Neurotech drama VFC by Charles S. Roy in Cannes Next May 8-13

News from our international network.

Since connected by Storytek Content+Tech Acceleator in fall 2017 Pia Tikka has consulted the VFC project directed by Charles S. Roy on screenplay and audience interaction.

Charles S. Roy, Film Producer & Head of Innovation at the production company La Maison de Prod, develops his debut narrative film+interactive project VFC as producer-director. VFC has been selected at the Storytek Content+Tech Accelerator, the Frontières Coproduction Market, the Cannes NEXT Cinema & Transmedia Pitch, the Sheffield Crossover Market, and Cross Video Days in Paris. In the vein of classic portrayals of female anxiety such as Roman Polanski’s REPULSION, Todd Haynes’ SAFE and Jonathan Glazer’s BIRTH, VFC is a primal and immersive psychological drama about fear of music (cinando.com). Its main innovation is in bringing brain-computer interface storytelling to the big screen by offering an interactive neurotech experience.

On the premises of the Cannes Film Market, as a grant holder for the Estonian innovation and development incubator Storytek Accelerator, Charles presented his work to the audience of the tech-focused NEXT section (8-13 May).

Collaboration meeting @ Virtual Cinema Lab, Aalto University

Our Enactive Avatar team Victor Pardinho, Lynda Joy Gerry, Eeva R Tikka, Tanja Bastamow, and Maija Paavola planning the volumetric video capture of a screen character with a collaborator in Berlin. The team’s work is supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Huhtamäki Fund, and Virtual Cinema Lab (VCL), School of Film, Television and Scenography, Aalto University, and by Pia Tikka’s EU Mobilitas Top Researcher Grant.

“Sümbiootiline helilooming” – New publication by Ilkka Kosunen

The manifesto for the new field of science, Symbiotic Composing, by Dr. Ilkka Kosunen, was recently published in the Teater. Muusika. Kino.

Symbiotic composing connects the topics of deep learning, physiological computing and computational creativity to facilitate new type of creative process where technology and human aesthetic judgment merge into one.

The article is in Estonian language.

TMK_aprill_2018

Meeting with Andrew Gordon at the ICT/USC

Andrew Gordon leads the Narrative Group at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies where his research is devoted to getting computers to be able to read and generate stories and to use the knowledge in stories in order to become more intelligent. He is also a professor in the USC Department of Computer Science. His project involves reimagining a 70-year-old social science experiment for the digital age.

In 1944, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel created a simple animated film depicting the motion of two triangles and a circle as they moved in and around a box that alternated between being opened or closed. Heider and Simmel asked people to describe what they saw. Now a classic work in the field of social psychology, the subjects responded with creative narratives that ascribed human-like goals, plans, beliefs, and emotions to the moving objects. Popular themes included romantic relationships and prison breaks. See also an article by professors of psychology Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel: “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” American Journal of Psychology 57.2 (April 1944): 243-59.

ICT’s Andrew Gordon Brings Seminal 1940’s Social Science Experiment Online

Enactive Virtuality at CNA Sound and Storytelling Conference LA March 22

Pia Tikka and Martin Jaroszewicz gave a joint talk at the CNA Sound and Storytelling Conference.

Image: Dr. Martin Jaroszewicz disucssing his ideas of enactive VR soundscapes at the Chapman University conference, Orange, CA, March 22.

“Enactive Virtuality – a framework for dynamically adaptive soundscapes”.

The novel notion of enactive virtuality is discussed, drawing from the theories of enactive mind [1], and the concept of enactive cinema [2]. The key attribute of ‘enactive’ refers here to the setting in which the human agent is in continuous feed-back-looped interaction with the surrounding world. Enactive virtuality in turn refers to the story emerging in the agent’s mind in this dynamical setting in order to make sense of the world. This story is based on the agent’s current situation and previous experiences [3], and in relation to others through neurally built-in imitation of their actions [4]. Thus, the concept of ‘enactive virtuality’ extends beyond the common techno-spatial buzzword of ‘virtual reality’. While virtual reality technologies allow platforms where the perception of sound events can be modulated algorithmically, we describe the human agent’s experience of a dynamically adaptive soundscape as an expression of enactive virtuality.Theories and techniques of sound transformations in the spectral domain [5,6,7] for this setting are discussed.

References:

[1] Varela F, Thompson E, Rosch E. 1991. Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[2] Tikka P. 2008. Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense. PhD diss. Helsinki: Univ. Art and Design Publ.

