101-dreams of dreams
Performance
Dreamsessions.org

Starting date 2017.01.09 Eugene OR, USA

Project description

I.

We create bridges between dreams and the wake world through brain waves recordings and represent them as data sculptures. Our project explores a transdisciplinary interstice between the world of dreams and the cognitive sciences, observing the traces of dream stimulation from daytime experience. Situated where mind and biology meet, the task of the scientist is fundamental for the study of these processes. The research project presented aims at putting the personal perception of Nathalie’s dreams through an objective, quantitative analysis using electroencephalography (EEG), in an attempt to establish a linkage between the two dimensions. During sleep periods, brain activity is similar to that of an awakened state, yet the thalamus, a phylogenetically ancient structure in the nervous system, isolates us from the environment. But this isolation is not total, and sometimes external stimuli are incorporated into the plot of our dreams. To establish a bridge between the record (EEG) and Nathalie’s dream narrative, we experiment with auditory stimuli as a possible mechanism of interference. Spoken words are reproduced while Nathalie sleeps – as a way of requesting an autobiographical memory and weaving it into the story. So far the experience produced four immediate results described in section III.

Representations Dreams 101:

We propose to scrutinize memory-invoked experiences and discover whether the stimulus applied during the night filtered into the plot of the dream, or if the stimulus was reflected in the diaries written every morning. As we can see at what time the computer triggered the audio, we can extract the section that corresponds to the event from the electroencephalography register. The depiction when the computer-produced auditory stimuli were incorporated into the plot of Nathalie’s dreams will be represented as large laser cut data sculptures, designed by neuroscientist Roberto, seeking to visualise the signal of the sensors along with the narrative of the dreams, and Katja will explore the interrelation between the perceived intensity of the dreamt situation with the signal intensity across the 256 electrodes.

The intimacy during sleep is touching. Our dreams are made of cells that shape our experience and reciprocally, are shaped by our experience. Even in the darkness of the night our brain keeps working and updating its functions; our body can be still but our brain is never silent.

The following work is an exploration of the frontiers in our engagement to build bridges across sleep study and the humanistic approach leading us to reincarnate the subjectivity of this very particular experience.

We documented the general environment of the study for a visual narration. Starting from the dream where Nathalie narrates of the experience itself, then we would build the cutaway shots of the film resulting from the real recording, with those imagined in the dream, and the cinematographic ones through the process of filmmaking, as if these different realities were intertwined. The film relates the subjective approach, the dreamer, Nathalie, the objective, the scientific reality featured by Guillaume and the inter-subjective, the cinematic, Olivier as invited artist to collaborate in the project.

II.

Dreamsessions.org is an arts and cognitive neuroscience initiative that promotes the use of art and science as a common good in knowledge and society by the artist Nathalie Regard in collaboration with the neuroscientists Roberto Toro, Guillaume Dumas and Katja Heuer. The objective is to confront the subjective, personal perception of Nathalie's dreams with an objective, quantitative analysis, throughout brain recordings, seeking to establish a bridge between these two dimensions. All data is open under CC-by licence dreamsessions.org

Since 1996, Nathalie performs a detailed diary of her dreams translated into a series of works marked by a sense of chronic, applying to visual and conceptual objects, combining painting, writing, performance, visual art, cognitive science, all related to the notions of perception and mental images.

The first test was conducted in May 2011 at the Sleep Clinic of the General Hospital in Mexico City. The work brings together the function of a polysomnographic registry and the test P300, both revealing images from the mind, traces of cognitive processes and consciousness, confronting them with Nathalie’s subjective approach. Since then, we went around the idea of stimulating sleep with audio.

Roberto is a researcher at the Institut Pasteur in computational neuroanatomy, interested in the development and evolution of the brain. In 2014, we performed the work 80 Days In Dreams in Mexico City, with a commercial headset of 14 channels. It was the second step in the search of a passageway between the dimensions of dreams and the wake state, adding an exceptional length of time in relation to common studies. We proposed that for 80 consecutive days we were going to put Nathalie’s body along with the drawing of a machine and to measure it with electroencephalography, to observe what the dream narrative reveals.

For two decades, Roberto and Nathalie have collaborated together until 2016, when Guillaume Dumas, is a researcher at the Institut Pasteur in neuroscience and in the transdisciplinary gap on the altered state of cognition, joined and decided to take the initiative to the next level. In 2017, we performed the recording of 101-Nights of sleep with 256 HD-EEG channels, in Eugene, OR. Katja Heuer, researcher at Max Planck Institute interested in brain development, evolution, and data visualisation, joined us in 2018, during our first workshop towards a collaborative analyses of these 1TB of EEG data.

Dream Sessions have been exhibited during the Brain Art Exhibitions at The Human Brain Mapping Conferences HBM in Québec City, 2011, Beijing 2012, Hamburg 2014 and Vancouver 2017, as well as the Brainhack in Centre International d'Etudes Pédagogiques in Sèvres, 2013 and the Brainhack hosted at the Institut Pasteur in 2016. At Galerie Laurent Mueller, Paris and The Hub/Wellcome Collection, London, in 2015 and in 2018, we presented our project in Error, the Art of Imperfection, Post City, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz Austria.

More information about the CVs of th team see the link below:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18RNKbsMAJ38ZHO5FGmif_ddyohiuqgv5

Olivier Seror

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1V-uXwqn2e2hD58_tEqk6PF_ujPTPW_of

III.

