Eunoia II - Lisa Park

I came across the artist Lisa Park via a friend's post on Facebook. This particular work resonated strongly with me due to its relationship with meditation and the emotions. Lisa's work mines traditional culture and tries to make it relevant to the modern world. A brief description of this particular work and her bio is included below. Her website is www.thelisapark.com

American-born raised in South Korea, Lisa Park is a multidisciplinary artist who is currently based in New York.  Park combines EEG scanning with speakers and pools of water to visualize her thoughts and emotions.

 

Last year, she exposed her brain patterns to the world with Eunoia, in which she placed five water-filled metal plates atop speakers designed to respond to her real-time brain data. In that project, Park sorted the data into five emotions—sadness, anger, desire, happiness, and hatred, one per plate. These are the emotions associated with an excess in the five organs in traditional Chinese medicine. In rhetoric, Eunoia is the goodwill a speaker cultivates between himself and his audience, a condition of receptivity. By training her brain to control and express her emotions she was able to play a musical score using the plates.

For the Eunoia project her stated goal was to 'to exercise control over her own mind, to make her mind so still and so calm that there’s nothing for the EEG sensor to read.' Park was hoping that by calming her thoughts she could silence the speakers, and stop the water from moving.

But the latest iteration of the project takes the experiment to the next level: Eunoia II is outfitted with 48 vibration pools, inspired by the 48 emotions philosopher Baruch Spinoza outlined in his book, Ethica, like frustration, excitement, engagement, and meditation.

 

Each speaker vibrates according to Park's brain wave-interpreting algorithm, which tranforms intense signals from Park's Emotiv EEG headset into intense vibrations in the pools of water. Here, Park is literally putting her inner struggles on display, and the whole show depends on how she deals with her feelings. "I started working with biosensors especially EEG headset, because I questioned, 'how can I take this invisible energy and emotions and make it visible?'"  "When I am feeling certain emotions (anger, sadness, happiness), I believe that what's inside me, more than 60% of water in human body, will create vibrations/energy within myself. So, I wanted to create an artwork that represents the inner part of myself."

 

Master’s degree in the Interactive Telecommunications Program from New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and has a BFA in Fine Art Media at Art Center College of Design.

She explored different genres in painting, sculpture, photography, and film during her education with an extensive background in fine art. Over the past few years, her interest in New Media Art (a genre that encompasses artworks including digital art, computer graphics, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art, video games, computer robotics, and biotechnology) has influenced her art practice to focus on creating performative-based interactive installation.
 

She has been interested in the application of neurofeedback’s method to analyze and understand human emotions. Her recent works explored the possibilities of self-monitoring her physical and psychological states through the use of biometric sensors (heart-rate and brainwave sensors). The latest performance involves using the commercial brainwave sensor, EEG (electroencephalogram), to create an external representation of herself. Her works were featured on The Creators Project, The New York Times' Bits Blog, Time Out New York, New York Post, Wired, Daily News, PBS' Off Book Series, and Intel’s Make it Wearable video, and many other publications. Other collaborations with The Moving Company (Tamar Ettun, Tyler Patterson, Tina Wang, Maia Karo) were published by Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, and Vogue.com.

 

Eunoia II from Lisa Park on Vimeo.