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The dark side of the mind: Exploring aberrant neurocognitive processes underlying anomalous bodily experiences 

Jason Braithwaite   
University of Birmingham

During our typical daily lives we experience a constant and coherent sense of self, where our consciousness feels securely embodied inside our physical moorings.  However, the mechanisms underlying this stable sense of 'self' are not error-proof and under some circumstances can breakdown leading to striking distortions in self-consciousness.  One example of this is the Out-of-Body experience (OBE) where observers report experiencing the world from a vantage point outside of their physical self.  These and other related anomalous bodily experiences are not only associated with neurological and clinical conditions - but can also occur in the non-clinical population.  This talk will examine recent developments in the neurocognition of anomalous experience - with an emphasis on OBEs and related anomalous body experiences.  Evidence supporting; (i) aberrant emotional reactivity; (ii) biases in sensory processing / multi-sensory integration, and (iii) increased degrees of cortical hyperexcitability, underlying anomalous states of consciousness will be presented.

Notes Towards a History of Art, Code and Autonomy

Paul Brown  
ÑÇÖÞÇéÉ«

The work of Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat and their contemporaries had a profound influence on the art of the 20^th century.  Art as a formal analysis of it’s own internal processes became a common theme of several inter-related art movements that, in the 1960’s, overthrew the concept of art as object and replaced it with one of art as process.  The systems and conceptual artists embraced and developed these ideas and then, in the 1970’s, a new generation of artists began to encode these concepts using the formal linguistics made possible by the new science of computing.  Computer art, as such, was not new:  by 1970 it was at least 20 years old and already in 1968 Jasia Reichardt, at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), had curated a major historical survey of the field called Cybernetic Serendipity.  But it was the young artists working at the Slade School of Art’s postgraduate Experimental and Computing Department from 1974 to 82 who were specifically applying the ideas from both systems and conceptual art within the context of the emergent computational domain.

Paul Brown was a member of that group at the Slade School and is an artist and writer who has specialised in art, science & technology since the late-1960s and in computational & generative art since the mid 1970s.  His early work included creating large-scale lighting works for musicians and performance groups like Meredith Monk, Music Electronica Viva, Pink Floyd, etc… and he has an international exhibition record that includes the creation of both permanent and temporary public artworks dating from the late 1960s. He has participated in shows at major venues like the TATE, Victoria & Albert and ICA in the UK; the Adelaide Festival; ARCO in Spain, the Substation in Singapore and the Venice Biennale and his work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA. With Charlie Gere, Nick Lambert and Catherine Mason he was a co-editor of White Heat Cold Logic - British Computer Art 1960 – 1980 (MIT Press, Leonardo Imprint, 2009).  Since 2005 he has been honorary visiting professor and artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, School of Engineering and Informatics at the ÑÇÖÞÇéÉ«.

Revelations by Flicker: Dream Machines and Electroencephalographic signals in Art

Luciana Haill  
ÑÇÖÞÇéÉ«

How did an ordinary tool in the Neurophysiology department became a means for spiritual enlightenment? This article follows the emergence of the harnessing of brainwave signals (EEG) in artworks, escaping and multiplying into installations like its predecessor Flicker from research laboratories.  The crossover occurred between Dr Grey Walter’s neurological research with strobes and electroencephalographs, and the culture of ‘The Beats,’ following his publication of “The Living Brain.” Cyberneticians, psychologists and artists were soon inspiring each other with pioneering chemistry, new artistic styles and new ways of seeing.

The psychological and neurobiological effects of psychedelic drugs

Robin Carhart-Harris
Imperial College London

Psychedelic drugs profoundly alter consciousness without compromising wakefulness and are therefore powerful tools for studying the neurobiology of consciousness. This talk will detail the complex psychological effects of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA, and offer hypotheses on how their respective effects on brain activity (measured with fMRI and MEG) relate to their psychological effects. The results will be discussed in relation to psychosis, the spiritual experience, creative thinking and novel psychotherapeutic approaches for disorders such as depression and addiction.

The Gothic and Computer Art 

Maggie Boden  
ÑÇÖÞÇéÉ«

At first sight, computer art would seem to be utterly at variance with "the Gothic"--especially given Ruskin's emphasis on the handmade, and his critique of mechanisation in general. However, six of his twelve principles of Gothic art could be satisfied by various types of computer art. (These deal with the properties of the art object.) The other six, which deal with the spirit of art-making, are more problematic. But even they can sometimes be satisfied indirectly.

