Category: Thesis Art

This work investigates whether the brain has access to whether a percept is veridical (real), or brain-generated (afterimage). Maria recorded prediction errors based on identical, but critically different percepts. The Thesis Art piece visualizes these brain responses (EEG/P300), highlighting a clear dependency of the surprise signal (red activity), on the peak latency of one participant (sorted along the vertical dimension).

The Creation Process

The plot was created in R, with a filter along the individual brain wave trials. Each individual line represents an EEG responses, the placement is sorted by their peak latency, focusing on the P300 component, which reflects a surprise or error in prediction. The color indicates the strength of the brain response at that moment. In many ways, the creation process mirrors what actual researchers would do with their EEG data.

Artistic Concept

The visual design of this piece reflects the EEG signal, which is commonly displayed similarly but without the color coding. The primary focus was on illustrating the surprise error (P300), and combining the data this way resulted in a visually engaging piece. This piece serves as a vericidal depiction of how our brain reacts to unexpected stimuli.

“Each trace in this plot isn’t a single trial — it’s the average of multiple repetitions, this highlights how individual and fleeting every single brain response is.”

Benedikt Ehinger

Personal Reflection

Benedikt shares: “The creating process was comparatively streamlined, but this plot belies the subtle complexities hidden within it.” While the study didn’t yield the expected conclusions, the artwork remains a reminder that sometimes even seemingly straightforward projects reveal unexpected depth.

This thesis art is the “first follower” in following Pinzuti’s approach of placing text on a trajectory. This technique would become a defining theme in later Thesis Art pieces, signaling a shift toward more dynamic, text-driven visualizations.

Edoardo developed a python software package to analyze causal information transfer between brain areas. The Thesis Art piece, inspired by the Lorenz system’s chaotic attractor (as used in his thesis), is the first Thesis Art to features text placed along a path, marking a significant milestone in the overall visual concept.

The Creation Process

Edoardo’s thesis focused on causal relationships between brain regions, which he probed using coupled Lorenz attractors. The overall ideas stem from Takens’s Theorem and are based on time embeddings. The visual concept was shaped by these chaotic systems, with Edoardo and Benedikt discussing its use in this context.

Artistic Concept

The design is based on an chaotic attractor, similar to how the unobservable neuronal activation stats can be thought of – thoughts circling and always moving back to a central theme. This connection between physics, chaotic systems, and the brain was is clearly reflected in the final artwork.

“This project was a great example of how theory and creativity can merge. Edoardo’s work on causality in neural data came to life in a way that felt both visually striking and scientifically meaningful.”

Benedikt Ehinger

Personal Reflection

For Benedikt, this artwork marked a pivotal moment in his creative journey. The integration of individual glyphs of the text along a defined path was a significant formative decision, but also a computational challenge. Visualizing the large amount of individual characters broke nearly all common professional plotting and visualization tools.

Judith’s thesis explored eye-movements in the context of exploration and exploitation behaviors, replicating and expanding the Hick’s law effect of earlier studies. The Thesis Art piece itself visualizes the participants’ experience of exploring stimuli, inspired by the concept of seeing through Swiss cheese as employed in the underlying study. The design combines multiple miniatures of pages, bringing both the visual and textual aspects of the research together.

The Creation Process

The thesis centered on investigating when and where eye-movements are triggered in response to visual stimuli. Benedikt’s goal was to convey the unique feeling participants experienced while exploring these stimuli, which he compared to looking at a picture through a Swiss cheese. The visual concept was shaped by Benedikt’s earlier Thesis Art piece (Kaufhold’2015), but this time he incorporated actual text and figures from Judith’s study.

Artistic Concept

The multiple miniatures represent the exploration process, offering a fragmented yet comprehensive view of the study. These miniatures mimic the participants’ visual experience, where exploration is hindered by the “blurry” stimuli. The visual design reflects the balance between “exploration” (searching for more information) and “exploitation” (settling on what’s already seen), which is central to the study’s core question.

“The artwork allowed me to experiment with depicting complex cognitive processes visually, and I hope it sparks curiosity in the viewer, making them wonder about the nuances of our study.”

Benedikt Ehinger

Personal Reflection

For Benedikt, this marked the end of a Thesis Art style, where the whole thesis itself is rendered, rather than using the Glyphs of the text. The interplay of design elements — combining figures and text in a fragmented format — allowed for a new perspective on how to visualize complex, scientific ideas. “The result was a compelling artwork that combined the scientific and artistic aspects in a way that felt both playful and thought-provoking”, he adds.

