The Color of (Re-)Rendering

#Interactive Installation #Human Computer Interaction
Background
People often think about their memory as a recording device. However, the American psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus, best known for her research on the misinformation effect, pointed out the reconstructive nature of our memory. According to her, our memory is more like a Wikipedia page where both ourselves and others can change it. Whenever memory is retrieved, people color it with the present experience of it, and in which a false memory is created.
Project Overview
This work takes the participant on a journey of their false memory: how it is formed, retrieved, and reshaped. It invites the viewer to question, “Is what I remember the reality indeed?” and to discover the relationship between the brain, memory, and the environment.
This project utilizes the notion of arousal and valence for emotion classification based on brainwaves measured in the EEG headset at 16 brain locations with a 200Hz sampling rate to create a visual interpretation of false memory.

The abstraction of emotion is calculated from the real-time brain signals on the prefrontal, frontal and parietal regions on both sides of the brain. Since either memory or brainwave has a physical form, I want to contrast it with something tangible and mechanical. Discrete emotions are most intuitively expressed with paints due to their inherent color and fluidity, and the burst of colors naturally represents the process of eliciting emotions from memory. Thus, watching balloons filled with colors pop where paints will spout, scatter, and mix is like watching our rendered memory.
The Color of (Re-)Rendering
Project Summary
Jul 2023
Interaction Demo Video
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