Art in the age of situated robotics: Expressivity, attention and significance

Adam Linson  
University of Oxford

A growing number of largely autonomous robots produce art, including painting, music, and poetry, increasingly in real time, often with human-like results, and in some instances using human-like processes. This intersection of emerging technologies with artistic practices has important implications for a renewed analysis of art. In this talk, I will interrogate some common intuitions about artistic expression inherited from previous centuries by drawing upon interrelated themes from research on interactive robots, neurobiological and psychological studies of attention, the philosophy of art and artificial intelligence, and historical and cultural perspectives on expressivity. My aim is to reconfigure our understanding of human artistic expressivity without denying the possibility of future robot artists.

I will argue that artistic production depends upon particularities about cognitive architecture as they pertain to historically embedded, socioculturally situated processes of interpretation. These processes connect to mechanisms of attention and subjectively identified significance. Ultimately, I will show that the embodied interactions of everyday life provide the experiential background against which artistic sensibilities take shape. This contrasts with the predominant view that mere domain-specific formalisations of artistic practices and their output could be sufficient for an expressive robot artist.

Exploring educational feedback with pop-up social networks

Matthew Yee-King 
Goldsmiths, University of London

The pop-up is an experimental creative, social, innovation, cultural or retail space which exists only for a fixed period of time. Typically it takes advantage of and even promotes the architecture of an unused space. Pop-ups enable experimentation with new ways of creating social, cultural, creative and community spaces and the disruption of established practices. In this talk, I will present our concept of the pop-up social network for education research, which allows us to create bespoke, fixed term experimental spaces in which we can investigate novel pedagogical architectures, student experiences and social interaction modalities. I will report on our experience running our pop-up social networks during the PRAISE project, a 3m EURO FP7 project. We have used our systems with a creative programming MOOC with an enrolment of 55,000 as well as a case study around practicing music through peer feedback. I will demonstrate our systems in action then I will present our methods for analysing the data we have generated, including social network analysis using restricted Boltzmann machines, qualitative, thematic and ontological analyses.

Semantic and Syntactic Factors influencing language production: "WHO" are we likely to refer to and "HOW" in repeated text?

Bojana Ivic
ÑÇÖÞÇéÉ«

Cancelled

Who are we likely to refer to in the repeated discourse or text? How are we likely to refer to them? This talk presents 5 experiments, looking at which one out of the people that have already been mentioned we are likely to refer to again, and in doing so, are we likely to repeat their full name or use the pronoun. Pronoun resolution is extensively researched topic, and the present research is looking at two previous studies with the conflicting results. One suggests that different factors influence “who” are we likely to refer to and “how” are we likely to refer to them (Fukumura & van Gompel, 2010) and the other that the same factor affects these two questions (Arnold, 2001). In particular, Fukumura and van Gompel, suggest that semantic role that a person mentioned in preceding clause, plays (e.g. stimulus/experiencer), determines who is referred to again, but that the way in which they are referred to (pronoun/name) is determined by the grammatical role (subject or object). Arnold, who looked at the thematic roles of source and goal, suggests that semantic roles influence both “who” we refer to and “how” we refer to them.

   In an attempt to understand why these studies produced different results we carried out 5 studies asking people to write continuations to the sentences which introduce two people related by an interpersonal verb. Both implicit causality verbs (following Fukumura & van Gompel) and the source-goal verbs (following Arnold) were used. The 5 experiments were varied in terms of the materials and methodologies used, in experiments 1,4, 5 we used a method of the forced referent, by indicating with an arrow who should participants refer to (thus creating bias-consistent and bias-inconsistent items), and in these experiments the main question was “whether the pronoun or repeated name are used?”. The answer is that the choice of name  vs. pronouns is influenced by the grammatical (subject) or structural factor (position of the antecedent in its clause); it is not clear, however, whether it is the first-mention or the subject of the preceding clause.

   In the ‘no arrow’ experiments (exp. 2,3), semantics does seem to influence “who” we are likely to refer to; for the implicit causality items, people tend to refer to the “stimulus” rather than an “experiencer” for both types of verbs (SE/ES). For the Arnold materials, when participants are asked to provide causal continuation (exp. 2) there is no clear effect, but when participants are free to continue the sentence as they wish (cause, consequence, elaboration were the main types of cont.) they choose “goal” over the “source”. This suggests the “goal” preference, rather than straightforward causality bias. When people are free to choose the continuation, for the ES/SE verbs their preferred choice of ending is “cause”, whilst for the GS/SG verbs, causes are less popular as the continuation, and this might allow people to refer to “goals” rather than “sources”.  Further studies will investigate these questions by asking  people to write consequential continuations. Insofar, it seems that slight changes in either items or instructions, affect changes on more levels than one. This might be an approach analogous to Marr’s theory of vision, which suggests that statistical properties of language affect language comprehension and language production at the very basic level.

