- Exhibition: Science, Technology & Art
Science, Technology and Art on the site and subject of a coming revolution in healthcare
Metamersion - Exhibition, Music & Bar
27-28 May 2022, 20-23H
Doca Pesca F
Champalimaud Foundation
Free registration HERE
This exhibition seeks to blur the boundaries between science and art, the physical and the virtual, medicine and health. It is part science museum, part art gallery, and part exhibition exploring the use of immersive, whole body interactive technologies to reveal new truths and new tools.
The title, Metamersion, is an amalgam of the concept of metamers: perceptually indistinguishable stimuli with distinct physical characteristics, and immersion: a state of deep and uninterrupted mental involvement. Just as color metamers were used to reveal our trichromatic vision more than a century before we knew its molecular basis, immersive technologies - virtual and augmented reality, whole body motion capture, computer vision - hold the promise of unlocking deep mysteries about our perception of the world and how this influences our daily actions and decisions. These actions, these decisions - our patterns of behaviour - and the environments in which they take place, impact everything from how well we recover from brain injury and how we age to our risk for disease and ultimately how well we function within, and as, a society.
On this occasion, we introduce a new programme at the Champalimaud Foundation, to be constructed on the site of the DocaPesca warehouse as part of the Ocean Campus ecosystem that is being created at Doca de Pedrouços, in Lisbon. It is a programme that connects fundamental neuroscience research to human health because we believe the time is right to expand our knowledge toward more immediate impact.
The Champalimaud Foundation has always aspired to push the boundaries of our understanding, to support research and medicine side by side, for the benefit of society. This programme represents nothing less than an opportunity to revolutionise medicine around those same pillars, leveraging world class behavioural neuroscience and technology to create a new arm of medicine, complementary to and integrated with existing approaches. In doing so, we aim to bend our collective future toward a longer, more resilient, more fulfilling way of life for all humankind.
We invite you to take one small step into a world where technology, neuroscience, behaviour and health are woven into a new type of fabric, one with the power to envelop and stimulate our senses and thoughts with unprecedented depth. By playing with the rules of perception - following them here, tweaking them there - we gain access to a powerful new creative space in which to construct endless realities. In science we seek truth and understanding of the world. Art seeks the same, leveraging human creativity and ingenuity toward reflection. The selected pieces and demonstrations of Metamersion offer a kind of antechamber onto a world where Art and Science merge into tools for inquiry and therapy.
MORE on Human Neuroecology and Digital Therapeutics
Augenblick
Lunar Ring
Augenblick, Lunar Ring
The installation Augenblick (“Blink of an Eye”) uses AI-mediated, real-time “style transfer” to explore new forms of interaction between creative humans and machines. The interplay gives rise to the phenomenon of emergent creativity, where something new and unexpected comes to life: a creative interaction, where the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. The algorithm used in this piece was developed in the context of neuroscience research investigating how the brain processes the visual world.
A camera is installed facing the audience. With this “eye”, the audience can seek further forms of interaction within the warehouse. These videos will be streamed into deep neural networks running on a supercomputer, which creatively reinvents the environment and reflects it back on the display, offering to the public a new perception of the space, playing with the real and virtual concepts. In this work Lunar Ring invites the public to interact and create within their installation.
Haita
Tupac Martir
Haita, Tupac Martir
Haita (“River”) is born from imagining how a dancer’s choreography could be explored from the inside-out, using recordings and images from within the human body, recast into new forms within virtual environments. The piece was developed during an art-science residency at the Champalimaud Foundation, using creative technology developed by Satore Studio.
Bringing together dance, music and state-of-the-art technology, the installation takes the form of a quadriptych display of four projections of the same choreographed piece. The dance itself is a mix of styles - incorporating modern ballet, Portuguese Vira and Mexican traditions - which has been recorded on film, as well as via motion and volumetric capture technology. While motion capture translates movement into computer-generated animations, volumetric capture records changes in the space around the dancer, inverting the process. Tupac, at Champalimaud Research, used medical technology to scan the dancer’s body and brain, building an ‘inside-out’ picture of how a dancer imagines choreography.
