The Tweeture has already been a great success. He has featured in a BBC’s Digital Planet video for the World Service, in numerous twitters and photos, but more than that he has become a talking point, a recognised figure at the Festival. Even the first night when the technology wasn’t switched on, his presence was enough to stop people who wanted to know what he was, could they get one and could they hold him.

So, some Tweeture moments (some I saw, some i have heard about) before they are forgotten:

• ” Look its the Tweeture” “Wow its Tweeture” one the first night walking passed a queue for a restaurant
• “Can he see that we are black?” from a group of Austin boys on 6th Street
• “He was here but I think he left about an hour ago” to Simon Johnson enquiring whether anyone had seen him at a party.
• “Is that the twitter critter?” shouted to me on the street
• ” Can i buy one?” a senior manager of Adobe

I find my own reaction to Tweeture curious. On first hearing the idea, I mostly loved it, but struggled with the vision of a cute Teddy Ruxpin type character (which is not what we have), which seemed twee and certainly not something I would want to carry around. And yet (like Heart Robot which was also made by Green Ginger), i feel strangely maternal towards him. And last night, feeling slightly isolated from days of screens, updates and a lack of human touch, Tweeture (the craft robot) was a reassuring cuddle.

Christie Nicholson of Scientific American started her talk on brain computer interfaces with the obligatory William Gibson and Matrix references and then went on to give a comprehensive and fascinating history of the research so far and what might be possible.

Starting with reality: the brain is electric – everything we think and feel starts off with an electrical impulse moving though our neurons. The brain is malleable – significant functional and structural changes occur throughout our lifetime. Research in the last ten years have shown that the brain can adapt and rewire itself.

There is 100 billion neurons is the human brain network and researchers have found a way to record electrical impulses, decode them and
translate them into something a  computer will understand. So far this has mostly been done with monkeys (it usually is), controlling robotic arms and even feeding themselves. The amazing things is that the monkeys develop a kinaesthetic relationship with the robotic arm.

Most of the human research has been done with patients who suffer from locked in syndrome. Matt Nagle is one of the first human cyborgs who was paralysed from the neck down after being stabbed. He had a chipped embedded into his brain which allows him to control objects and play computer games. This is done with an intracortical electrode, a chip embedded right into the grey matter. In 5 – 10 years, this may allow people to feed themselves and even stand up. The holy grail is picking up a glass of water with a
robotic arm – although achieving a closed feedback loop of sensation is the tricky bit – otherwise the glass will be smashed.

It also gets more complicated when we reverse the process and enable machines to input data to the brain.

Some crazy, future-facing stuff:

DARPA’s Silent Talk research – making telepathic soldiers by installing an EEG inside helmets to enable word-less communication on the battlefield.

Optogenetics
(Stanford University) – researchers have taken a gene from pond scum bacteria and injected it into a mouse’s brain, reactions  can then be triggered using different coloured lights. A kind of on/off switch. This might have therapeutic benefits for people suffering from depression and narcolepsy. See the Wired article on this.

Blue brain (Lausanne, Switzerland) – Mapping a rat brain like the human genome project. Now moving on to humans.

OpenEEG (contributed from the floor -  making plans and software for do-it-yourself EEG devices available for free.

The session largely avoided the ethics (which would have been huge) but concentrated on the possibilities. I played Mindflex over Christmas (see family photo). Its not brilliant when you are drunk, but even a simple plastic board game you can buy on Amazon is pretty amazing when you are controlling it with your brain.

Some of the cool stuff she referenced in her (amazingly short) talk:

Nanotechnology contact lens designed to detect glucose levels in diabetics – it changes colour to reflect sugar levels.
Think labs iPhone app linked to their digital stethascope to capture and display patient sounds, email recordings etc
Copenhagen wheel from MIT which captures the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and maps pollution levels, traffic congestion and road conditions in real-time.
The Sniff RFID dog
SixthSense – a wearable gestural interface that uses natural hand gestures to interact with information.

I am really excited to be presenting at the Festival, and have been lucky enough to secure sponsorship from UK Trade & Investment and Arts Council, England. The panel takes place on Tuesday 16th March and is called Pervasive Games and Playful Experiences: Rendering the Real World. The people doing the really hard work for the panel (I am just moderating) are Umbrella Group members Toby Barnes of Mudlark, Nina Steiger of Soho Theatre, Duncan Speakman and Simon Johnson of SlingShot. Its my job to make sure we discuss the following questions:

• What makes pervasive games the quintessential 21st century artform?
• Why/how have pervasive games captured the imaginations of the masses?
• Who are the new practitioners and what makes them good?
• Are we just playing in the panopticon or do pervasive games offer real freedoms?
• Can a powerful collective desire for play create meaningful disruptions to the status quo?
• Can pervasive games really have a positive social impact (through public collaboration and the radical re-appropriation of shared spaces, real and virtual)?
• Will a dream platform ever emerge or will this always be a fractured development space?
• If “locative media is fundamentally based on the appropriation of technologies of surveillance and control” (Andreas Brockmann) what duty do creatives have to address this fact in their work?
• How do pervasive experiences deal with narrative? Who shapes/owns/consumes the story?
• What is the role of the writer and curator or audience in this mixed medium, if everyone is involved and the city has become the stage?