Artistic vs. Scientific Orientation
How do you balance the artistic and scientific elements in your work? Do you feel more comfortable with one than the other?
From an early age, I felt a definite sense of vocation — a calling to be “an artist” — coupled with a fascination for “how things work.” Science was and continues to be an important part of how I pursue this curiosity. Since I began exploring biofeedback in the early 2000s, I have been interested in the connections between art, psychophysiology, and neuroscience — and ways they can help us understand who we are and how we function.
As an artist working with psychophysiological phenomena, science and technology provide crucial ways to understand and work in very concrete ways — using body-mind processes as materials or circuits for creative exploration. While scientific methods of knowing and measuring are central, my motivations are very much artistic, cultural, and pragmatic — creating situations that enable us to experience these phenomena as being special and sacred.
‘Art & Science’ can feel like a very binary way of thinking about these collaborations. There are many different ways of knowing and observing, including social sciences, indigenous knowledge and medicine, psychotherapy, philosophy, and somatic bodywork, all relevant to the practice of biofeedback art. I hope that we can keep opening up this discussion to hold space for these other ways of knowing.
Initial Motivation for Biofeedback Art
When did you start exploring the intersection of biological data and artistic expression? What sparked your interest in this field?
I first read about biofeedback in the late 1990s when I was exploring my interest in hypnosis and trance-states, and ways these states could be supported with electronic technologies. I had some experience working with analog and modular synthesizers, and when I realised what biofeedback was, I was immediately blown away by the potential to create a sonic experience that was modulated by some aspect of our conscious and subconscious experiences. James Turrell’s work on ‘seeing how we see’ was a huge influence on my thinking at the time and the idea of biofeedback art seemed like a way to extend this phenomenological interest; to enable us to ‘feel how we feel’. It was a real ‘lightning bolt’ moment! I had no idea at the time that other artists had been making such work since the 60s, but the thought that we could create artworks that enable us to ‘feel into’ body-mind dynamics – in ‘direct’ and interactive ways – remains very exciting.
Impact and Aspirations
Where would you like to see the greatest impact of your work? What specific outcomes or changes are you hoping to achieve through your projects in academia, industry, or public?
First and foremost, I’d like the value and impact of my work to unfold in the experience and imagination of the people interacting with it through their own body-mind process. At this individual level, I have had some really wonderful, moving conversations with people after their interactions with my works — reflecting on insights and perspectives about their own health and being afforded by these interactions.
All successful artworks embed themselves in our imaginations as felt and remembered experiences that go on to inform subsequent experiences, interactions, and sense-making processes.
I’m very interested in art as a way of processing and ‘making sense’ of scientific understanding.
Biofeedback interaction offers people a way to sense, understand, and regulate our autonomic nervous system processes.
My hope then is that – as biofeedback art practice matures, and as more audiences become familiar with these ways of experiencing and interacting, that these experiences may eventually contribute to improvements in how we as a society, imagine, talk about and care for each other’s wellbeing.
Challenges & Growth
What have been some of the main challenges you’ve faced in your work in general or specifically with biofeedback art? How have these challenges shaped your principles, approach, and methods? How have your goals changed since beginning your work?
The main challenges I’ve encountered have been 1) technical capability; and 2) how to structure the different stages of the experience as a whole.
When I started working on biofeedback art in 2002, I had no experience with computer programming and was approaching interactive art from a sound-design and sound-synthesis perspective. I don’t consider myself a ‘natural’ coder, and have relied on visual-programming languages (Max and PureData) for my own work, usually in collaboration with custom made applications made by programmers I collaborate with (Trent Brooks, Jason McDermott, Greg Turner, David Morris-Oliveros).
It takes time to become familiar with bio-signal dynamics. When crafting image and sound using changes in bio-data, I try to take into account variations between people, and also within a single person’s interaction over time. The mapping of data to biofeedback signals involves the creation of a software-based ‘instrument’ capable of supporting an expressive approach to data visualisation/sonification. Add to this functions to support recording, playback or simulation of sensor data and it becomes quite a challenge to coordinate all the different components as the work goes through various iterations over time. All this can become a rather heavy cognitive load when you are making the work: making an software-instrument, and then composing a software-artwork using the instrument you made; and then iterations of this: making further changes to the instrument; making changes to the (data-mapping) ‘artwork’.
Unlike traditional artworks that build on centuries of established cultural practices and habits we are born into, it is seldom automatically clear for audiences how they should or could interact with a biofeedback artwork. The perceived responsiveness of biofeedback artworks will be significantly limited to the extent that audiences feel consciously or subconsciously confused and therefore stressed.
Experience with somatic bodywork practices such as the Feldenkrais Method ‘Functional Integration’ and ‘Awareness Through Movement’ have been important for my understanding of this aspect of the practice, leading to the incorporation of pre-recorded spoken word inductions that assist audiences to ‘arrive’ into their body (and the work) and establish a physiological baseline state of calm – from which state voluntary changes can then be initiated and observed.
Tools & Methods
Could you share information about specific hardware or software tools or methods that are integral to your work?
