Opening AI-inspired artistic performance: Meeting of Minds

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Opening AI-inspired artistic performance: Meeting of Minds

Meeting of Minds. Choreography by Andy and Dionne Noble. Music by Anthony Brandt. Visual projections by Badie Khaleghian.
The University of Houston IUCRC Brain Center. Jose-Luis Contreras-Vidal, director. Featuring: Lauren Serrano and Tyler Orcutt, dancers, Astrid Nakamura and Nanki Chugh, violins, Molly Wise, viola, Christopher Ellis, cello (on recording).
“Meeting of Minds” is a unique combination of artistic performance and scientific experiment. 
As the dancers perform, they wear portable electroencephalography (EEG) caps that record the electrical signals in their brains.  The music and dance explore polarization – a pressing theme in today’s world.  The two dancers begin in opposition; in the course of the dance, they arrive at mutual understanding.  Meanwhile, the neuro-engineering team monitors the dancers’ brainwaves for neural signatures of intra- and inter-brain synchrony.  The choreography been designed to support the scientific inquiry: for instance, individual sections focus on eye contact, touch and synchronized movement, giving the scientific team rich sources of data on creative and expressive movement.  Innovative visual projections, via an aesthetic brain-computer interface (BCI), respond in real time to the live EEG neural synchrony data. 
This real-world study is only possible thanks to neural engineering and AI programs developed at Dr. Contreras-Vidal’s lab that remove artifacts from the data.  The IUCRC BRAIN’s art-science research has implications for the study of learning and neuro-rehabilitation, as well as teamwork, brain-machine interfaces and other topics in collective neuroscience. 

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