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Call for NEUROCINEMATIC papers — Baltic Screen Media Review, Special Issue 2023

Call for NEUROCINEMATIC papers – Baltic Screen Media Review, Special Issue 2023

Cinematic minds in making – Investigation of subjective and intersubjective experiences of storytelling

Guest editors Pia Tikka and Elen Lotman with Maarten Coëgnarts

Contact and submission to NeuroCineBFM@tlu.ee

 

 

One of the key foundations of everyday activities in society is intersubjectively shared communication between people. Stories, films, and other audiovisual narratives promote shared understanding of possible situations in other people’s lives. Narratives expose complex social situations with their ethical, political, and cultural contexts (Hjort and Nannicelli, 2022). They also play a role for the human kind as a means to learn from protagonists and their positive examples and successes, but also their mistakes, false motivations, and blinded desires that may lead to dramatic situations, sometimes even disasters. An exhaustive range of contextual situatedness as the constitutive essence in narratives does not only serve entertainment and education, but also scientific studies of human mind and behavior.

Since the beginning of this millennium, narratives mediated by films have allowed researchers to simulate complex socio-emotional events in behavioral and neuroimaging  laboratories, accumulating new insights to the human behavior, emotion, and memory, to name a few of many topics. The proponents of the so-called naturalistic neuroscience and, in particular its subfield neurocinematics (Hasson et al. 2008) have shown how experiencing naturally unfolding events evokes synchronized activations in the large-scale brain networks across different test participants (see, Jaaskelainen et al. 2021, for review). The  tightly framed contextual settings in cinematic narratives have opened a fresh window for researchers interested in understanding linkages between individual subjective experiences and intersubjectively shared experiences.

So far, neurocinematic studies have nearly exclusively focused on mapping  the correlations between narrative events and observed physiological behaviors of uninitiated test participants.. The knowledge accumulated so far does not tell much of the affective or cognitive functions of the experts of audiovisual storytelling, with few exceptions (e.g. deBorst et al 2016; Andreu-Sánchez et al. 2021).  Along with this Special Issue we want to extend the scope of studies to the embodied cognitive processes  of storytellers themselves. As an example, consider the term “experiential heuristics” proposed by cinematographer ELen Lotman (2021) to describe the practice-based knowledge accumulation by cinematographers, or the embodied dynamics of the filmmaker in the process of simulating the experiences of the fictional protagonists and/or that of  imagined viewers described as “enactive authorship”(Tikka 2022). Another question that merits further understanding is how the embodied decision-making processes of filmmakers further lead to the creation of dynamic embodied structures in the cinematic form. Appealing to the shared embodiment of both the filmmaker and the film viewer, these pre-conceptual patterns of bodily experience or “image schemas” have been argued to play a significant expressive role in the representation and communication of meaning in cinema (Coëgnarts 2019).

We call for papers that focus on the creative experiential processes of the filmmakers,  storytelling experts and their audience. We encourage the proposed papers to discuss how temporally unfolding of contextual situatedness depicted in narratives manifests in reported subjective experiences, the observed  body-brain behaviors,  and time-locked content descriptions.

TOPICS

We invite boldly multidisciplinary papers to contribute with theoretical, conceptual and practical approaches to the experiential nature of filmmaking and viewing. They may draw, for instance, from social and cognitive sciences, psychophysiology, neurosciences, ecological psychology, affective computing, cognitive semantics, aesthetics, or empirical phenomenology. 

Accordingly, we encourage papers that discuss the relations of data from these approaches, all concerning film experience of the film professionals and/or film viewers.  The focus of a submission may also focus on a specific expertise, for example that of the writer, editor, cinematographer, scenographer or sound designer. The papers may describe, for example 1) subjective experiences, 2) intersubjectively shared experiences; 3) context or content annotation, 4) semantic description; 5) first-person phenomenal description, and/or 6) physiological observation (e.g. neuroimaging, eye-tracking, psychophysiological measures).

