Exploring the “NeuroRights Arcade”: Art, Ethics, and Technology with Roel Heremans

What inspired you to focus on the ethical implications of BCIs (Brain-Computer Interfaces) in your work? 

For a long time already I’ve been working with what I call interactive imagination compositions in which I stimulate the imagination through timed words and instructions. Although I don't really like the word instruction, because instruction expects a direct result, while for me it's more like understanding through experience. 

For you to fully understand the inspiration for this project I have to go even further back. When I was 19, I had a terrible accident and I had two brain hemorrhages, a fractured skull, and a broken spine. And for me, a lot of what I create today is linked to that. During the period of recovery, I had to do a lot of fMRI tests to check if everything was okay with my brain. This really sparked an inspiration for me to some day do something with this type of technology. 

To go back to the original story, I was doing experiments with stimulating the imagination of the participants using brainwave data. While I was doing this to myself I thought that this is very cool and I want to know more about my own brain processes. But then when I was doing it with other people, I all of a sudden had an ethical reflection, like, oh, but wait, isn’t this weird. And isn't this analogous to what I'm critical about. With social media, for example, this whole economy where you get a service, but then you have to accept that your user data is being stolen or sold to other vendors. I was all of a sudden thinking, wow, if there is no ethical framework for this, then the same thing will definitely happen if these devices become popular. 

This was the initial idea. I then started doing some research and suddenly something snapped and everything else aligned. I immediately found the NeuroRights Initiative, and I started to research professor Rafael Yuste, from Columbia University in New York. And from there I delved deeper and deeper into their proposed charter. 

Can you walk us through the development process of the NeuroRights Arcade? What were some of the key challenges and milestones? 

I think the success of the project, or at least the final form, really came down to so many lucky finds in a row, which always happens like this somehow. As I was mentioning earlier, I was thinking of doing something around the imagination and bringing in computer interfaces and maybe ethics. I needed a good BCI device. For this I was doing experiments with Muse, and with the Nextmindy, which is a device you put on the back of your head that reads your visual cortex, which is actually a bit obsolete because there is a lot of other technology with which you can detect eye movements very well. And then I stumbled upon the Enophone, which is an EEG C3, C4 headphone, which was developed by a start up in Canada called Eno. I got in contact with them and I have to admit in the beginning I was a bit skeptical how such a beautiful design object can really have qualities. But then I got it and I was very surprised. It’s a solid, semi-good noise canceling headphone, and it looks elegant. I was also a bit skeptical about the C3 and C4, but then we did a whole thesis project with KU Leuven in Belgium. Two students, Thai Duong-Throng and Yuhan Zhang researched what the qualities of this BCI was and what we can get out of it.

That was my first lucky find; the brain computer interface that I'm using for the installation. Based on their thesis research, Thai developed a Python script in which it is possible to stream the raw brainwave data directly via OSC to a computer. For me that was really important to get the raw data from the headphones to a computer, because now the company ENO was bought by Americans who upgraded their firmware making it way more difficult to get the raw brainwave data out of the device without having it go through their programme.

Now I had the BCI, and then I was wondering how to connect the headphone to a screen that guides the audiovisual process. I started drawing, I started sketching how I wanted the audiovisual form to look and all of a sudden I was like, wow, this thing I'm creating really looks like an arcade, like an old school arcade. And then it made sense to me to create a NeuroRights Arcade. 

I really wanted to do it with an arcade machine and then another very lucky find happened. I was searching for digital models of this typical eighties arcade and I found one open source which we then reconstructed in wood. This made us realise that the TVs of the eighties and nineties were round and square and now they are more rectangular and flat. This was a challenge because we were thinking: placing a rectangular shaped monitor on this oldskool Arcade is not going to work. We then decided to turn the screen around and make the arcade very slim. The final design actually looks a bit like an iPhone or something like that but also like an arcade. We then decided to make the machine matte black to have this reference of the arcade but a dystopian version of it, like a 2024 dystopian version.

Another challenge we had to face was the buttons. Normally you have four buttons, but I wanted to have a simpler design. We decided to do one joystick and one button, but that really looked weird, which is why I decided to put two buttons. From a design perspective I felt like a dystopian arcade as an archetype needs two buttons. With a lot of tries we in the end settled on two black buttons, one black joystick, the arcade made of black wooden MDF and painted black, the screen and the headphone. At this moment there are seven arcades all over Europe, because people really like to show them and I am happy about that.

Could you tell us a bit more about the creative creation process of the NeuroRights Arcade. How did you for example come up with the texts the visitors hear when engaging with the Arcade? 

Like I said, I've been making a lot of these interactive imagination compositions. So for most of my work, I give two to eight people headphones, and ask them to close their eyes. Then a voice guides them into their imagination. They then have to open their eyes, look at each other and like this their bodies in space look like choreography. I’ve been doing this for over seven years, making many of these compositions. For me it is like a craft that I learned over time. It has its own rules in a sense. If you write a text for imagination, it has something to do with a text you read, but also it's a completely different text. I learned this by studying the Bachelor Radio in Brussels before I did a masters at ArtScience Interfaculty in the Hague. So the text you write for audio is completely different, but also the text you write for imagination is very different. When doing this and testing this for so many years, I really discovered some little things that work, things that don't work. I believe I now have a sense of how it works, or how it can work the best.

When I was creating the text, I was thinking about what do these five NeuroRights represent: the Mental Privacy, Personal Identity, Free Will, Equal Access to Mental Augmentation, and Protection Against Algorithmic Bias. Like what they really mean to their core and what they can mean for a person. It is such an abstract thing, you know. How can somebody take this right? And how can you as a visitor relate to that even though you are standing there, your eyes closed. At the same time, I did not want to go too deep. I knew how to go really deep based on my previous work, where I sometimes even had people crying and almost fainting. But of course you don’t want to do that when you work with an arcade machine in an exhibition. I gave myself around seven minutes, which is already quite long, as an indication of the attention span of the visitors when listening to a voice that really hit the imagination quite rapidly. 

It was also a lot of testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t. The first arcade I made, I think, was free will. That’s also a longer one that works with a clock. What I like about this one is that it works like a meta loop. On the one hand the machine is warning me of something, but doing exactly what it warned me about, and then you are the one pressing the button, so is that your free will or not? Is it predetermined? With this philosophical meta loop I created the first NeuroRight Arcade. This is how I discovered the rhythm or structure of the arcades which is: first question, imagination, choice, second question that relates to it but is slightly different. Lastly, you make one ethical choice, so also your ethical consciousness is simulated.

I think that’s the answer to your question. I first delved very deep in what the individual Neuro Rights mean and brought in contemporary issues. If I go deeper into those Neuro Rights, Mental Privacy is for me the most fun. It is like something that everybody can relate to somehow. It’s a little bit like, oh, oh, oh, my lies are being detected. Oh, this is a big secret. It really stimulates in a nice way. I think the NeuroRight Arcade Personal Identity is the same. It's weird, this one is not my favorite, but people tend to like this one as well. For Free Will, I think the two first questions are a bit too broad, a bit too big, your best decision, worst decision. But I really like the extra thing and the clock. The key message is that I try to go deep every right and try to extrapolate a balanced experience to keep the attention of the visitor, but at the same time try to go as deep, as quickly as possible. That's what I tried to do.