Art and science merge at Hong Kong festival: mind-controlled movies, artificial typhoons and musical biology
- Three-day event includes a film that changes scenes to match audience brain activity and a play about storm-chasing with artificial storms
- Artists are important in imagining future uses of new technology, festival collaborators say
Can you imagine going to a movie and having the power to determine how its plot will play out by just thinking about it?
It may sound like science fiction but it is already possible.
“Mind-controlled movies” are just one of the highlights of the upcoming Spark festival in Hong Kong, a three-day event organised by the British Council that celebrates creativity in science and the arts.
Other highlights of the festival, which will take place in Central district’s prison-turned-cultural-hub Tai Kwun, include a stage production that features real miniature typhoons, and a music performance accompanied by biological cells “dancing” on a screen.
The mind-controlled movies are the creation of Richard Ramchurn, a graduate of the University of Nottingham in the UK and a collaborator at the festival. Using electroencephalography devices that detect electrical activity in the brain, he has adopted the technology to detect how much attention a user is paying to something.