Schizomachine: a Wearable Schizo-interface for a Schizo-body

Affective states triggered in our body during an artistic/aesthetic experience have been discussed by philosophers over the years under the concept of sensation. From a philosophical viewpoint, sensation is a subtle but intense emotional phenomenon, mainly perceived when we are experiencing art. From another perspective, Neuroscience has dedicated itself to analyzing this phenomenon in laboratory practices by using biofeedback systems like EEG (electroencephalogram) and ECG (electrocardiogram), among other systems such as MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). In such procedures, the subject is aware that she/he is part of an experiment, which could repress spontaneous emotions as the one triggered in an artistic experience. Schizomachine is a research-work in progress that aims to investigate those subtle affective states of the human body during the aesthetic experience in a museum or art gallery by means of mapping and monitoring methods of the viewer’s physiological parameters. In this paper, we present the concept of the artwork and the prototype of the Schizocap, an EEG cap that composes the work. Schizomachine will be initially composed by an EEG cap (the Schizocap), that generates the input data, and by a clothing, called Schizobody, where the data can be seen in the form of light (the output).