops time from the axes altogether and plots the signal against its own immediate past, so that every point is the state the system is in now against the state it was in a moment ago. The wiggle becomes a trajectory through a space of states rather than a history. Signals that look like noise in the first view often turn out, in the second, to be orbiting a well-defined region they never leave however long the recording runs: the boundaries of the system that produced them.
A screen between the easels carried an explanation of the method, which was equally as important. Aside from whatever the canvases are worth as art, the stand was a short introduction to what chaos theory is doing in neuroimaging: the family of indices (entropy, fractal dimension, and the rest) that we use in the lab's own work on complexity and that NeuroKit computes.
Many thanks to the BrainArt SIG for the invitation, the wall space and the easels. The rest of that year's exhibition is worth the detour: the full catalogue is online.
The legends says the two canvas were donated to the University of Montréal.