Contributions addressing topics such as (but not limited to) the following are particularly welcome:

  • Social cognition and embodied intersubjectivity
  • Interdisciplinary challenges for methods; annotations linking cinematic features to physiological data
  • First-and second-person methodologies; empirical phenomenological observations
  • Embodied enactive mind, embodied simulation, and theory of theory mind
  • Embodied metaphors in film; embodied film style; bodily basis of shared film language; semantics;
  • Cinematic empathy; emotions; simulation  of character experiences
  • Audience engagement; immersion; cognitive identification;
  • Temporality of experiences; context-dependent memory coding; story reconstruction; narrative comprehension;
  • Experiential heuristics; multisensory and tacit knowledge;
  • Storytelling strategies, aesthetics, fIlm and media literacy; genre conventions

GUIDELINES

We will accept long research articles (4000 – 8000 words w/o ref) and short articles and commentaries (2000 – 2500 words w/o ref). Submitted papers need to follow Submission guidelines

All submissions should be sent via email attachment to Guest editors at NeuroCineBFM@tlu.ee

BSMR embraces visual storytelling, we thus invite authors to use photos and other illustrations as part of their contributions. See Journal info https://sciendo.com/journal/BSMR


Key dates


01.04.2023 – Submit abstracts of 200–300 words.
10.04.2023 –Acceptance of abstracts
30.06.2023 –Submit full manuscripts for blind peer review
20.09.2023 –Resubmit revisions
31.12.2023 –Special Issue published online


This issue of BSMR will be published both online and in print in December 2023. 

All submissions should be sent via email attachment to Guest editors at NeuroCineBFM@tlu.ee

Guest editors 

Maarten Coëgnarts https://www.filmeu.eu/alliance/people/maarten-coegnarts

Elen Lotman  https://www.filmeu.eu/alliance/people/elen-lotman

Pia Tikka https://www.etis.ee/CV/Pia_Tikka/eng

 

References

Andreu-Sánchez, C., Martín-Pascual, M.A., Gruart, A. and Delgado-García, J.M. (2021). The effect of media professionalization on cognitive neurodynamics during audiovisual cuts. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 15: 598383. doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2021.598383

de Borst, A. W., Valente, G., Jääskeläinen, I. P., & Tikka, P. (2016). Brain-based decoding of mentally imagined film clips and sounds reveals experience-based information patterns in film professionals. NeuroImage, 129, 428–438. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.01.043

Hasson, U., Landesman, O., Knappmeyer, B. Vallines, I., Rubin, N., & Heeger, D. (2008). Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film. Projections, 2, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2008.020102.

Hjort, M and Nannicelli, T. (Ed.).(2022) The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value. Wiley-Blackwell Press.

Jääskeläinen, I. P., Sams, M., Glerean, E., & Ahveninen, J. (2021). Movies and narratives as naturalistic stimuli in neuroimaging. NeuroImage, 224, 117445. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117445

Lotman, E. (2021) Experiential heuristics of fiction film cinematography. PhD Diss. Tallinn University.

Tikka, Pia (2022). Enactive Authorship Second-Order Simulation of the Viewer Experience— A Neurocinematic Approach. Projections: the Journal for Movies & Mind, 16 (1), 47−66. DOI: 10.3167/proj.2022.160104.

 

Relationality in VR – Luzern workshop at HSLU 22 March 2023

Programme – Relationality in VR

Organizer Hochschule Luzern, Design & Kunst, Dr. Christina Zimmermann, Projektleiterin Forschung

hslu.ch/design-kunst

***

 

Tikka Pia

Enactive Co-presence in Narrative Virtual Reality
 

The talk describes our most recent project The State of Darkness (SOD 2.0; work-in-progress).

SOD 2.0 is a virtual reality installation in which human and non-human lives coexist. The first is lived by the participant while the latter is lived by the non-human Other.  The narrative VR system is enactive, this is, all elements of the narrative space are in a reciprocally dependent state with the other elements.

The participant’s experiential moves are interpreted from their biosensor measurements in real-time, and then fed back to drive the different elements of the enactive narrative system. In turn, the facial and bodily behaviour of the artificial Other feeds back to the participant’s experiential states. The scenography and the soundscape adapt to the behaviours of the two beings while these adaptations affect back to the atmosphere of the intimate co-presence between the human and the Other.

The concept of non-human narrative allows the State of Darkness 2.0 to reflect the human-centric perspective against that of a non-human perspective. The intriguing question is whether narratives and the narrative faculty should be considered as exclusively characteristic to humans, or if the idea of narrative can be extended to other domains of life, or even to the domain of artificially humanlike beings.

