Cognitive Sensations brings you a multidisciplinary event combining art, science and technology, co-hosted by STEM and emotions expert Dr. Sharon Tettegah. Decoding Humans will present two new artworks as part of the wider programme ‘The Downloadable Brain’, exploring the biological connection between humans and machines.

Emotion tracking is a young industry with enormous potential within society. Currently, there are universal approaches to collating data about user’s location, digital habits and consumer preferences. Often described as the ‘attention economy’, this form of data collection is hugely informative, but it doesn’t reveal the psychological state and impressions experienced at the time. Current initiatives mark a starting point in this turn of focus, and their target is the emotional status of users.



Previewing to audiences for the very first time, Rod Dickinson and Nathan Semertzidis will reveal their artwork experiment Machine_in_the_middle, reimagining a classic cyber attack using EEG sensing and emotion recognition, featuring the notoriously inscrutable snooker star Steve Davis. Artist of the senses Marcos Lutyens will launch his collaborative artwork The New Herulians, inviting audiences to take part in an interactive synaesthetic experience exploring emotional data through a sci-fi narrative.



Dr Sharon Tettegah will take audiences through an informative journey exploring the technological turn to cognitive and biological data collation. Through a collaborative discussion, Decoding Humans will shed light upon the huge potential of these technologies as social coaches, helping users understand and manage their own emotions to help overcome issues such as trauma, PTSD and stress. 

As these technologies seek to quantify and reveal the inner workings of the mind, what sort of future can we expect as emotion becomes a new cognitive target of the digital age?

About the Speakers:

Dr Sharon Tettegah is a Professor and Director at the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With a diverse background in data science, engineering and other areas of STEM, Tettegah is the co-editor of a series of books exploring emotions, technology, behaviour, design and social media.

Marcos Lutyens’ practice centers on the investigation of consciousness to engage the visitor’s embodied experience of art. Exhibitions of infinite scale and nature have been installed in the minds of visitors. Investigations have included consciousness research with social groups such as the third-gender Muxhe, Raeilians, synaesthetes, border migrants, space engineers and mental architects to explore how unconscious mind-sets shift across cultures and backgrounds. Lutyens has extended these consciousness projects to involve our external surroundings. Works include interactions with pedestrian flows, social media dialogue, air quality levels, animal and biological intercommunication.

Rod Dickinson is curator of the Control Shift digital art festival in Bristol, which aims to rethink and reshape our digital tools with creative practice. His artworks have been exhibited across Europe and beyond and explore the history and legacy of behavioral science and its impact on governance, often using software and other digital technologies. He is also Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at The University of the West of England.

Nathan Semertzidis is a PhD candidate at Exertion Games Lab, Monash University. Through his research, he designs and evaluates brain-computer interface systems to better understand how technology can be integrated with the human brain to function as extensions to our endogenous neural processes. His current projects contribute toward his vision of establishing a human collective consciousness.