Through our project we got four immediate results :

1. 952 GB of brain data produced by the registry of 256 sensors over the period of 101 nights in continuity. The data has been posted online along with the record of body movement under the responsibility of neuroscientist Guillaume Dumas.

The data set from 101-dreams can be found at http://dreamsessions.org/101eeg.html.

2. A diary that narrates all of Nathalie’s memories of the dreams, including the hours she spent sleeping with the EEG device and the times the interfering audio was incorporated into the stories.

101-dreams of dreams are available at http://dreamsessions.org/101nights.html and in audio version at http://dreamsessions.org/101audiodreams.html

3. An itinerary describing succinctly and precise the daily activities and important events. It contains interactions with the world outside, the hours sleeping, writing dreams, foods, walks, etc. This record gives a complementary account of the experience and provides potential for establishing interrelations among the brain data and the dreams during 101-dreams project.

This set of data is available at, http://dreamsessions.org/101daybyday.html

4. The logs from the database containing the short auditory stimuli. The words were taken from the poem The Sleepers by Walt Whitman. Each of 101-dreams of registry, the computer program randomly selected a word from its database, played the audio and kept the log along with the exact time of the event.

IV.

An exploration of emerging technology

This project is exploring the old topic of dream with state of the art neurotechnology and data analytics. We partnered with EGI the electroencephalography division of Philips Healthcare which produces the most advanced high-density helmets for the recording of brain waves. During 101 nights we collected in our rogue neuroscience laboratory the signals of 256 electrodes on the scalp of Nathalie at 1 KHz. But the experiment is not only observational since we designed a system to send messages while Nathalie was asleep. Those messages were also meticulously indexed and stored with the time of their emission at the millisecond precision. Since Nathalie has logged all her dreams and diurnal activity for the whole 101 days and nights, the overall dataset allows to probe how the subjective experience of a dreamer is correlated to brain activity, but also how both the dream content and the dreaming brain can be affected through semantic perturbation. The uniqueness of the project – its longitudinal aspect and extensive documentation –, and the fact that all the collected information has been made open, has already convinced multiple researchers that it constitutes a meaningful exploration of emerging technology through the lens of an ancient mystery of the human mind: dreams.

V.

Relationship between technology and culture.

In an introduction to a 2010 series of talks on cognitive experiences in the realm of art, Mario Borillo wrote: “The universe of art is the supreme site for mental activity for both the creator and the spectator. An activity whose distinguishing mark appears to be the space devoted to the imagination, to dreams, to memory, to passions, to the flows of subjectivity. This universe, heretofore obdurate or inaccessible to the exigencies of scientific analysis, is beginning to make its way into the cognitive science field of study.”

During the creative process, an artist must, above all, inquire into the subjective experience of perception and—more or less consciously—ask in what ways it enables the construction of our relationship with the world. As Mario Borillo suggests, the study of this process situated at the physical-mental node is a task befitting neuroscience.

Our project combines neurotechnology with the cultural mystery of dreams is an explicit invitation to bridge the gap between contemporary technological advances and ancient cultural questions. Using words from the poem The Sleepers by Walt Whitman, creating an iconography associated to classic paintings, to nudge people, in taking perspectives and connecting different representations. The experiment itself aims at fostering the dialogue between a first-person and a third-person perspective, in the spirit of the neurophenomenology research program of the neurobiologist Francisco Varela. The issue is that “consciousness is a public affair” (sic) and how we experience the world is shaped by our living experience constrained by our biological embodiment and our cultural embedding.

VI.

Data of interest

The data produced within 101-dreams project is a longitudinal and structured approach to the topic of dreams, a unique dataset for scientific analyses, methodological developments as well artistic projects. Including cognitive science and multiple modalities of art the unprecedented project allows an internal and external perspective on Nathalie’s dreams, containing extensive data for 101 consecutive nights and days.

In detail, the project produced

1. EEG recordings of 101 nights from 256 electrodes
2. Recordings of her body movement (actimetry and infrared camera),
3. the logs of the words played to Nathalie each night and their exact time,
4. Nathalie’s daily dream diary entries,
5. an extensive documentation of her daily life,

The longitudinal aspect and extensive documentation make the data an interesting playground to test the robustness of scientific methods and further their development.

The extensive metadata in combination with the EEG recordings enable a multitude of scientific questions interesting to psychologists, sleep scientists, and the neuroscientific community in general.

As all code to process the EEG data will be openly available, and given the extensive metadata and its availability in written and spoken English, the project presents an extremely rich dataset for artists worldwide. It enables purely artistic projects as well as many options to explore the data at the intersection between art and science.

All data is openly and freely available under CC-BY license on Dreamsessions.org and enables a multitude of interactions for everyone.

Dreamsessions.org would like to acknowledge.

The acquisition of 101-dreams was possible with the in-kind support of EGI, a division of Philips Healthcare, a medical device company and a key component of dense array EEG method based in Eugene, Oregon, U.S.

– In partnership with SAE Institute Mexico. In-kind support in digital sound recording and editing.

– Sponsored by Lyrica Artist Workshops, Mexico.

We would like to acknowledge the support and cooperation of The Neuro Bureau, a non-profit organisation that supports open science and data exchange, (http://neurobureau.projects.nitrc.org) as well as the academic function of the Mexican Institute for Sleep Medicine (IMMIS) in Mexico City.