Computational Models in Child Psychiatry

Jonathan Williams 
King's College London

Children love computers, but computations also happen within children.  Computational modelling is a small but promising field:  programmed simulations of how information is processed.  Such models have been made of brain processes leading to both normal and abnormal behaviour – as well as of evolution and social interactions.  Modelling of children may advance faster than that of adults, because CAMHS routinely addresses observable behaviour, with the diverse influences on it such as learning, inherited characteristics, family function, and medication.

There are many computational models of children’s mental health, and I briefly summarise several including my own work on ADHD.  Currently, modellers constantly work to maximise rigour, novelty, and understandability.  Key concepts in current models include adaptation, normative dysfunction, multifactoriality, population variation, emergent properties, and failure of complex systems.   Future goals include models that are clinically realistic and collaboratively incrementable; and eventually, models that make useful predictions for individuals and populations.

Zero Hit Points and Information Politics

Tim Jordan  
ÑÇÖÞÇéÉ«

The moment when an avatar 'dies' in an online multiplayer game will be examined as a moment of information politics. The talk will first explore what this 'dieing' means and what kinds of inter-secting politics can be found in it. Several moments of death in massive-multiplayer online games will be compared both in terms of visual references and gameplaying meaning. It will be noted that all such moments are as much moments of resurrection as they are of 'death' because they are always moments when zero hit points is translated into full hit points for the avatar. This moment will be seen as a key informational moment, involving recursing information to the game and of satisfying various networks and protocols that define the game, that connect to a politics around the common theme of games as means of avatars 'killing' other avatars. This will be connected to Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter's critique of games as being dominated by a 'militarised masculinity'. This will be examined in relation to the way games implement stereotyped and extreme racial and gender characteristics in relation to visual and aural representations but also trivialise the importance of race and gender in gameplay. This both essentialises gender and race while rendering it irrelevant to gameplay. This critical analysis will be complicated by the demand from such games that players play with others and form social groups, ensuring all games are not only about killing but also about co-operating. What this means for the critique of games as 'militarised masculinities' will be discussed. Following this case study, the idea of an 'information politics' will be focused on and explored. This exploration will propose two parts to understanding the idea of an information politics that is exemplified by the discussion of death in gaming. First the idea of an information politics as one political antagonism in a field of several such antagonisms will be explored. Second, it will be proposed that the nature of information politics as an antagonism can be understood as being constituted by the three inter-linked dynamics of recursion, devices and networks-protocols.

The Cultural Origins of Structure

Simon Kirby  
University of Edinburgh

Language is striking in its systematic structure at all levels of description. By exhibiting combinatoriality and compositionality, each utterance in a language does not stand alone, but rather exhibits a network of dependencies on the other utterances in that language. Where does this structure come from? Why is language systematic, and where else might we expect to find this kind of systematicity in nature?

In this talk, I will propose a simple hypothesis that systematic structure is the inevitable result of a suite of behaviours being transmitted by iterated learning. Iterated learning is a mechanism of cultural evolution in which behaviours persist by being learned through observation of that behaviour in another individual who acquired it in the same way. I will survey a wide range of lab studies of iterated learning, in which the cultural evolution of sets of behaviours is experimentally recreated. These studies include everything from artificial language learning tasks and sign language experiments, to more abstract behaviours like slide whistle imitation and sequence learning, and have recently even been extended to other species. I will conclude by suggesting that these cultural evolution experiments provide clear predictions about where we should expect to see structure in behaviour, and what form that structure might take.

Social media and soft power: Influence of citizens and perceptions of cultural icons

Jon Oberlander  
University of Edinburgh

Social networking services like Twitter and Facebook see surges in activity around major events, whether they are considered political (like upheavals in the Ukraine), cultural (like the Oscars ceremony), sporting (like the Commonwealth Games), or all of the above (like the London Olympics 2012 Opening Ceremony). People like to identify “trending topics”, and Twitter’s hashtag mechanism makes this relatively easy. But to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on when the social media world goes wild, we need to analyse publicly available information about the messages being exchanged, and their content. Working with the British Council, we have recently been looking at certain types of insight we can derive from Twitter by text mining, combining geo-parsing, named entity recognition and sentiment analysis. We examine both cultural-sporting events, and political upheavals, and discuss both the influence of UK-based social networkers, and the perception of UK-related cultural entities.