Emergent Consciousness

21 April 2007 Schedule
3:00pm - 8:00pm :: Ashanti and Chris Korda will be facilitating sessions with EKTA
8:00pm - 9:30pm :: Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot presents Dreams in High Fidelity
9:30pm - 10:30pm :: Sean Stevens presents Synaesthesia
10:30pm - 11:ish pm :: Eartha Harris/Project Sphere & Scott Draves music/visuals performance.

Dreams in High Fidelity

Electric Sheep realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet. It's a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms.

Dreams in High Fidelity is a painting that evolves. It was designed and rendered with the Electric Sheep screen-saver, but at vastly higher aesthetic and technical quality. Physically it consists of a small computer driving a large high definition display. The computer creates a continuously morphing, non-repeating, abstract animation. The animations are rendered by the Electric Sheep network, but at triple the resolution and much smoother motion.

The talk will explain how it works, and why I'm doing it.

Read Spot's bio here

Synaesthesia

Sean Steven's software and hardware, called Synesthesia was created with an eye/ear towards creating art-intelligence capable of making correlations between motion, sound, light and video in a way similar to that of the human mind.

Following his belief that visual entertainment needs to move away from being locked into a 4:3 2d plane, Sean created the interactive art piece Free the Stars specifically for the woods of Vermont, sponsored by a Firefly Arts Collective art grant.

Expect this talk/show and tell to contain demonstrations & explanations of Sean's Synesthesia visual instrument using the Nintendo Wii Remote, Free the Stars II, and potentially other pieces.

Read Sean's bio here

EKTA: A Sensory Awareness Installation

EKTA is an interactive multimedia and biofeedback installation that allows a user to control light and sound directly with their brain waves. EKTA mirrors the user's brain state, allowing them to mentally program many aspects of the experience, in real time. The user wears a special EEG headband, which radios their brain waves to a network of computers. The computers respond with synthesized algorithmic music, and a video projection of continuously morphing kaleidoscopic imagery, both of which follow changes in the user's brain waves. For example, as the user relaxes, the music gets slower and deeper, encouraging them to relax even more (positive feedback). The experience leads the user through seven distinct stages, which correspond to the seven chakras (energetic centers) of the human body. Each chakra is represented by a unique color, geometry, bass note, and change of musical instrument.

EKTA is the Sanskrit word for UNITY. EKTA allows the user to experience the unification of their inner and outer vibrations. The goal of this heightened awareness is transcendence, a state in which they see things as they really are. As with many meditative and spiritual practices, this has the potential to bring about internal transformation.

Read Ashanti and Chris Korda's bio here