The SOD 2.0 is an artistic dissemination of the project Enactive Co-presence in Narrative Virtual Reality: A Triadic Interaction Model.
The MOBTT90 research project which combines arts and sciences to explore how the viewer’s experience of co-presence can be controlled by parametrically modifying the behavior of a screen character or its context. It is led by research professor Pia Tikka, Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM) & Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT), Tallinn University.The project is funded by the EU Mobilitas Pluss Top Researcher Grant and Estonian Research Council. 
 

Enactive Virtuality Lab hybrid seminar 24 Nov, 2pm – 6 pm – Open for online attendance!

Enactive Virtuality Lab present the most recent work by the team members.

The event takes place in Tallinn University, Nova building N-406 Kinosaal

Date: 24.11.2022. 14:00-18:00 (EET / CET +1)

Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/95032524868

Speakers and Schedule, see below.

 

SPEAKERS

Tanja Bastamow: Virtual scenography in transformation

The performative possibilities of virtual environments

 

Scenography has historically been understood as the illustrative support for a staged drama. However, in the recent decades, the field has expanded to encompass the overall design of performance events, actions and experiences. Positioning this expanded understanding of scenography in dialogue with virtual reality (VR) opens up interesting possibilities for designing virtual scenography which can become an enabler of emerging narratives, unforeseen events and unexpected encounters. In my research I investigate the question of shifting agencies and virtual scenographers’ role as a co-creator rather than a traditional author-designer. Who – and what – become the creators, performers and spectators in virtual experiences and encounters in which the real-time responsiveness, transformability, (im)materiality and immersivity of virtual scenography play a key role? In my talk I will introduce thoughts around these questions by describing the process of building the virtual scenography for “State of Darkness II” VR experience.

Tanja Bastamow is a virtual scenographer working with experimental projects combining scenography with virtual and mixed reality environments. Bastamow’s key areas of interest are immersive virtual environments, the creative potential of technology as a tool for designing emergent spatial narratives, and creating scenographic encounters in which human and non-human elements can mix in new and unexpected ways. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at Aalto University’s Department of Film, Television and Scenography, doing research on the performative possibilities of real-time virtual environments. In addition to this, she is working in LiDiA – Live + Digital Audiences artistic research project (2021-23) as a virtual designer. She is also a founding member of Virtual Cinema Lab research group and has previously held the position of lecturer in digital design methods at Aalto University. 

Ats Kurvet: DESIGNING VIRTUAL characters 

Ats Kurvet is a 3D real-time graphics and virtual reality application developer and consultant with over 8 years of industry experience. He specialises in lighting, character development and animation, game and user experience design, 3D modeling and environment development, shaders and material development and tech art. He has worked for Crytek GmbH as a lighting artist and runs ExteriorBox OÜ. His focus working with the Enactive Virtuality Lab in researching the visual aspects of digital human development and implementation.

Matias Harju: Traits of Virtual Reality Sound Design

Whilst sound design for VR borrows a lot from other media such as video games and films, VR sets some unique conditions for sonic thinking and technical approaches. Spatial sound is inarguably one of the most significant areas in this respect. That entails the whole process from narrative decisions to source material recordings to 3D audio rendering on the headphones. Other sound design considerations in VR may relate to the level of sonic realism and the role of sound in general. My talk will briefly expose some of the characteristics of sound in VR from both artistic and technical perspectives.

Matias Harju is a sound designer and musician specialising in immersive and interactive sonic storytelling. He is currently developing Audio Augmented Reality (AAR) as a narrative and interactive medium at WHS Theatre Union in Helsinki. He is also active in making adaptive music and immersive sound design for other projects including VR, AR, video games, installations, and live performances. Matias is a Master of Music from Sibelius Academy with a background in multiple musical genres, music education, and audio technology. He also holds a master’s degree from the Sound in New Media programme at Aalto University

MARIE-LAURE CAZIN:Freud’s last hypnosis, validating emotion driven enactions in cinematic VR

Dr Marie-Laure Cazin will present the study she has been conducting in the context of her European Mobilitas + postdoctoral grant with Enactive Virtuality Lab  BFM, TLU (2021-2022).  She is currently developing an artistic prototype of Emotive VR for interactive 360° film. The project aims to obtain emotional interactivity of the viewer with the film’s soundtrack. While experiencing her VR film, Freud’s last hypnosis, the emotional responses of the viewers are collected with physio-sensors, eye-tracking and with personal interviews after the viewing. Project is in collaboration with Dr Mati Mõttus from the Interaction lab of the school of Digital Technology (TLU) and Matias Harju, composer and sound designer (Finland).

