Neurotechnology on stage
What happens when the brain itself becomes part of a play? That’s exactly what an interdisciplinary team of artists, engineers, and scientists is working on. The goal: to capture brain activity in real time and translate it directly into a live performance. Thoughts become sound, light, or visual elements.
The idea is currently being tested at the Burgtheater in Vienna in the production Solaris (premiere: June 20, 2026). During the performance, the participants’ neural and physical signals are fed live into the action on stage, meaning that brain and body signals influence the stage, sound, and interaction in real time. This creates a direct connection between inner states and artistic expression. For the audience, neurotechnology thus becomes a direct, physical, and immediate experience.
To make this work, the team has developed an experimental design that specifically induces different mental and physical states under realistic conditions such as movement, emotions, and complex environments. The goal is to identify reliable patterns in the data that remain stable despite these influences.
Neurotechnology Meets Theater
At the heart of the project is a so-called “passive brain-computer interface (BCI).” This is a technology that uses brain signals for communication without requiring users to actively control anything. Instead, unconscious mental states are detected and converted into technical signals. Measurements are taken using mobile EEG (electroencephalography). That is, wearable sensors that record the brain’s electrical activity.
In this field, the Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors (IfADo) provides expert knowledge based on years of experiments with mobile EEGs used outside the laboratory. Tests with mobile EEGs were conducted in various environments - such as on running tracks, in the forest, or in simulated logistics centers - and the results were compared with EEG data from IfADo laboratories.
The use of mobile EEG systems outside the lab presents challenges: the technology is complex to set up, prone to interference, and not primarily suited for use by non-experts. On stage, however, these difficulties are not viewed as problems but rather as central research questions for further development.
The project uses EEG not just as a measuring instrument but as part of the artistic language. The project brings together the theater collective Minus.Eins; director Roman Senkl; creative technologist Phil Jungschläger; and Prof. Edmund Wascher (IfADo) as scientific advisor. The technical implementation is based on mBrainTrain's SMARTING EEG technology. The BCI pipeline was developed in collaboration with Jakob Niedermann and Agata Feledyn.
This news article was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence and has been carefully checked and revised by the editorial team and the appropriate scientific experts. AI-generated images are identified as such.