NeuraFutures

September 2020 - Ongoing

Skills: Art Direction, Graphic Design, Interaction Design, Data Visualization, Digital Fabrication, Wireframing, Rapid Prototyping

Contributors: Nataliya Kosmyna, Nina Cragg, Gaby Nugent, Jackie Sabillon, Sophia Rim, Tatiana Zhizhimontova, Shannon Murphy, Sam Fromowitz, Damien Socia, Anna Demko, Yuran Ding

NeuraFutures is a research project about the representation of brain-computer interfaces in science fiction media. Nataliya Kosmyna (research scientist in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab) and I founded the project in the fall of 2020. Nataliya had been compiling a list of all the sci-fi media she has consumed or heard of for many years, intending on eventually making a project out of it, and I expressed my interest in helping out. Since then, we have compiled over 400 examples of brain-computer interfaces in the media, analyzed them, and designed a web experience and a traveling installation to represent the data. The installation has been shown so far at DA-Z New Media Arts Festival in Zurich, the MIT Media Lab Museum, and the Cambridge Science Festival, and is soon to be installed at the new MIT Museum. As of summer 2022, I have passed my roles as Lead Designer and Art Director to Yuran Ding so I can focus on other work. My current involvement includes the development of conference submissions about the project.

NeuraFutures features devices known as Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). BCIs access the user’s brain via sensors that are worn on or implanted inside of the head. In today’s research, they are used to measure, support, and augment cognitive states such as fatigue, attention, and visualization. In the next few decades, the ubiquity of BCIs will be equivalent to that of mobile phones today, which emphasizes the urgent need to discuss the ethics of interacting with such systems. While this type of work is primarily conducted through public discussions among experts in computing fields, there is another avenue of inspiration that we believe is equally important to the understanding of BCIs: science fiction media.

Media that feature BCIs—which we call BCI-fi—are important to the societal acceptance of BCIs because they are the primary sources of the public’s understanding of these technologies before they become real. As a result, BCI-fi has a lot of influence over our perception of the future. Our science fiction worlds are free from the physical and computational limitations of the present, which allows us to design for our future selves, but may give us unrealistic expectations.

With this project, we intend to better emphasize the necessity to properly prepare for the future of information and digital interactions by describing it through a relatable medium. When we augment ourselves to a point where our devices know ourselves better than we do, or we need devices to know ourselves at all, we risk the loss of simplicity, identity, and altruism—of everything that makes us human. We already see this happening with social media platforms: they commodify identity by feeding us the information we crave in order to foster an addiction to consummation. Extending this into a world in which augmentation is trendy and biodata is easily accessible to corporations, without structure our uniqueness will dissolve in the greed to know anything and everything. Data privacy is not only a common theme in sci-fi but an increasingly important topic of conversation today as ubiquity becomes one of computing’s main goals and collecting biodata with personal devices is normalized. Thus, we intend for our experiences to expose users to the dangers of this kind of future, of surveillance capitalism and the business of ubiquity, in the hopes that it sparks more action toward enacting proper biotechnological legislation. We ask that viewers reflect on the “data” that they give up for their entertainment and consider whether preserving or augmenting identity is more valuable to the advancement of humanity.

There have been three objectives with this project: the development of a scientific publication, designing data visualizations and an online database, and producing a research-based installation. We gathered a team of artists, designers, and engineers (mostly undergraduates) to assist in the development of the database and the installation. Nataliya is the principal investigator, so most of the research and the scientific writing have come from her. I contributed to creating our vocabulary, calculating the statistics, and writing the intro of and editing the text. However, my main roles were serving as art director and lead designer: I designed many of the visualizations and interactions as well as oversaw the success of the team as a whole.

Please visit the database at www.neurafutures.com !

Statistics & scientific contribution

While the scientific contribution, a paper, is still in production, the first thing Nataliya and I did for this project was organize and develop some terminology to describe our data.

• First, we developed the term BCI-Fi (Brain-Computer Interface Fiction) to describe the subgenre of science fiction which includes brain-sensing devices or posthuman cognitive skills.

• We use Notion to host our data. We have collected many data points for each BCI-Fi device, including the name of the device, the types of media (book, TV show, movie, etc.) it’s featured in, the year it was invented, its type of BCI category, images of the device, whether it’s dystopian/utopian, it’s level of invasiveness, and much more.

• We determined 4 larger categories and 18 subcategories that describe the use cases of BCI devices in the media:

  • Communication devices create connections between users and/or devices.

    • Linking devices create a symbiotic connection between a person’s brain and an electronic system. The systems are typically large and remote, like a network of devices or vehicles. They can influence the user.

    • Robot Control devices create a one-directional connection between a person and another object, wherein the user controls the object with their brain but the object has no influence on the user.

    • Telepathy devices allow two or more people to communicate silently using only their brain signals. This communication is bi/multidirectional.

