The second festival day was a great success with the sold-out VR-programs Heal the World and Artifical Reality?  and the short film program Artificial Identities. Read more about the highlights of festival day 2 here!

Gaming against your brain

On entering the café at InScience Film Festival, you are asked whether you would like tea or coffee. You think about the options, make a decision, and answer “Tea”. At every point in this decision-making process, your behavior can be tracked by your brain activity. Previously, scientists have only focused on brain activity at the point of, and after, deciding to have Tea. However, it has recently been found that there is very important stuff happening in your brain before you decide which caffeinated beverage you would like. Scientists can decode this activity and see your decision before you even consciously know it –  you give off a special wave. Your brainwaves say you want tea, but you think you are still deciding. This all happens very quickly, in the space of a few seconds, but the amazing thing it can be seen and tracked.

What will happen when technology appropriates this technique? What will happen to free choice? Cece at Radboud University has come to our library with this technology to put it to the test. She has designed a game where you play against the computer, which has access to your brain waves. So essentially, can you beat your brain?

This program can be visited until Sunday at the library De Mariënburg.

Pim Haselager about the consequences of the creative use of robots

A robot doing your laundry or cooking your dinner? According to Pim Haselager this is a realistic image of the future. But do we realise the consequences? What should a robot do when a child gives the order to throw a cat in the water? How does a robot distinguish garbage and art from your child? With the questions, Pim Haselager exposes in his talk he made the audience realise that robots can make our everyday life easier, but a lot of adjustments have to be made to artificial intelligence.

Best European Science Film

The screening of the Best European Science Film was a surprise, it was not yet known which of the 6 nominees won. The Best European Science Film is chosen yearly by the European Academy for Science Film (EURASF), an association promoting science films and film festivals. As one of the member festivals, InScience hosted the award ceremony this year.

The winner was Dusk Chorus, a documentary from 2016. The film is based on the project “Fragments of Extinction” by David Monacchi. It follows Monacchi as he records sound portraits of the tropical forest of the Amazon. One of the film directors, Alessandro D’Emilia was there to accept the award. He was excited to be at the festival, especially since Dusk Chorus won the InScience Student Jury award the previous year.

It is a perfect combination of art and science. Before the screening started, Alessandro advised: “Don’t just watch the film, listen to it. If you feel it, close your eyes and get immersed. Just don’t fall asleep!” The audience was definitely ready to be immersed in the soundscape of Dusk Chorus.

The serengeti rules

On Thursday we saw the Dutch premiere of The Serengeti Rules, a documentary that features a group of ecologists who in the late 1960s advanced a theory that has shaped our understanding of intricate relationships between animals. The ‘keystone species theory’ revealed that some animals are crucial in ecosystems, in that their disappearance would lead to downgrading effects on the environment.

After the film, the audience had the chance to hear reflections of two Swedish ecologists and filmmakers, Jacob von Heland and Henrik Ernstson. While both researchers acknowledged the theory’s contribution to understanding how ecosystems work and its reverberations on other disciplines (today we speak about urban, cultural, political ecology etc.), they also stressed that the film is a slight simplification of how science typically happens. The film paints a romanticized picture of the scientists and their theory.

According to Jacob von Heland, the film does not show that the keystone theory was a contested one for some time, nor it pays tribute to all PhDs and other young researchers who typically put in all hard work to test out ideas put forward by senior figures. It is certainly true of doing science that it is usually 1,000 ideas and only one of them may work in practice. Yet, the film highlights the notion that is at the core of doing any science, scientists are always led by curiosity and the quest to understand how things work.