For heart rate monitoring, I use a mix of commercially available Bluetooth 4 HR sensors, and custom built microcontrollers (Dr Angelo Fraietta, Smart Controller) and also incorporate medical-grade infrared pulse plethysmogram circuits (Nonin). For EEG, I initially used the MyndPlay BrainBandXL; then mostly Interaxon ‘Muse v.1’ and more recently the EMOTIV Epoc+ headset.
I use Max (Cycling74) and PureData software for data analysis, mapping, and sound design. For frequency-domain analysis of heart rate variability data - I use separate custom built apps that interact with Max/PD using OpenSoundControl (OSC) protocol.
Wireless biosensor signals are usually routed wirelessly to Max or PureData using custom built applications written by Trent Brooks (BrainwaveOSC; HeartRateOSC) or via the MindMonitor iOS app when using Interaxon’s ‘Muse’ EEG data visualisation I use custom data-visualisation apps (developed by Trent Brooks, Jason McDermott, Andy Nichols, David Morris-Oliveros, Greg Turner and John Tonkin), and TouchDesigner (developed by Michela Ledwidge, MOD productions).
Collaborations
Overall, how has collaboration influenced your projects? Specifically, what insights did you gain when working with experts from other domains, such as collaborating with scientists if you’re primarily an artist?
Collaborations have been instrumental in the development of my practice; from collaborations with curators to support the development and presentation of the works; to collaborations with software developers/coders and hardware engineers; and clinical research teams designing and running clinical trials in hospital and health care settings.
In 2008 I was fortunate to receive Australia Council for the Arts funding to lead an interdisciplinary research group investigating ways to incorporate touch and movement into body-focussed interactive art and design (Thinking Through The Body ArtLab 2008). The group comprised a curator, several media arts practitioners/researchers and two certified Feldrenkrais Method somatic-bodywork practitioners (Maggie Slattery and Catherine Truman).
Collaborating with Maggie and Catherine on the conceptualisation and development of a series of prototype interactions provided some very important insights and precedents for how I am continuing my work with body-focussed interactions.
Many of the resulting prototypes we created were very simple technically, but astonishingly effective at facilitating a sense of gentle wonder and delight focussed around seemingly simple actions and sensations: standing, leaning, spinning, breathing etc.
Whilst not ‘scientists’ in the conventional sense, they brought a very sophisticated, nuanced and pragmatic understanding of movement and touch, based on their ‘clinical’ experience, translating our very generalised propositions into a more concrete and bio-mechanically embodied process of observation and reflection.
Future
Where do you see the field of biofeedback art research headed in the next few years?
I’m very keen to start exploring how we can create biofeedback interactions that support two or more people in exploring co-regulation processes. I’m curious to see how other artists respond to Steven Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, which I believe has huge implications for how we think about the autonomic nervous system and artforms that work explicitly with this part of the nervous system. It’s exciting to see more researchers addressing issues of neurodiversity in their work, and exploring ways we can create works that can be inclusive of and responsive to differences in how we process experiences.
I hope we can move towards a more sustained and sustainable form of body-focussed cultural practice, where the lived experience of the artwork exceeds the novelty of the interaction, and the insights gained from the lived experience, help us understand how to relate to ourselves and others.
I hope there will be more opportunities for artists to explore the feedback and training aspect of biofeedback interaction – the somatic dimension of biofeedback as a creative learning modality, biofeedback art as a way of knowing and acquiring skills and sensitivities for regulating and co-regulating our nervous systems. I acknowledge that it can be very difficult to conduct this type of research in the context of single-year or 2-year university postgraduate research programs given the challenges of obtaining research ethics approval within these timeframes.
Final Thoughts
Do you have any closing thoughts or messages for the BARN community and newcomers? Perhaps a personal story or anecdote related to your work that you’d like to share?
Biofeedback art by its very nature is interdisciplinary, being some form of blend of art and biomedical methods and technologies. Arts-health is an exciting but complicated area to work within, and can be so many different things and contexts. Broadly speaking the worlds of ‘art’ and ‘health’ both come with different histories, boundaries and accountabilities. It takes time and supportive collaborations with practitioners from both fields – to negotiate and find your own path between these sometimes very different and even contradictory sets of expectations and accountabilities. For example when incorporating biofeedback art into therapeutic contexts and applications, or when presenting very intimate and personal interactions in public art settings, what assumptions and limitations are being placed around the way that people interact with our work?
All of this unfolds within a much larger crisis of completely unsustainable global economic systems, and the consequences of this crisis extend to problems with health, community and the environments we interact with. As artists working with biofeedback, we have some responsibility for how we frame not just the body but also how physical health interacts with community health and environmental health. It’s no longer sustainable or desirable to see these things as separate.
At the other end of this complicated problem space, we as artists negotiate all this through our own lived and embodied experience. My own journey with biofeedback art has without doubt been hugely influenced by my own experiences of social anxiety, professional and care-giver burnout and more recently, complex and compounded grief. My mother passed away in 2021 during the COVID lockdowns, 6 years after her initial dementia diagnosis. This was followed by the illness and eventual death of two of my former partners and very dear friends. The first after a prolonged period of cancer-related illness, and the other by suicide fourteen months later, after several years of declining mental health. The intensity of this journey with grief, and the heightened sense of my own mortality arising from it, is having a profound impact on how I’m approaching my work with biofeedback now.