Constantina is coordinating a project, where an interdisciplinary team of engineers, neuroscientists, dancers, musicians, and multimedia artists seek to study, via mobile electroencephalography (EEG), the brain activity of five experienced dancers while dancing butoh, a postmodern dance that originated in Japan. In their pilot study, led by Constantina, the team managed to record brain activity from five dancers simultaneously and synchronously, at a millisecond resolution, to their knowledge, for the first time in scientific history. They also established a protocol that manages to reduce motion artifacts (e.g., electrode movement artifacts, and electromyographic artifacts originating from head and neck musculature), as well as manufactured their own equipment that protects the electrode caps, processing units and WiFi transmitters when dancers perform movements on the floor. Lastly, they generated a live visualization of the dancers' brain activity on a screen, via an artistic brain-computer interface.

 

Read the preprint of the study here!

 

The scientific module of the project is done in collaboration with Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal and Sadye Paez. The artistic module of the project is led by Vangeline, who has choreographed a 60-minute ensemble Butoh piece, on a soundscape informed by techniques of brainwave entrainment, composed by Ray Sweeten.