Marie-Laure Cazin is a French filmmaker and a researcher. She is teaching in Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design-TALM in France. She was a postdoctoral researcher at MEDIT BFM, Tallinn University with a European post doctoral grant Mobilitas + in 2022-23. She received a PhD in Aix-Marseille University for her thesis entitled “Cinema et Neurosciences, du Cinéma Émotif à Emotive VR”[1] in 2020. This thesis is about cinema experience, contextualized by neurosciences research, describing the neuronal process of emotions and trying to think further about the analogy between cinema and the thinking process. She is also a regular teacher in the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design TALM, le Mans (France).

She comes from an artistic background, having studied in Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, the Jan van Eyck Academy, post graduate program in residency (Masstricht, Netherlands) and in the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She has conducted many art-science projects together with scientific partners that have been shown in many exhibitions and festivals, creating prototypes that renew the filmic experience. In her Emotive Cinema (2014) and Emotive VR (2020) projects she applies physiological feedback, like EEG, in order to obtain an emotional analysis from the brains’ activity of the viewers that changes the film’s scenario.

[1]Cazin, M-L. 2020. Cinéma et neurosciences : du cinéma émotif à emotive VR. Accèss https://www.theses.fr/2020AIXM0009

MATI MÕTTUS: Psyhco-physiology and eye-tracking of CINEMATIC VR

There are various ways to track our emotions through physiometric signals. Most common of these signals are electrical conductance of skin, facial expressions, cardiography and encephalography. In my talk I’d like to discuss the reliability and intrusiveness of physiological measurements in interactive art. While the reliability of measurements is not too critical in the domain of art, the intrusive sensors over art-enjoyers’ bodies can easily spoil the artistic experience.

Mati Mõttus is a lecturer and researcher in the School of Digital Technologies, Tallinn University. His doctoral degree on computer science in the field of human-computer interaction focused on “Aesthetics in Interaction Design” (2018). The current research interests are hedonic experiences in human-computer interaction. The focus is two-fold. The use of psycho-physiological signals in detecting users’ feelings while interacting with technology and explaining emotional behavior on one hand. On the other hand, the design of interactive systems, based on psycho-physiological loops.

Robert McNamara: Empathic nuances with virtual avatars – a novel theory of compassion

Technological mediation is the idea that technology affects or changes us as we use it, either consciously or unconsciously. Digital avatars, whether encountered in VR or otherwise, are one such technology, often in concert with various machine learning applications, that pose potential unknown and understudied interactional effects on humans, whether through their use in art, video games, or governmental applications (such as the pilot program at EU borders which was used to detect traveler deception, iborderctrl). One area where avatars may pose particular interest for academic study is in their perceived ability to not only evoke the uncanny valley effect, but also in their potential to promote a “distancing effect.” It is hypothesized that interaction with avatars, as an artistic process, may also result in increased expressions of cognitive empathy through the conscious or unconscious process of abductive reasoning.

Robert McNamara has a background in American criminal law as well as degrees related to audiovisual ethnography and eastern classics. He is from New York State, but has lived in Tallinn for the last five years. Currently, he specifically focuses on researching related to ethical, socio-political, anthropological, and legal aspects in the context of employing human-like VR avatars and related XR technology. He is co-authoring journal papers in collaboration with other experts on the team related to the social and legal issues surrounding the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and virtual reality avatars for governmental immigration regimes. During 05-09/2020 Robert G. McNamara worked as a visiting research fellow working with the MOBTT90 team. 10/2020 onwards he continues working with the project as a doctoral student. In the Enactive Virtuality Lab Robert has contributed to co-authored writing; the most recent paper accepted for publication is entitled “Well-founded Fear of Algorithms or Algorithms of Well-founded Fear? Hybrid Intelligence in Automated Asylum Seeker Interviews”, Journal of Refugee Studies, Oxford UP,

