Luciana Haill is a UK based artist working with EEG to produce realtime visualisations and sonifications of electrical current read by contacts from an EEG contact array. The artist claim to be measuring activity in the ‘prefrontal lobe’. The data abstracted by the EEG contacts positioned on the forehead is used to present a 2 channel visualisation of brain activity and and a stereo sonification – with the emphasis on exploring the performative possibilities of biofeedback. This emphasis on exploring the performative aspects of biofeedback set this project apart form the rather more complex experiments of the Listening to the Mind Listening projects of 2004.
Luciana was first introduced to EEG after studying with the cybernetic art pioneer Roy Ascott in the late 90′s. The artist is using the relatively simple 3 contact ‘consumer ‘ grade array produced and marketted by the artist’s company IBVA. Medical grade EEGS array use in excess of 16+ contacts and this provides sufficient localisation to provide a topology of brain activity while limiting the noise inherent to the EEG method. Haill presented work at Future of Sound festival in 2008 and is the head of ‘Augmented States of Consciousness’ at the Institute for Unnecessary Research.