Enactive Virtuality Research Group, Tallinn University
keynotes and other invited talks
Invited talk by Pia Tikka at the Hong Kong Forum Nov 2, 2019.
Hong Kong Baptist University will be partnering with the Consul General of France and the Alliance Francaise to mount an exhibition and a forum, October 31 – November 2, 2019.
The exhibition will focus on the work of the French artist Yves Gellie, specifically his photographs and films related to social robotics and artificial empathy. (t.b.c.)
Hong Kong offers possibilities to play with Sophia from Hanson Robotics.
An invited keynote at the two day conference “Actor and Avatar” organised by Professor Anton Rey, IPF, ZHdK August 29th and 30th 2019 at the Toni Areal, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). The “Actor and Avatar” project explores aspects of actor performances particularly aimed to provide facial expressiveness for a virtual character (avatar) and is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
The VR Installation The State of Darkness previously exhibited in the Science Gallery, Dublin (Dec 2018) and in the 360 degrees (Prague 2019) will be presented at the conference. In addition, Enactive Virtuality Lab’s team member Victor Pardinho will run a Master’s Class for ZHdK students and staff.
The keynote by Pia Tikka 29th of August will address a range of topics related to the actors and humanlike virtual characters in the collaborative setting as described under the image.
Images: Two examples of the recordings of a dyadic realtime setting where the two actors are seated in front of a Green Screen in the ZHdK IPF Film studio looking at each other through a display in front of them directly connected to the camera in front of the other actor. The other actor takes the role of an asylum seeker’s interviewer (I), while the other actor plays the role of an asylum seeker (AS). Both are listening to the dramatised background story of the latter while engaged in evaluation of each others emotional state within the dramatised context. The performances are applied to humanlike virtual characters in the project Booth developed at the Enactive Virtuality Lab. Actors (upper row) Dr. Gunter Lösel [AS] and Tim Woody Haake [I]; (row below) Corinne Soland [I] and Samuel Braun [AS]. Images©IPF courtesy of Dr. Rey and Miriam Loertscher from ZHdK research group.
Images: Derek Bradley, Walt Disney Research Studio Zürich (above) and Matthias Wittmann, Digital Domain (below)
Industry engagement: Derek Bradley, Walt Disney Research Studio Zürich was one of the enactive experienters of facing Adam B in the State of Darkness. Here with Pia Tikka and Victor Pardinho (Sense of Space, Finland).
Image: Dr Johannes Riis opens the plenary session for honouring the academic career and contribution of professor Torben Grodal at the SCSMI, chaired by Dr. Stephen Prince (right corner). 5 invited speakers included in addition Ed Tan, Mette Kramer, Pia Tikka, and David Bordwell on the June 13th.
The presentation discusses the concept of enactive virtuality in terms of a triadic epistemology, in which holistic understanding is accumulated via reflecting subjective experience against its psychophysiological epiphenomena and varying narrative contexts. Film narrative can evoke strong emotional identification with the screen character, however, in a context-dependent manner. The aim is to deepen the holistic understanding of cinematic narrative in particular as simulated person-to-person encounter. Two concretising case studies of person-to-person encounter are discussed. The first setting applies conventional film as a model of life situations, while another dramatic setting assigns the viewer an enactive role when engaging with an artificial screen character. These settings are compared and analysed in terms of the mentioned triadic epistemology.
Invited lecture and a collaboration meeting with professor Iiro P Jääskeläinen and Enactive Virtuality Lab May 21-22, 2019.
Image: Pia Tikka, Iiro P Jääskeläinen, Jelena Rosic, and Ilkka Kosunen at MEDIT meeting space.
May 21 at 3-4 pm Dr Iiro P. Jääskeläinen, Associate Professor of the Brain and Mind Laboratory, Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, Aalto University School of Science, Finland,
gave an open neurocinematic talk on “Using movies as real-life like stimuli during neuroimaging to study the neural basis of social cognition” (room M-134).
Abstract:
Movies and narratives are increasingly used as stimuli in neuroimaging studies. This in many ways helps bridge the gaps between neuroscience, psychology, and even social sciences by allowing stimulation of, and thus also measurement of neural activity underlying, phenomena that have been less amenable to study with more traditional neuroimaging stimulus-task designs. Observation of signature patterns underlying discrete emotions across largely shared brain structures have suggested that both basic and dimensional emotion theories are partly correct. Robust differences in brain activity when viewing genetic vs. adopted sisters going through a moral dilemma in a movie clip have shown that knowledge of shared genes shapes perception of social interactions, thus demonstrating how neuroimaging can offer important measures for social sciences that complement the traditional behavioral ones. Furter, more idiosyncratic brain activity has been observed in high-functioning autistic than neurotypical subjects specifically in putative social brain regions when watching a drama movie. Development of data analysis algorithms holds keys to rapid advances in this relatively new area of research. Modeling the stimulus and recording brain activity is significantly complemented by behavioral measures on how the subjects experienced the movie stimulus.
Image: Jelena Rosic and Ilkka Kosunen engaged in discussing correlations between ‘pheno’-dynamics and ‘neuro’-dynamics for our micro-phenomenological Memento study, a follow-up for Kauttonen et al 2018.
