Information technology has reformed, and is
still constantly changing how we communicate.
We can address almost everyone, anywhere and
anytime instantly. Some dominate certain
channels and multiply information or
disinformation, even steer the masses and some
go to great lengths to expose almost every bit of
themselves in order to generate more attention.
While magnitude and multitude of information
changed, the modalities and transmission
channels have also changed and are still
changing. Probably someday we’ll communicate
with mental commands only or let someone else
walk through our virtual representation of our
minds, so they can understand us in a dadaist
way, no metaphors, symbols, semantics and
syntax needed.
The goal of this project was to create a virtual
experience that reacts to human emotional
statesbyinterpretingdatafrombiosensorssuch
as EEG and ECG devices. This approach is called
Mindwalk, as it creates a procedural landscape
using intimate biometric data and letting the
user walk trough and experience an artistic
representation of her/his own mind or the mind
of others. The aim is to explore how graphic
design concepts can be founded on the idea of
emphatic technology - the idea that technology
reacts to human emotional states.
This project also touches on an age-old problem
of philosophy known as the mind-body-problem
- the question on the relationship between the
mental realm and the physical realm - in a
playful way. Furthermore we’ll focus on how
graphic design may use technology to translate
emotional states to colour and shapes.
In order to integrate this aspect in the virtual experience
that is created, it touches on the subject of
procedural content generation - procedural
landscape generation in computer graphics. It
aims to explore, how virtual experiences might
be able to enable us to communicate on a whole
new level without the use of any syntactic
language: Others might be able to retrace our
emotions even thoughts and dreams, because
technology is able to reenact them for us. This
might enable us, to broaden our way of
communicating our internal feelings and
motivations and understanding each other.