The installation will be accompanied by a physical dancer performing at 9:30pm on both days.
Credits:
Artist - Tupac Martir // Producer - Satore Studio // Dancer - Rita Carpinteiro // Music - Tupac Martir // Lead Tech - Filipe Barbosa // Violin - Alexandra Finlaison // Cello - Klara Schumann // Guitar - Andrew Lancaster // Synth - Eric Martino // Choir - CCC // Musical Production - Tupac Martir & Moullinex
Mixed - Moullinex // MRI & EEG - Champalimaud Foundation // MRI Technician - Nuno Loução // EEG Technician - Tiago Quendera and Gonçalo Guiomar // Shoot Location - Maat // Visual Assistant - Rebecca McKie Collis // Visual Assistant - Alyssa Melo // Data Assistant - Rajan Chakravarty Jalem // Camera - Francisco Crocco
At the beach
Werner Haas
At the beach, Werner Haas
A collection of pictures taken systematically from a window towards people on the beach. The low resolution combined with post production digital intervention converts photographs into a kind of dance of human behavioural notation, an evocative ethogram, the meaning of which is revealed to us through postures and gestures. In the images, purposely coarse human forms nonetheless expose inner states of the subjects related to intention and emotion, highlighting the richness of behaviour as a lens unto the inner complexity. Despite the static nature of the work, our brains absorb the information and use it to construct dynamic narratives.
Polylith
Collaborative work, Champalimaud Neuroscience
Polylith, Collaborative Work, Champalimaud Neuroscience
Polylith are a triptych of interactive installations that aim to simulate a deep and compelling connection to various naturalistic environments. The experiences are mediated by body tracking technology, which allows the simulation of parallax, and naturalistic changes in the sonic landscape. Closing the loop between the machine and the observer, the viewer is invited to let go of the physical world and fall into a virtual one, where new realities can be flexibly generated to study and shape internal states of mind.
Each element of Polylith can be thought of as atoms that form the material elements for building an endless possibility of virtual worlds. They demonstrate, in a highly distilled manner, the haptic nature of our senses, ie, we move our sensors around through our behavior, and this in turn creates lawful structure in the sensory information we take in. Only by creating environments where these laws are obeyed, across many modalities, will our brain be fully convinced and engaged within virtual environments.
Credits:
Concept and Production - Gonçalo Guiomar & Zachary Mainen // Interactive Sound Design - André Gonçalves & Gonçalo Guiomar // Virtual Environment Design - Filipe Rodrigues & Gonçalo Guiomar // Software Support - José Teixeira, João Frazão & Filipe Mendes // Production and installation support - Artur Silva & Filipe Mendes // Production Support - Paulo Carriço & Joseph Paton
Mindpod
MSquare Healthcare, Mindmaze
Mindpod - MSquare Healthcare, Mindmaze
Research indicates that people with neurological injuries and diseases benefit from greatly increased doses and intensities of behavioural intervention. A highly engaging animated gaming experience – based on evidence and prescribed protocols – MindPod Dolphin is designed to promote the recovery of motor skill and cognitive function. For stroke patients, it comes with an anti-gravity vest that de-weights the arm and trains fine-motor control of the upper-limb by encouraging continuous exploration of its immersive oceanic environment. The dolphin invites patients to "be" them and the software's algorithm then stretches their mind and body in the hope of maximizing recovery.
The human brain possesses the incredible capacity to change its own structure to learn, adapt, master, and even repair itself. This phenomenon, called plasticity, and its mysterious effects can happen at any age. Neuroscientists passionately strive to unlock these secrets. The prize – improved cognition, wellness, attention, mood, and even the potential to repair the brain after damage. What has been discovered in the last decade is that experiential technology (interactive games, virtual and augmented reality, haptic interfaces, etc.) can exploit and augment plasticity.
At Metamersion the Mindpod will be an invitation to the public to experience this engaging and immersive environment, and feel the real potential of this kind of therapy.
