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COGITO in space: Public performance of EEG radio-transmission at Dwingeloo Radiotelescoop

Walking to the cabin of the radio telescope, under an especially star-filled sky, Michael and Jan point out to me their favorite constellations. Its the night before the big event, cold and bright. We would need a beach-chair for serious star gazing though, as our necks have started hurting from looking up all the time. On summer nights they put them out on the flat plains of the national Dwingelderveld park, surrounding the 25-meter dish of the Dwingeloo Radio Telescope. I wonder about mosquitoes though, as I still itch from the night before, as a couple of them were smart enough to stay inside for the winter and feast on fresh supplies of bike-tourist blood.

Together with Daniela, Robert, Guillaume, Marina, Sandro and Giuseppe, we arrived in Drente, NL, two days before the big event to set everything up, do the final debugging (which lasted until the morning of the performance thanks to the unstable Oculus VR software), and of course some rehearsals. A lot of people and equipment were involved, space was very limited in the cabin, and almost everyone who was invited also RSVP’d, and so we had to deal with space in very practical ways. I think we ended with a very charming and truly unique set. I’ve written more about COGITO in space earlier, e.g. here, here, here, here and here, but in a way those event were all exercises and rehearsals for this one, in which everything, and everyone, came together.

Dwingeloo Radio Telescope 3-6 November 2018

I will leave the final documentation to the professionals who are working on it now, but I just want to share some photo’s from behind the scenes. So although we haven’t heard the last of COGITO in space, I have just moved my /COGITO folder from /EEGsynth/current_projects to /EEGsynth/finished_projects. Its important to have this moment where we can pat ourselves on our backs, and realize that we did it! In the end, it was quite a smooth operation, especially given the mix of people, places, thoughts, technology and art. For the public it happened within two hours of allotted time (we did it twice) within a program that was much more than that, and included the following  people and events which all took place in and around the ASTRON building (I really recommend following up on those links, as they all do fascinating work):

I really like this animation you see on the left, created from a recording of the projection that we showed during the transmission. Guillaume, also a VJ in one of his parallel lives, was able to project a mix of the live EEG signals (the first two channels displayed by the EEGsynth) with the night sky from Stellarium showing the original target of the transmission (Antares, after which the rotation of the earth strafed the emission across the sky), and the spectrum of the radio transmission itself as recorded with a little USB-antenna. You can see the voice of the call-sign in the jagged band (you can see the vowels), while the EEG transmission shows up as a dense continuous band.

Here you can listen to one of the broadcasts:

More info

The ‘patch’ we used to do all the EEG recording and conversion is documented under patches\cogito in the EEGsynth github. Furthermore, you can find the code for the interstellar EEG-transmission protocol as one of the EEGsynth modules. So far for now, enjoy the photo’s below, and we will report soon again on hopefully a scientific tail of the project: we recorded the radio transmission, so we will try to do some quantitative checks on its fidelity and the possibility of reconstruction. Stay tuned to the gigahertz!

For the Dutch, a fun post on Astroblogs.nl.

Also, see here an interview with Daniela about the project.

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