Beyond Perception
A mind machine rebuilt as an instrument: your live EEG steers light and sound, which in turn shift the brain being measured.
Beyond Perception closes a loop between a brain and a machine: a portable EEG headset reads your live brain activity, and that activity steers an audiovisual stimulation of flickering light and pulsing sound — which in turn shifts the very brain state being measured. The mind machine, classically a playback device you passively consume, becomes an instrument you play from inside your own head.
The work sits inside a larger story: imaging techniques let neuroscience watch the brain at work, while inexpensive, accessible EEG devices move brain data out of the lab and into creative hands. The accompanying text surveys this race to decode the brain — from neuroscience, neurotechnology, and Brain–Computer Interfaces to the cultural shift toward open neurotechnology.
Building on proven stimulation techniques — the same fixed-frequency light and sound pulses we had tested in Brain State Sharing — Beyond Perception uses your own live EEG signal as the source that modulates the stimulation. Light and sound become an interface to consciousness: not a one-way broadcast, but a personal feedback channel shaped by the brain it is shaping.
Developed together with Luis Grass after years of shared experiments, the work was my bachelor’s thesis — “Beyond Perception: Reinventing the Mind Machine” — and concluded my Interface Design studies at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. You can read it as an English (DeepL) translation or in the German original.
