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Let’s Work Together

stavros.didakis@nyu.edu

Pulse Mode

Neural Control for Realtime Audiovisual Content

Commissioned artwork, Leicester Arts Centre (UK)

Media Installation, Custom-Software, Brainwaves Sensor, Tablets, Mobile Phones

2013

Pulse Mode, a commissioned artwork showcased at the Code Control Festival  in Phoenix / Leicester Arts Centre from 22-24 March 2013 (Leicester UK), presents a participatory art space by integrating a set of interactive, telematic, and audiovisual custom-built systems that allows participants to “mold” the projected audiovisual landscapes in real time. Set in space designed with a fragmented 3D screen and featuring a variety of interactive tools, including Mindwave sensors and mobile device integrations, Pulse Mode invites the audience into a continuous interplay between authoritative control, social dynamics, and the individual aesthetic experience. With its computational facilitation allows the real-time manipulation of musical and visual elements, Pulse Mode not only showcases the possibilities of multimodal interactions but also focuse son themes of authority and control within art and society, challenging the perceptual roles of creator, spectator, and the relationships between individuals and institutional entities.

Configured as a responsive instrument, the installation recalibrates continuously from neural biosignals (MindWave) and audience phones, converting attention and arousal into operational inputs that redistribute authorship across genre zones. A live mixing engine braids multitrack stems through shifting time signatures while the visual system recomposes content across spatial screen fragments in step with rhythmic and spectral cues. The installation tests how bodies become interfaces and how metrics govern culture: signals are scored, influence is tallied, and participation oscillates between collaboration and competition. Rather than staging open-ended freedom, it exposes curated forms of agency where rules, thresholds, and technical infrastructure (MaxMSP, Jitter, Python, Node.js, MongoDB, HTML, JavaScript) script possible frameworks of participatory interactions. The result is a phenomenology of co-authorship that treats intention, preference, and contention as aesthetic material, inviting reflection on biopolitics, cybernetic control, and the ethics of measurement in participatory art.

Credits:

Hardware Support: iDAT, Plymouth University

Interior Design: Kallia Platirrahou

Web/Server Design: Florian Bruckner

Graphic Design: Andrew Leeke

Special Thanks: Sean Carroll & Chris Tyrer