At the end of September, I visited the Augmented Cognition Lab at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. I learned about this lab at a conference last autumn. The head of the lab, Luis Emilio Bruni, and his colleague Niels Erik Raursø were so welcoming and helpful during the week and showed me around.
The lab is part of the Media Section of the Department of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology. Both Luis and Niels are also involved in the Medialogy study programme.
Luis Emilio Bruni allowed me to shadow him during the week, so I attended his lecture, a practice-based learning seminar, an evaluation meeting with students, and a thesis defence. And I heard a lot about Danish universities and how the system has changed in the last 15 years, pushing schools to produce graduates who are employable on the job market, a metric closely monitored through post-graduation unemployment data.
Besides all of this, we spent hours discussing research on human cognition and how it is related to the understanding of (not only interactive) narration. Luis’ background is in biosemiotics – a field I know nothing about. I stopped reading semiotics a long time ago because it seemed to me incompatible with cognitive science. However, Luis himself has done a lot of work with EEG, EDA, eye-tracking, heart rate etc., so I was obviously wrong about semiotics.
In our discussions, we touched upon a very broad range of topics, ranging from specific EEG research designs to explore distractions when watching films, across the possibilities of biometric research in cinema, to the philosophy of mind and theory of evolution.
During the week, I also visited several museums and cafés, walked around Copenhagen, and so on. I want to highlight James Turrell’s Aftershock, an installation which can be visited in Copenhagen Contemporary.
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