[3] Heyes CM, Frith CD. The cultural evolution of mind reading. Science. 2014 Jun 20;344(6190):1243091. doi:10.1126/science.1243091.

[4] Gallese V, Eagle MN, Migone P. 2007. Intentional attunement: mirror neurons (…) J Am Psychoanal Assoc. 55(1):131-76.

[5] Jaroszewicz, M. 2015 Compositional Strategies in Spectral Spatialization. PhD thesis,University of California Riverside,

[6] Jaroszewicz, M. 2017 ”Interfacing Gestural Data from Instrumentalists,” ART – Music Review, vol. 32.

[7] Kim-Boyle. 2008. “Spectral spatialization – an overview,” RILM Abstracts of Music Literature. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.bbp2372.2008.086

A 13 min talk on Neurocinematics, Tallinn University Day 2018

See full program here

At 12:15 session Pia Tikka, Research Professor, Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School “Neurocinematics”

My 13 minutes will introduce a multidisciplinary research paradigm of neurocinematics. Combining methods of cinema, enactive media, and virtual screen characters with those of cognitive sciences it allows us to unravel new aspects of the neural basis of storytelling, creative imagination, and narrative comprehension. In addition to contributing to academic research on human mind, neurocinematics contributes to a range of more specifically targeted goals, such as the impact of audiovisual media on its audience for artistic, therapeutic, or commercial implementations, to name few of many.

TALK @Brain Awareness Week 2018

Brain Awareness Week 2018

Tallinn University is celebrating Brain Awareness Week (BAW) for the second year in a row! This year we have an open seminar

“Meet the Researchers”

Monday, March 12 from 2PM to 6 PM “Meet the Researchers”, University of Tallinn (Narva mnt. 29), room A-325.
Take part of a seminar where experts from the field take the floor and discuss brain, promote the benefits of brain research and inform the public about what we do as neuroscientist and brain researchers.

Researchers:

Professor Talis Bachmann – Professor of Cognitive and Legal Psychology (University of Tartu)
Dr Toomas Toomsoo – Neurologist (East-Tallinn Central Hospital)
Pia Tikka, PhD – Finnish film director and leading research scientist (Tallinn University)
Erika Comasco, PhD – Neuropsychopharmacologist (Uppsala University)

NeuroCine team’s study on Memento gains international media attention Feb 2018

Pia Tikka

The neuroscientific study my research team NeuroCine initiated at the Aalto University some years ago has been published in NeuroImage journal.

The Neural Basis of Watching “Memento”

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-02-nolan-memento-reveals-brain-events.html

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180221122954.htm

http://www.sciencenewsline.com/news/2018022116140007.html

http://www.iltalehti.fi/terveysuutiset/201802212200761490_we.shtml

https://www.sttinfo.fi/tiedote?publisherId=37936456&releaseId=66429298

Links provided by Tiina Aulanko-Jokirinne, Communications Coordinator at Aalto University

Enactive Avatar in Time Flies Nordica Spring 2018

You can find an article about prof Pia Tikka and her studies on enactive co-presence between the viewer and screen character in the Nordica in flight magazine “Time Flies”.

You can also read the article in BFM’s blog:
http://media.tlu.ee/imagine-movies-could-read-your-emotions

If you are not there where are you? 27 Feb 2018

Pia Tikka

With the IYANTWAY director Maartje Nevejan, cinematographer Jean and sound designer Fokke in the Kaurismäki Brothers’ Moscow Bar Helsinki. The group is seeking to gain new insights to the experience of absence seizures through artistic contemplation. See more at the productions’web pages http://www.ceruttifilm.nl/documentaire.php?filmid=12

My interview on neurocinematic topics was flavoured by watching a powerful scene from Aki Kaurismäki film Match Factory Girl, which we have shown to elicit broad whole brain activity in several viewers (orange colour) in functional MRI. This research was conducted at the aivoAALTO research group at Aalto University (2009–2014), and AK’s film was the first that our neurocinematic team took into brain imaging lab.

See more in our research article:

Juha M. Lahnakoski , Juha Salmi, Iiro P. Jääskeläinen, Jouko Lampinen, Enrico Glerean, Pia Tikka, Mikko Sams (2012). Stimulus-Related Independent Component and Voxel-Wise Analysis of Human Brain Activity during Free Viewing of a Feature Film. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0035215