Dr Robin L. Zebrowski, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and the Chair of Cognitive Science Program at Beloit College, WI, USA invited by Associate Professor of General Psychology Kristjan Kask at the School of Natural Sciences and Health,TLU.
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An intellectual aftermath inspired by Robin’s talk at the MEDIT’s meeting space, BFM, (from right) PhD student Jelena Rosic, professor Robin Zebrowski, senior researcher Ilkka Kosunen, associated senior researcher Mauri Kaipainen, professor Kristjan Kask and professor Pia Tikka.
What does it mean to be present somewhere? In this talk, I’ll explore this question by looking at telepresence technologies and ways of extending our reach across wide distances, while also critically examining what we mean by “the body” that gets extended. We’ll look at what phenomenologists have called “intercorporeality” – the felt experience of being present with other beings like us, and we’ll look at how this interacts with our experience of telepresence technologies, including virtual reality, telerobotics, and EEG-type prosthetics.
About lecturer:
Robin L. Zebrowski is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science in Beloit College, Wisconsin (USA). She has a PhD in philosophy from University of Oregon. Prof. Zebrowski is interested in her research in embodiment, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Prof. Zebrowski is coming to Tallinn University as a Fulbright Specialist Scholar.
Additional information: Kristjan Kask kask@tlu.ee
Here Robin’s webpage https://www.beloit.edu/philosophy/faculty/zebrowski/
Invited talk on “Narrative Sense-Making – A Neurocinematic Approach” at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPI), Frankfurt am Main, March 26, 2019.
Presentation at the Cinema of the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Brain on the Screen public series of 4 introductory talks: Ed Vessel, Vittorio Gallese, Marie Therese Forster, and Pia Tikka.
Run Lola Run (German: Lola rennt) is a 1998 German thriller film written and directed by Tom Tykwer, and starring Franka Potente as Lola and Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni. The story follows a woman who needs to obtain 100,000 Deutsche Mark in twenty minutes to save her boyfriend’s life.
The Brain on Screen
Diese und weitere Fragen stehen im Zentrum der Film- und Vortragsreihe „The Brain on Screen“, die das Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik gemeinsam mit dem Deutschen Filminstitut & Filmmuseum im März 2019 veranstaltet. An vier Dienstagen (5., 12., 19. und 26.03.2019) werden vier Experten jeweils eine Einführung in vier Filme geben, die aus neurowissenschaftlicher Perspektive interessant sind.
Während der anschließenden Filmvorführung hat das Publikum die Gelegenheit, hautnah mitzuerleben, wie neurowissenschaftliche Forschung zum Filmerleben aussehen kann. Wer möchte, kann Teilnehmer in einer den Film begleitenden Studie werden.
„The Brain on Screen“ bietet einen wissenschaftlichen und praktischen Einblick in ein spannendes Forschungsfeld und verwandelt das Gehirn selbst in einen Akteur.
Wenn Sie Interesse haben teilzunehmen, können Sie sich hier anmelden.
Pia Tikka:
Date: 21 March, 2019
Time: 4:30 – 5:45 pm
Venue: AAB 905, Academic and Adminstration Building, Baptist University Road Campus, Hong Kong Baptist University, March 21, 2019.
https://talent100.hkbu.edu.hk/
Abstract
I will introduce my concept of enactive virtuality, associated with the idea of narratives as fundamental constructs of human mind. Inspired by the approach to enactive mind by Fransisco Varela and colleagues, the concept of enactive virtuality describes the experiencing mind as a dynamical system of body, brain, and the world. The epistemic triangulation is suggested as a means of translating the concept to practice.
While audiovisual narratives have been shown to elicit very similar physiological responses in different viewers, however, individual life experiences define how the story is interpreted by each. The approach of triadic epistemology, a combination of methods from arts, social sciences, and psychophysiology allows generating integrated knowledge about how different viewers experience particular narratives. The method builds on the fundamentally pragmatist idea that no two domains of knowledge are enough to explain each other, but a third is always required to provide the interpretative angle. Therefore, understanding narrative content needs to be analyzed not only based on subjective reports of the viewers, because that is not anchored to any overall understanding, but they also need to be related to a neurophysiological repertoire of experiences. Similarly, being able to describe the neural activity data collected during the viewing of a film, it is not enough to relate it only to subjective reports of the viewers, but the observations also need to be interpreted to conventions of narrative dramaturgy and filmmaking. A selection of cases are described to clarify the concept of enactive virtuality and the proposed triadic method.
And a great aftermath of the Talk at the HKBU campus Cafe with Roger Carcia, Chianly Sze, Samantha Goh, Mette Hjort, and Eugene Birman.
Sergej Eisenstein and the Game of Objects
Workshop at The Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies (ZeM), Potsdam
In the year which marks both the 120th anniversary of Sergej Eisenstein’s birth and the 70th anniversary of his death, the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies (ZeM) in Potsdam and “Cinepoetics – Center for Advanced Film Studies” at the Free University Berlin are jointly organising a workshop that will take place in Potsdam from the 22th to 24th November 2018. More here.
Title of the talk by Pia Tikka: Simulatorium Eisensteinense: Eisenstein’s legacy in art and science dialogue
Image form Sergei Eisenstein Elokuvan muoto, p 121 ISBN 951-835-004-3