DEBORA C.F. DE SOUZA: SELF-RAting of Emotions in simulated immigration interview

Humans benefit from emotional interchange as a source of information to adapt and react to external stimuli and navigate their reality. Computers, on the other hand, rely on classification methods. It uses models to calculate and differentiate affective information from other human inputs because of the emotional expressions that emerge through human body responses, language, and behavior changes. Nevertheless, theoretically and methodologically, emotion is a challenging topic to address in Human-Computer Interaction. During her master’s studies, Debora explored methods for assessing physiological responses to emotional experience and aiding the emotion recognition features of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs). Her study developed an interface prototype for emotion elicitation and simultaneous acquisition of the user’s physiological and self-reported emotional data. 

Debora C. F. de Souza is a Brazilian visual artist and journalist. Graduated in Social Communication at the University of Mato Grosso do Sul Foundation in Brazil. Her artwork and research are marked by experiments with different kinds of images and audiovisual media. Recently graduated with an MA in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); she is now a doctoral student at the Information Society Technologies and a Junior Researcher at the School of Digital Technologies at Tallinn University. In the Enactive Virtuality Lab, she is researching the implications of anthropomorphic virtual agents on the human affective states and the implications of such interactions in collaborative and social contexts, such as medical simulation training.



SCHEDULE 14-18

14:00-14:10 Pia Tikka: State of Darkness (S0D)- Enactive VR experience

14:10-14:45 Tanja Bastamow – Designing performative scenography (SoD)

14:45-15:00 Ats Kurvet –Designing humanlike characters (SoD)

15:00-15:20 Matias Harju – Traits of Virtual Reality Sound Design

15:20-15:40 Marie-Laure Cazin:Freud’s last hypnosis, validating emotion driven enactions in cinematic VR

15:40-16:00 Mati Mōttus: Experimenting with Emotive VR cinema

Break (10 min)

16:15-17:15 Robert McNamara: Empathic nuances with virtual avatars: a novel theory of compassion.

17:15-17:35 Debora Souza: Self-rating of emotions in simulated immigration interview

17:35- 18:00 Discussion

****

 

BFM PhD is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Enactive Virtuality Lab hybrid seminar
Time: Nov 24, 2022 10:00 Helsinki

Join Zoom Meeting
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Meeting ID: 950 3252 4868
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Pia Tikka’s superviseé Elen Lotman — doctoral confirment ceremony at TLU

Excited announcement!

Pia Tikka’s superviseé Elen Lotman, cinematographer, will be confirmed as the first doctor from the artistic research line at the doctoral program of the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, TLU.

Image: Drs Pia Tikka, Elen Lotman, Madis Jävekülg, Indrek Ibrus, Teet Teinemaa, Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, Tallinn University

https://www.tlu.ee/en/doctoral-conferment-ceremony-2022

Time: 18 November, 2022 at 3 p.m
Venue: Tallinn University’s Ceremonial Hall (Narva Road 25, III floor)
Gathering of doctors and supervisors: T-307 at 2:15 p.m

The event will be broadcasted live on our internal televisions and on the Tallinn University Youtube channel.

Ülo Pärnits & Ülemiste City @ Tallinn University

Tallinn University and Ülemiste City signed a cooperation agreement on 12 October to confirm the interest of both parties in jointly promoting innovative education and supporting talents. The signing was preceded by a discussion about what knowledge, talents, and technologies the education system will need in the future. (…) At the heart of the memorandum between Ülemiste City and Tallinn University is the promise not to lose sight of the human being in an ever-technological world and to look for ways to support talents and their development.

In order to sign the memorandum, the founder of Ülemiste City and the long-time chairman of the board of Mainor, Ülo Pärnits, was ‘brought to life’ as an avatar created by Pia Tikka, the lead researcher of the Enactive Virtuality Lab of the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School of Tallinn University, and Ats Kurvet, a computer graphics specialist. It is a tribute to his influential work.

The work on Ülo Pärnits avatar was coordinated by Ermo Säks/ BFM.

