NOBLEMOTION & MUSIQA & UH BRAIN Center
Meeting of Minds
NEXT STEPS
On the heels of the premiere of Meeting of Minds at MATCH in January performed to sold out houses, NMD artistic directors Andy and Dionne Noble, composer Anthony Brandt and musicians from Musiqa, projection artist Badie Khaleghian, and UH BRAIN Center director Dr. Jose Contreras-Vidal with Annel Pacheco Ramirez and Aime Aguilar Herrera, neuro-engineers, will tour the work to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland in May 2024 to be presented at “AI for Good” Global Summit.
“Meeting of Minds” is a combination of artistic performance and scientific experiment: as the dancers perform, they wear mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) technology that record their brain activity (electroencephalography, EEG), eye movements (electrooculography, EOG) and head motion. Thanks to live visualizations of the data, the audience is able to observe what’s happening inside the dancers’ brains as they perform.
The 35-minute dance explores the process of building social connection. The two dancers begin isolated from each other. Their first face-to-face encounter is frictional and combative. In the final sections, they gradually work through their differences and arrive at mutual understanding. Meanwhile, the neuro-engineering team from the University of Houston IUCRC BRAIN Center is monitoring the dancers’ brainwaves for the neural correlates of social interaction by estimating the intra- and inter-brain neural synchrony of the dancers.
At first, the dancers’ movements are highly contrasting; then, as the dance unfolds, later sections focus on eye contact, touch and synchronized movement–all key signals of engagement and cooperation. AI programs developed at Dr. Contreras-Vidal’s lab enable artifacts to be removed and the data to be analyzed in real time.
A visualization of the live data is incorporated into the projections via a visual brain-computer interface operating on real time estimates of inter-brain synchrony: the brighter the visualization, the greater the synchrony between the two dancers’ brains.