Brain activity and mental workload associated with artistic practice

Abstract

We present the first stage of our on-going artist-driven BCI collaboration, where we equipped an artist with the brain scanning technique functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) in order to record mental workload levels during her creative practice. We artists are interested in exposing the hidden cognitive processes involved in our creative practice, in order to reuse or integrate the data into our performances. The computer science researchers are interested in collecting unstructured ‘in the wild’ fNIRS data, and to see how the artists interpret the data retrospectively. We highlight some interesting early examples from the data and describe our on-going plans. We will have completed a second data collection before the workshop.