An article about the whole event can be read in Estonian here: https://www.ulemistecity.ee/uudised-teated/tallinna-ulikool-ja-ulemiste-city-asuvad-koostoos-tulevikuharidust-edendama/ and in English here: https://www.ulemistecity.ee/en/news-messages/tallinna-ulikool-ja-ulemiste-city-asuvad-koostoos-tulevikuharidust-edendama/

Collaborative work with M-L Cazin and Nantes Univ fall 2022

Pia Tikka & Mati Mõttus worked 03.-07.10. with filmmaker and researcher Marie-Laure Cazin in Paris, Saint Maurice on the experimental psycho-physiological study where Cazin’s VR film “Freud’s Last Hypnosis” is viewed by French speaking participants. The currently on-going multidisciplinary art-science study is a natural extension of Cazin’s EU Mobilitas Pluss Postdoc year at the Enactive Virtuality Lab (09/2021-08/2022; a separate report t.b.d.). The target is a joint paper with Enactive Virtuality team, Cazin and Nantes University researchers. As Cazin’s VR film is a well-designed cinematic story that has strong emotional and intellectual components that trigger VR viewers’s affective-cognitive processes, it provides the MOBTT90 team with a perfect study case.

During the week in Paris we worked on analysis of the interviews of participants and the analysis of collected data, as well as the structure of the joint paper (in preparation). In this project we measure eye-movements, heart rate and skin conductance as indicators of dynamically changing mental states of the viewers, and the collected data is correlated with the annotations of the individual eye-tracking data layered on top of the performance video recording. Furthermore, these are related with the in person interview material collected by Cazin.

We are excited to collect new data with François BOUFFARD and colleagues at the Nantes Univ, Halle 6 – Pôle Universitaire interdisciplinaire des cultures numériques, in early December.

 

On the 6.10. Pia Tikka, Mati Mõttus and Marie Cazin did a three hour seminar with presentations of on our MOBTT90 research invited by prof. Jean-Marie Dallet at the École des arts de la Sorbonne, UNIVERSITÉ PARIS 1 PANTHÉON-SORBONNE.

A talk at SCSMI conference June 9-12, 2021

Title: Dialogue between neuro- and pheno-dynamics of film viewing experience

https://scsmi-online.org/conference

Tikka, Pia and Rosic, Jelena

One of the main questions put forward by neuro-phenomenology (Varela 1996) is how to bring into a frui\ul dialogue the two to allegedly incommensurable domains of science, namely the one unraveling neural functions of being-human in the world (neuro-dynamics), and that describing the experience of being-human in the world (pheno-dynamics). As it seems in the light of current literature, the main challenge lies in the identification of the mutual constraints (ibid.), this is, the domain-specific conditions on both fields that would allow for reciprocally fruitul dialogue. By discussing phenomenologically informed reflections and corresponding findings of a neurocinematic study we aim to apply such an interdisciplinary dialogue in the domain of film studies. We argue that neurocinematic methods can be optimised with specifications provided by phenomenological inquiry.

References
1. Greene, B. (1999). The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
2. Kauttonen, J., Hlushchuk, Y., Jääskeläinen, I. P., & Tikka, P. (2018). Brain mechanisms underlying cue-based memorizing during free viewing of movie Memento. NeuroImage, 172, 313–325.
3. Memento (2000). Directed by Christopher Nolan. US: Summit Entertainment & Team Todd.
4. Petitmengin C. (2006). Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5(3-4), 229–269.
5. Varela, Francisco J. (1996). Neurophenomenology. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4), 330–349.

 

Accepted to be presented. Cancelled by PT.

Enactive Virtuality Lab presents April 16

Welcome. Please join us!

Enactive Virtuality Lab presents the on-going work in online seminar.

Date: Friday April 16, 2021 
Time: 09:15 -13:00 Helsinki

Zoom Meeting

Meeting ID: 947 9465 7125
Passcode: 019362

VIDEO recording (t.b.a.)