Judith’s thesis wasn’t just a project for Benedikt — it turned into an ongoing collaboration. In fact, Judith is now part of his group, working on her PhD.

Jiameng’s thesis explores eye-movements and their relationship to visual stimuli, using computational vision models. The Thesis Art piece applies a subset of the same image filters to the manuscript itself, creating an abstract visual representation of the study’s findings.

The Creation Process

The visual concept for this Thesis Art piece came from the use of computer vision algorithms in the research itself. The idea was to apply the same filters to the entire manuscript as had been applied to the stimuli, creating an abstract visual interpretation of the thesis. The biggest challenge for Benedikt was finding the right selection of features to use and balancing the colors in a way that made sense while also representing the research’s lack of strong predictive results of the image features on eye-movement durations themselves.

Artistic Concept

The resulting Thesis Art plays with the concept of patterns emerging from something without purposeful structure, much like the classic Rorschach psychotherapy test. The abstract shapes and figures created by these filters reflect the elusive nature of the findings in the research — a lack of clear structure or strong results.

“This artwork applies the thesis’ own computer vision filters to itself, turning structure into abstraction.”

Benedikt Ehinger

Personal Reflection

Benedikt reflects on the unique approach of Jiameng’s Thesis Art piece, where multiple miniatures were used to display the thesis pages, with no direct relation to the text except for the overall global structure. He finds it fascinating how the visual presentation, through filters, emphasizes the abstract and structural aspects of the research. In a light-hearted moment, he recalls. “Meng later went on to do a PhD — how cool!”

Lilli Kaufhold’s thesis examines where and for how long we look at things. More technically, she also investigated the relation of saccade eye-movements and Hick’s law. The accompanying Thesis Art piece visualizes the thesis through multiple miniatures, each representing an eye-movement of Benedikt reading the thesis, offering a meta perspective on eye-movements in a study about eye-movements.

The Creation Process

In this Thesis Art piece, Benedikt recorded his eye movements while reading the thesis. Each dot on the miniatures — which are all pages of the thesis — represents a “fixation”, a lingering of the gaze on a specific spot, illustrating the focus of attention of the reader throughout the thesis. This method allows the audience to experience the data in a visually engaging way, offering insights into the reading process itself.

Artistic Concept

The visual concept arose from Benedikt’s desire to explore the theme of eye-movements in a literal and meta way: “The project itself, based on eye-movement research, felt like a perfect opportunity to apply eye-tracking to the thesis creation process”, he says. The multiple miniatures represent an abstract yet structured view of the thesis, emphasizing the relationship between gaze, attention, and the material.

“Eye-movements on an eye-movement thesis — it was the meta-project approach that made this piece so unique.”

Benedikt Ehinger

Personal Reflection

Benedikt reflects on the labor-intensive process of data collection and the challenges faced in creating the visualizations. The eye-tracking aspect was particularly challenging as it required programming a new experimental setup and spatially synchronizing the thesis text with the eye-tracker. As Benedikt notes, “This project turned out to be one of the most labor-intensive in terms of data collection, but it is a whole different style, not directly visualizing the glyphs, but rather the work in its entirety.”

Katja Häusser’s research explores how much we rely on brain-generated visual percepts compared to actual seen ones, revealing that we trust the brain-generated ones more. For the corresponding Thesis Art piece, Benedikt Ehinger recreated the central visual stimulus (a so-called Gabor patch) using the text of her thesis.

The Creation Process

Benedikt’s approach was entirely digital, using Adobe Illustrator as his tool of choice. While working with large amounts of text presented some challenges, especially with Illustrator’s slower performance, in this early work, he did not use individual glyphs, but text-blocks, greatly improving the performance. The recreated stimulus, as used in Häusser’s experiment, is a convolution of a sinusoidal wave with a Gaussian, and led to key insights into the human brain.

Artistic Concept

The artwork plays with the concept of spatial frequency illusions, where objects are perceived differently from different distances. This idea is directly tied to Häusser’s findings, where brain-generated visual cues influence our perception. The Thesis Art text aspect becomes only clear, as the viewer moves closer to it, symbolizing the experiment’s results: our perception shifts based on proximity and the way our brain interprets visual stimuli.

“My very first student and my first Thesis Art piece.

I’m quite happy that we made a real discovery in this project – something entirely new and before unknown.”

Benedikt Ehinger

Personal Reflection

Reflecting on this first student project, Benedikt fondly recalls the experience: “We even published a paper from this work, and I’m most proud of that,” he says. The translation of the research into visual art was a unique challenge. He notes, “It was the most literal translation I made, using text as the ‘paint’ rather than shaping it into forms.”