Luciana Haill has pioneered communication from brainwave mapping in her Art since the early 1990s. Her work intersects new technology, neuroscience, and the unconscious to make mental processes visible (in particular – lucid dreams, meditation and nostalgia). She creates artworks which combine digital media, augmented reality, performance, drawing and binaural soundscapes. Her brainwave artworks have been described as a form of ephemeral portraiture through monitoring the brain’s EEG signal. Luciana experienced viral meningitis as a teenager which led to a fascination with the brain. She studied Fine Art and graduated in Interactive Art under the inspirational leadership of Professor Roy Ascott influenced with cybernetics and telematics, to make art that can be technoetic.
2016-2017, Phoenix Gallery Brighton and Waterman’s Arts centre London
Haill has delivered keynotes & presentations in Mexico City in CENART, iMal in Brussels, The October Gallery in Holborn, for ‘Breaking Convention’ in Greenwich University, Nesta in Shoreditch Village Underground. And has created installations for pop-ups in festivals ‘The Secret Garden Party” in the science tent, & in The Guerrilla Zoo as well as for several events known as Hackstock & for Modern Panic X. Her work has been shown internationally at major venues including The Royal Academy, The Royal Institution, The Sage Gateshead, The Waag Society Amsterdam, The Psychedelic society of The Netherlands, Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, KIBLA in Slovenia, CENART in Mexico City, The Science Gallery ‘Lates’ and The Kinetica Art Fair in London. Research trips have involved travel to Hawaii, New York and India. She held a visiting research fellowships at the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex from 2011-2016 is currently a visiting lecturer on the MA level Digital Media Arts course at the University of Brighton.
Her installations take the form of sensory environments that enable participants to access new ways of experiencing & perceiving. These works often involve the real-time monitoring of the participants own brainwaves & use other forms of biofeedback such as heart rate, performatively using techniques from neuroscience, hypnosis & meditation, to control & create interactive experiences using sound and videos. Since 2018 she has also worked intensively with augmented reality.
In 2018, with further support from the Arts Council she created Apparitions an augmented reality (AR) artwork exploring nostalgia, ageism, hauntology and local lost heritage in Hastings & St Leonards. The effect of Apparitions’ AR brings to mind a form of modern-day conjuring or ‘seancing’ of ghosts or phantasms. A form of assisted imaginative time travel enables you to peer through a portal and down the corridors of history. Haill designed and produced an ‘augmented reality’ application called ‘Apparitions’. It triggers spectral artworks: 3d models with anachronistic soundscapes when viewing special vintage postcards of the sites using smartphone cameras. Digitally Elevating traditional souvenirs of obsolete sites into steganographic missives, described by Mark Fisher’s as ‘hauntological,’ embedding the past into the future so it may be interrogated as a simulation and a simulacrum. Haill is currently developing a new AR artwork entitled “Pioneer” which builds on her work previous “Apparitions” artwork.
Haill’s latest work “Into the Rose Garden” (2021) was originally conceived as a performative networked installation that is now mediated (due to COVID-19 restrictions in 2021) as live-streamed videos exploring volumetric capture and telepresence with real-time brainwave feedback. She has also co-authored a practice-based research paper with Professor Nick Lambert for the EVA London Conference 2021.
“Luciana’s work is sharp and inquiring. She sets up performance installations whereby we (the audience) witness her (the artist) undertake elements of experiment and ritual on our behalf. But this is only half the story, as what the artist does really well is also simultaneously build overarching state changes for us to experience as transformational to our own senses. This blending of putting her own experiences at stake, in order to then facilitate our own sensory involvement, is a clever mechanism to draw together the science, philosophy and magical elements of her work, in ways that are as smart as they are generous.” (Robert Pacitti, Artist, Director & Curator – SPILL Festival of Performance).