We’re accustomed to seeing EEG technology provide novel ways to filter aesthetic tastes, whether that be in art galleries or through tag-cloud navigation devices.

A new interactive EEG installation at Manchester’s FutureEverything Festival 2011 will see taste transformed into one-off artworks.

Multimedia artist Marcos Lutyens is working alongside Absolut Vodka to bring cocktail drinkers a visual representation of how their brain is enjoying their drink.

Lutyens has a long standing interest in the multisensory phenomena of synaesthesia and worked closely with a team of crack coders to create the Flavour Collider, which uses a Neurosky Mindwave headset to “allow signals from our brain to create self-generative art.”

Colour proved to be a bit of red herring when it came to coding the synaesthetic visualizations, with texture and shape of sensation experienced proving more important in terms of the final visualizations generated on screen.

Lutyens: “we associated a sharp taste, like chilli, with more angular shapes than a smooth taste.”

FutureEverything 2011 takes place from 11th May to 14th May.

Marcos Lutyens

[via Wired UK]