Dromos/Autos - Phoenix, Leicester

[Text nur in englischer Sprache verfügbar] The aim for this performance-research project explores how EEG (Electroencephalography) and neurofeedback facilitated sensory overload can lead to new performance paradigms, mediated through a particularly idiosyncratic yet revealing interface for musical expression: the autistic cognition. The research adopts an interdisciplinary, practice-based methodology; incorporating facets of generative electronic music, psychoacoustics, audio-reactive visuals and performance/endurance art. The main body of work for the research encompasses the design of 'provocative’ sounds, i.e. sounds tailored to induce sensory overload specific to the performers/researchers autistic ontology. These sounds are curated towards parameters established via a reflexive autoethnographic research methodology. The has then deliberated potential arrangements for the sounds, which then influences the nature of their generative programming in tandem with gathered EEG data to produce an open 'neurofeedback' loop; a dynamic sonic and performance ecology in which the performer is subject to.

The performance-project utilises commercially available EEG and BCI (brain-computer interface) technology to engender an electroacoustic performance ecology, manifest as a durational endurance art performance, in which the parameters of bespoke virtual ‘provocative systems’ produce sonic events that are determined and modulated by the preceding audio stimuli via neurofeedback. The events are tailored to stimulate the performers autistic cognition, insofar as 'provoking' it into an embodied cognitive sensory arrest. This transgressive performance method is intended to elucidate an auto-ethnographic representation of the augmentative capabilities of ASD, in addition to reconfigure the social metanarratives that bracket, over-pathologize and disempower the autistic ontology.