Time Giver: An Installation of Collective Expression using Mobile PPG and EEG in the AlloSphere Yuan-Yi Fan, F. Myles Sciotto, Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin Fig. 1. Time Giver @ Shadows in Space, presented in the AlloSphere, California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Abstract—Time Giver explores the multimodal representation of an audience‘s physiological (PPG and EEG) temporal patterns, shifting each audience member from spectator to active participant within the work. Using our BioSync interface running on personal mobile devices, each member of the audience is engaged and contributing in a collective creative work. This synchronous interaction provides a shared visual and sonic experience, taking place within the immersive environment of the Allosphere, allowing for the dynamics of social and physiological triggers to relate to both the one and the many. Index Terms—Audience, Biometrics, Mobile, Cybernetics, AlloSphere 1 I NTRODUCTION Time Giver is an artistic audio/visual installation that received its first public performance in the AlloSphere [3], a three-story immersive in- strument and installation space at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on May 23rd, 2013. Time Giver is inspired by the German term Zeitgeber, which refers to “any external or environmental cue that entrains or synchronizes an organism‘s biological rhythms to the earth‘s 24-hour light/dark cycle and 12 month cycle [2]. “ Other com- mon examples of Zeitgeber include light, temperature, social inter- actions, pharmacological manipulation, exercise, eating and drinking patterns. In designing Time Giver, we consider light, social interac- tion, and representation of temporal information as external cues to audience members within a dynamically evolving system generated using real-time data streams from the audience. Considering the Al- losphere as a closed system, each individual in the audience has his or her own biological rhythm, for example, heart-rate and the ratio of Alpha/Theta bands from EEG data. As streaming physiological • JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is with MAT @ UCSB. E-mail: jkm@create.ucsb.edu, create.ucsb.edu/ musjkm. • F. Myles Sciotto is with MAT @ UCSB. E-mail: f.myles@gmail.com, soCinematic.com. • Yuan-Yi Fan is with MAT @ UCSB, E-mail: yyf.plus@gmail.com, yuanyifan.com. Manuscript received 31 March 2013; accepted 1 August 2013; posted online 13 October 2013; mailed on 27 September 2013. For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to: tvcg@computer.org. data is made simple by our BioSync mobile interface [7], we explore artistic multimodal representation of temporal information from the audience in the AlloSphere. In addition to rhythmic information from individuals, social interaction is also a consideration, as Zeitgeber con- tributes to the dynamics within this closed system. To close the feed- back loop, internal rhythmic information of the individual participant as well as the group‘s aggregate response are used to create real-time stereoscopic visualization and spatial sonification in the Allosphere. The important concepts in the Time Giver project include: • audience participation in the making of feedback-based artwork, • an interface that enables exploring an artistic conversation be- tween heart-rate monitoring and brain-wave monitoring, • and an evolving system based on initial conditions determined by the timing of audience participation, manipulated by real-time feedback during the unfolding of the artwork. The novel contributions of this research can be summarized as fol- lows: • a new technique that allows the creation of feedback-based art- work using biometric data from a large group of participants, • a novel way to meta tag each participant with a unique smart- phone ID using OpenSoundControl, • and an affordable and scalable audience apparatus of bi-channel and bi-directional communication for feedback-based visualiza- tion and sonification. This is the first experiment of collective expression using the BioSync mobile interface in an immersive environment.