'Brain art: Brain-computer interfaces for artistic expression'

摘要

Anton Nijholt's edited book Brain Art: Brain-Computer Interfaces for Artistic Expression is a unique contribution, being the first and only fully comprehensive cover of art and brain computer interface (BCI) projects. For the first time, readers can learn about the enormous scope of BCI experimentation in art and art-related projects, dating back many decades, all in one volume. Importantly, this book is not only for people with an interest in the arts, but is also of high importance to the wider BCI scientific and engineering community. BCI is mostly an engineering discipline, and the majority of BCI scholars and practitioners are engineers. Engineering and art are extremely different practices, with an inherent contrast between them: engineering is analytic and rigorous, whereas art is often associative and exploratory. This is exactly why BCI engineers and scientists, interested in developing applications or making scientific progress in the field, may find value in reviewing the explorations made by artists or in the scope of science-art projects. The lack of rigorous success criteria in art can be alienating for both scientists and engineers, but this is what most often allows artists to be the first to explore new interaction paradigms and scenarios, long before the more conservative scientific community steps in. Case in point, 'hyper-scanning' has been trendy for several years [1-4]. Reading through the volume's chapters, one can learn about how attempts in closed-loop EEG explorations looked into dyads and beyond, to groups, as early as the 1960s (Chapters 1 and 4).