mirko febbo
- Nov 26, 2021
- 3 min read

Add a Catchy Title: Artefact 2

Updated: Nov 28, 2021

Focusing Direction

Brain Mapping 3

Let's start with the brain mapping 3 project. The main drive to make this project was pending due to a funding answer from the Art Council of England, sadly for my wallet, the project got rejected, but luckily for my sanity it freed up quite a bit more time. The one thing I will keep working on, when possible, is to learning shaders, since the looming computing thirsty big data sets EEG visualisation are soon to come.

Attraction + EEG

As odd as a connection is to use electromagnets to interpret EEG data, it somehow gets close to what my collaborator is thinking in Montreal. As she wants to create a strange attractor from the data.

Before we go into magnets, lets first look at what is a strange attractor? It was created by Edward Norton Lorenz as he was simulating weather data to make reliable predictions. And due to a rounding from 6 to 3 decimal points it gave two completely different predictions. Which lead the path to chaos theory and strange attractors.

The attractors are an interpretation of butterfly effect theory whereas a minimum change can engender unpredictable impacts. Mathematically it is a series of very elegant and simple quadratic functions where the number of iteration makes the magic but also work as a way to update a particle position.

Furthermore, while tracking one point into the visualisation, and calculating its distance between the attractor, when transposed into a line graph, it share a lot of similarity with EEG raw data (as seen in MathemagicalProofs's video, on the left ,at the 7 minute mark) . I have reached out to Charlotte about this intriguing resemblance and I will probably attempt to put this idea in practice.

Beside, there is strong correlation with strange attractors and magnets, as seen with a swinging pendulum over magnets which is another direction that can be explored with electromagnets. (from Gadgetify video)

Regarding my experiment with ferrofluid and electromagnet I got the most important part working. Where a ferrofluid in a display is being controlled by 6 homemade electromagnets, and with some basic programs that showcase and test grid control. For now there is a mode for going around the various magnets, a random walker, and joystick control of the fluid.

Further experimentation will use steel powder and classic magnets to explore different approach to motion.

Users + Form

For Transparency, I have completed the form analysis report with a small pool of 25 participant mainly from the data visualisation class with Jamie Forth, and a couple of things jumped out, first that it is super hard to make questions aimed to generate meaningful feedback. Secondly it confirmed one of my intuitions that people are not that interested in knowing more about the industry's impact. It also show that the first visual is not that easy to understand even with instructions. So overall a great eye opener, the next step will be to improve on the machine learning algorithms with better training data, especially the text classification model and then next year UX.

Conclusion:

This time it was more about research, and consolidation, with the neuroscience project it lead to shorten the link between magnets and brain data while hinting into an alternative direction. As for the web-scraping visualiser I now have a good first taste of user feedback which will help for further investigation and visual research.