Program

To be confirmed

9:15

Pia Tikka (Enactive Virtuality Team leader, MOBTT90)
Introduction

9:20 KEYNOTE

Ighoyota Ben Ajenaghughrure (t.b.c.) 30 min + Q&A  (Vistiting lecturer of Software Engineering @ DT)

Symbiosis in information society  

10:00

Debora Conceição Firmino De Souza (MA Thesis @DTI)
Exploring the affective states of an interviewee during a Q&A session


10:15

Abdallah Sham (doctoral student @DTI)
Facial Expression Recognition in a Human-human dyadic setting


10:30

Ats Kurvet (computer graphics specialist)
Playing  with MetaHuman for “real” in narrative VR environment


10:45-11:00 coffee break (15 min)


11:00

Robert McNamara (doctor in law (US); doctoral student @BFM)
Cinematic Narratives in Gaming Engines to Explore Compassion towards Refugees

11:15

Sampsa Huttunen (doctoral student @Helsinki University)(t.b.a)
Psychophysiological Reactions to Human Face under Different Lighting Conditions: A Pilot Study


11:30

Mehmet Burak Yılmaz (doctoral student @BFM)
Affective functions of camera movements in cinematographic storytelling


11:45 -12:30 Discussion

 

Open for public!

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Biofiction -panel: Neurotechnology and how it will shape our future bodies April 8, 2021

BIO·FICTION

Neurotechnology and how it will shape our future bodies

The BIO·FICTION Science Art Film Festival is one of a kind: It’s a creative and boundary-crossing event with a program filled to the brim with content exploring cutting-edge emerging sciences – in the present, but also in possible futures. https://bio-fiction.com/

BIO·FICTION Panel

8 Apr 2021 19:00 — 21:00

 

BIO·FICTION Panelist (in image)
with Riitta Hari, Pia Tikka, Markus Schmidt and Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka (moderator)
Thursday, April 8, 19–21h (Finnish time, UTC+2)
via Zoom | in English

Neurotechnology and how it will shape our future bodies is the underlying question of the BIO·FICTION Science Art Film Festival. For the kickoff of the Helsinki edition, where we will show a selection of nine films, all of which have been awarded or screened at the festival, we invite you to join the BIO·FICTION online panel. During it, Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka will discuss together with festival director Markus Schmidt, neuroscientist Riitta Hari and artist Pia Tikka neurotechnology and its current and potential impact on society.

Join the panel via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83861833745

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Riitta Hari MD PhD is Professor Emerita of Systems Neuroscience and Human Brain Imaging at Aalto University, Finland. She has been developing magnetoencephalography (MEG) for tracking millisecond-scale activation sequences in the human brain, providing fundamental insights into human sensory, motor, cognitive, and social functions in both healthy and diseased individuals. Hari is Academician of Science in Finland since 2010 and member of the National Academy of Sciences USA since 2004. She currently attempts to bridge art and neuroscience without privileging either.

Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka is a Helsinki-based media artist, art educator and researcher working with technological notions of sense. As part of interdisciplinary Brains on Art collective his practice is informed by collaboration with scientists and researchers and the friction between art and science. Mäki-Reinikka is a board member of the Bioart Society, a foil fencer and a teacher of Art and Artificial Intelligence in Aalto University. Mäki-Reinikka is writing an artistic dissertation on interdisciplinary art and its possibilities to discuss changes in human-machine relation. Since August 2020, Mäki-Reinikka has been teaching art in Kallio Upper Secondary School of Performing Arts.

Dr Markus Schmidt founded Biofaction, a technology assessment, science communication and art-science company in Vienna, Austria. With a background in electronic engineering, biology and risk assessment, he carried out environmental risk assessment and public perception studies in various fields, such as GM-crops, nanotechnology, converging technologies, and synthetic biology. He has published over 35 peer-reviewed papers and three edited books about the future of life. In 2010, he helped to chart the field of xenobiology. Schmidt was part of the FUTUREBODY project.

Dr Pia Tikka is a filmmaker and EU Mobilitas Research Professor at the Baltic Film, Media, and Arts School, Tallinn University. She is a founder of NeuroCine research group that studies the neural basis of storytelling. She has published widely on the topics of enactive media, narrative complex systems, and neurocinematics. A Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and a member of European Film Academy, her filmography includes international productions as well as fiction films, interactive films and VR films she has directed. Currently, she leads Enactive Virtuality Lab at Tallinn University.

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BIO·FICTION is part of the ERA-NET project FUTUREBODY and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF: I 3752-B27). The BIO·FICTION programme at Bioart Society is funded via the Biofriction European collaboration project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European.