    • Reading Thoughts devices allow the user to listen to the inner dialogue, thoughts, ideas, and intentions of someone else. Such communication is one-directional.

  • Surveillance devices manage the user’s data. Many of these devices are non-fictional, meaning they (or similar technologies) have been invented in reality.

    • Recording devices read the user’s physiological data with electrodes, typically in a medicinal context.

    • Tracking devices geolocate people and objects.

    • Advertisement devices market unavoidable content directly to the brain.

    • Cerebral Defense devices protect the user from harmful data and prevent other people from downloading the user’s own sensitive brain data.

  • Consciousness devices have to do with the user’s state of consciousness.

    • Dreams devices read, write, control, manipulate, or induce the user’s dreams.

    • Transfer devices completely copy the brain onto a device or another body.

    • Termination devices end the user’s life.

  • Perception devices alter the user’s perceptive brain functions.

    • Control of the User devices manipulate any aspect of humans, including behaviors, thoughts, and feelings.

    • Emotions devices read, write, control, manipulate, or induce the user’s feelings.

    • Memory devices read, write, control, manipulate, or induce the user’s memories.

    • Storage devices add, store, and recall information in the brain.

    • Reality devices alter a user's visual perception or mental conception of reality, either in tangible or virtual space (XR).

    • Knowledge Upload devices upload external information, knowledge, or skills to the brain or that from the brain to an external system.

    • Stimulation devices stimulate the brain in order to suppress a medical condition or induce a new state, such as pain or pleasure.

• Using the data we collected, we came up with terms that are important ideas to BCI-fi or that describe various ratios the variables:

  • Cyfusion is the point in the future when all of the devices from BCI-fi will exist in society, and technology can be fully integrated into the brain (~150 years from now). This prediction comes from Nataliya, an expert on BCIs and their current reality.

  • The BCI Forecast is the duration between a BCI-Fi device’s date of invention and how far in the future Nataliya believes the device will be real - essentially how early on the inventor “predicted” the device.

  • Neuroptimism is a measure of how innovative a work of BCI-Fi was when it was published. The rate of technological innovation increases exponentially in human society. As a result, the plane of innovation, or the conceptual space, in which BCI-fi is written and consumed shrinks over time because fewer technologies are seen as “fictional” and more neuro-territory is studied. This means the prediction of a technology during a time further away from Cyfusion is more significant than one which is closer. Thus, neuroptimism describes the significance of the inventor’s prediction, i.e. its level of innovation. This is the ratio between the BCI Forecast and how close to Cyfusion society was at the time of its publication.

  • Neurafictionality is a measure of how fictional a work of BCI-fi remains today. The length of time from today until Cyfusion situates a work of BCI-Fi in the currently reality of BCI research and acceptance. We can make a judgment about how generally fictional a work of BCI-Fi is right now using this datapoint because the more we learn more about BCIs and brains in general, the devices, and thus the stories, from BCI-Fi that were once fictional become more real. This is the ratio between how long ago a work was published and how close to Cyfusion we are today.

  • The Reality Factor, the most important statistic, is how “real” the device is today, i.e. how much progress we have made toward designing and capitalizing on it. This is the relationship between neuroptimism and neurafictionality.

Database & Visualizations

NeuraFutures wireframe designed by Cassie Scheirer and Sophia Rim. (Web implementation by Tatiana Zhizhimontova.)

Installation

The final part of this project has been designing or collecting various examples of these devices, which we are referring to as “props”, and framing an interactive installation around them. The prop design team was led by Shannon Murphy and also included Sam Fromowitz, Damien Socia and Anna Demko. They used various sculpture and prototyping materials and methods to design prototypes of these devices including 3D printing, laser cutting, wood, clay, resin, and electronics. There are 34 total props.

Nataliya was invited to submit an installation proposal to the DA-Z new media arts festival, so I developed an installation concept that involved our plan to design a selection of props. We were accepted to the festival and offered a larger space than we expected, so we scaled up the plan significantly.

However, there were also guided learning activities that visitors could participate in.

1. At the top of every hour, Shannon and I (and sometimes Nataliya) gave a guided tour of all the props: their context within their media, how they were designed, a discussion of their Reality Factor, relevant science and research, and questions they raise about ethics and our values in society.

2. At every half hour, Nataliya facilitated live demos using a real headset with visitors who wanted to try controlling a little robot with their brain.

3. A 45 minute-long compilation of the digital appearances of the props (clips from movies, TV shows and interviews about these media) could be watched.

4. Children’s activities included worksheets and a scavenger hunt.

5. An optional end-of-experience survey, which we called the “Futures Test”, asked the participant about their knowledge about BCIs, preferences in sci-fi, and relevant morals. At the end of the survey, the participant would be paired with one of the devices in the installation that was closest to their “ideal” device.

6. We gave many visitors “tokens” (little purple poker chips) to leave next to their favorite prop as a way to collect more data.