Game Design

When? 6. Dezember 2016, 18:00 Uhr bis 20:00 Uhr

Where? Salotto Café, Hardturmstrasse 169, CH-8005 Zurich

This LASERZurich will feature two renowned researchers that will cross pollinate their research by presenting their own collaborations.

LASERZurich is part of the world wide series, LASER Talks sponsored by Leonardo the International Society for Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST). Founded in 2008, LASERs are now happening in over a dozen locales internationally: Zurich, University of San Francisco, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, New York City, London, Tacoma, Toronto, Montreal and Kansas State University. LASERZurich is a coporation with Life Science Zurich (Zurich University) and the Zurich University of the Arts.

Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) is a nonprofit organization that serves the global network of distinguished scholars, artists, scientists, researchers and thinkers through our programs focused on interdisciplinary work, creative output and innovation. From its beginnings, Leonardo/ISAST has served as the virtual community for purposes of networking, resource-sharing, best practices, research and events in Art/Science/Technology. The organization is well known for the publication of Leonardo Magazine, MIT Press.

Professor Dr. Margarete Jahrmann (Experimental Game Designer / epistemologist) and

Professor Dr. Stefan Glasauer (Neuroscientist / sensorimotor researcher).

The discussion will be moderated by Prof. Dr. Jill Scott.

Informationen zu den Vortragenden:

Stefan Glasauer

Stefan will talk about experimental paradigms and situations used in human neuroscience and experimental psychology and will discuss what can or cannot be concluded about human brain function and behaviour from data acquired in such situations. Experimental situations in science depend strongly on repeatability and happen in a reduced laboratory setting. They are thus distinct from many of the important real life situations, which only happen once, but in a rich environmental context. Important aspects of that context are missing in experiments, and many experimental paradigms are more comparable to games than to life. The scientifically desired repeatability has even led to several experimental results that have been discussed for more than a century but may only be side effects of the particular experimental system. He will give several examples from scientific practice and discuss their relation to games and art practice.

Margarete Jahrmann

Will introduce ideas about the experimental system as hermeneutical surface in contemporary performing arts and game design. She will critically question gamification methods for «motivation design» in scientific experiments in relation to the recent increase of functional brain scans in design and life style. How does the speculative social meaning of these scans of our personal «data» influence the potential inscription about our human condition? How can the monitoring of oxygen levels in the blood and construction of flesh and neuronal fibres be read as valid text, considering the “paradoxical” blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) effects as basic parameters for functional imaging of brain activity? Margarete suggests that a better understanding of the potential and political dimensions of functional brain scan analysis can be informed by media theoretical views on the meaning of data in networks. Media can highlight the surveillance issues of neurophysiological experiments using fMRI, EEG or functional Near-infrared-spectroscopy. Under this angle, Margarete will present fragments of the 2016 «Decision Demon» experiment she co-developed with Stefan for the occasion of the Opera of Entropy Vienna, including the brain-scan data of herself watching approximate void in white noise and connect it to her ongoing game art performances on the collapsing of the NSA communication scanning towers in Berlin Teufelsberg and on the very active Onyx Satellite field in the Swiss French Alps.