Thesis Art

Thesis Art Karolis Degutis

12. August 2020

The idea of thesis art is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. Each student that finishes his thesis with me, receives a poster print of this piece from me. One copy for them, one for me.

The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see. You can find all past thesis art pieces here

In his project Karolis Degutis (@karolisdegutis) tried to replicate two laminar fMRI effects, but not at high-field 7T, but at 3T. Unfortunately, we failed to replicate these effects – on the one hand, we had to stop acquisition early due to COVID-19, on the other hand, we found anecdotal evidence in favour of the H0.

Karolis made use of laminar fMRI, and accordingly in this thesis art, I used a layerified horizontal slice of brain (bigBrain). The layers are completely made up by the words of his thesis – overall ~55.000 characters were used. This was the first time that I completed a thesis art in Julia. It was a blast! Not only could I completely extract all PDF text easily, but I also used a nice library to solve a large travelling salesman problem. Finally, using makie.jl, plotting that many characters took only 0.5s – and it did not crash at all (compared to my experience with matlab/ggplot).
You can find the julia code here

15. February 2019

I was a supervisor for Katharina Groß’s Bachelor’s Thesis. You can find the resulting paper (!) here on biorXiv

In her project we developed a new test battery to benchmark eye-trackers in many different tasks. We concurrently measured Pupil Labs Glasses and an Eyelink 1000. In the thesis art I selected six of the tasks and visualized the data of one subject using the letters of her thesis. The tasks I used are: Fixation Grid, Smooth Pursuit, Microsaccades, Blinks, Pupil Dilation and Free Viewing.

The idea of “thesis art” is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see. You can find all past thesis art pieces here

Thesis Art: Lisa-Marie Vortmann

6. September 2018

I was a supervisor for Lisa-Marie Vortmanns’s Master’s Thesis.

In her project, we tried to decode from brain activity* which objects on a screen a subject is currently tracking with their mind. To do this, we “tagged” the to-be-tracked objects and distractor with different frequencies, so that we can trace them in the EEG. What you see here is the SSVEP response over time for three trials per row. At the beginning and end, the response is small because the object was not tracked, only in the middle part one can see that the response is much larger, the object was tracked. The plot is “written” by the first 10.000 letters of Lisa’s Thesis.

The idea of “thesis art” is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see. You can find all past thesis art pieces here

* This is actually Lisa’s own brain activity

Thesis Art: Maria Sokotushchenko

18. June 2018

I was a supervisor for Maria Sokotushchenko’s Master’s Thesis.

In her thesis-art, I artistically visualized the brain’s surprise response to a unexpected stimulus change. This response is sorted by how fast subjects responded (late on top, fast in the bottom)

The idea of “thesis art” is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see. You can find all past thesis art pieces here

Thesis Art: Edoardo Pinzuti

30. May 2018

I was a co-supervisor for Edoardo Pinzuti’s Master’s Thesis. I finally came around to make this artwork with the text from his thesis.

He wrote an impressive matlab toolbox to analyze causality directions in time series based on Takens Theorem. The whole idea is about reconstructing embeddings of chaotic systems, with the Lorenz system (the one depicted in this artwork) being a simulation example in his thesis. Please find the DDIFTOOL toolbox here

The idea of “thesis art” is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see. You can find all past thesis art pieces here

Thesis Art: Judith Schepers

17. May 2018

I was a supervisor for Judith Scheper’s Bachelor’s Thesis.

In this thesis-art, I visualized the guided-bubble paradigm used in a recent publication in the Journal of Vision. Judith generalized the paradigm to more than five bubbles, therefore, many more bubbles are visible in the thesis-art.

The idea of “thesis art” is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see. You can find all past thesis art pieces here

Jiameng Wu: The influence of Saliency on the Initation of Saccades in a Guided Viewing Paradigm with Bubble-Stimuli

10. October 2016

One of my bachelor’s students (Jiameng Wu) finished her thesis on parts of this project. I again tried to make art out of science.

In this piece I used three of her features on different scales and calculated them for each page of her thesis. I then recombined and arranged them. In eye-tracking these image features are commonly used to analyse where people look (high contrast regions and the like). In this case we find surpringly emerging global structures (I mean the guy with a tophat in row 2 or the cat in row 3) .

The idea is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see.
Find two other pieces here and here

Lilli Kaufhold: The influence of Fixation Durations on the Initiation of Saccades

9. May 2016

One of my Master students (Lilli Kaufhold) finished her thesis on parts of this study (manuscript forthcoming). I took the opportunity to form her work into a pice of art.

It is a meta-study of an eye-tracking study. I recorded my eye-movements while reading her thesis about eye movements(using these cool 3D-printable open source eye trackers!) . Every red dot is a fixation (a moment where the eye stayed still) and every line connects two fixations with an eye movement. It is clear that I focused on the words, but some figures elicit specific eye tracking behaviour. Of course it is up to the viewer to figure out, which page contains what content.

The idea is to inspire discussion with persons who do not have an academic background or work in a different field. The thesis is hidden in the drawer, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see.
This is the second piece, for the first one see here.

Katja Häusser: Psychophysical Study on the Temporal and Nasal Visual Hemifields and the Blind Spot

19. April 2016

One of my Bachelor students (Katja Häusser) finished her thesis on parts of this study (manuscript forthcoming). This is the first piece of art I made based on a thesis. For this one, I reconstructed the main stimulus used in the psychophysics study by the complete text of the thesis.

The idea is to inspire discussion with people who do not necessarily have an academic background. The thesis might be hidden in the drawer, or is incromprehensible for people outside of science, but the poster is out there at the wall for everyone to see.
I hope to start a series, where most projects end up in an unique piece of art.