Winner Announced for the 2025 Art of Neuroscience Competition

Each year the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience hosts the annual international art competition at the intersection of neuroscience and art. Its purpose is to highlight the beauty of neuroscience by showcasing brain-inspired artworks and ignite curiosity and discussion within the general public. This year’s submissions span a remarkable range of media, from poems and drawings to installation and multimodal works, each exploring the intersection of neuroscience and art in unique ways.

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2025 Winner: Russel by Penelope Bekiari

Affiliation: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Composition : Penelope Bekiari
Cello: Semeli Kostourou

Rustle is a live electroacoustic work that unfolds as a dialogue between the human body, its inner states, and its acoustic environment. Rooted in the interaction between a cellist and a responsive electronic system, the piece draws from real-time physiological data (brainwave activity (EEG) and heartbeat rate (HR) data) to shape both the live cello’s timbral spectrum and the structure of its surrounding soundscape.

Rather than functioning solely as a data sonification piece, Rustle integrates affective technology: the performer’s emotional states (pre-mapped and categorized through machine learning algorithms trained in Python) dynamically inform the electronic layer. In this way, the system does not merely translate data into sound, but interprets and responds to affective states; rendering them musically audible and shaping the trajectory of the piece.

Field recordings—captured in locations selected for their emotional or acoustic resonance—form the basis of the electronic material. These recordings are continuously transformed and spatialized in real time, influenced by the fluctuating bio-signals of the performer. The cello, treated through subtle live processing, is not simply accompanied by electronics; it is entangled with them in a complex, adaptive feedback loop. The line between performer and environment dissolves, and sound becomes the medium through which cognition, emotion, and external space converge.

Crucially, Rustle also includes a visual layer: a video projection that evolves in tandem with the sonic and physiological transformations. The visual material—composed of abstract textures, environmental footage, and algorithmically generated imagery—reacts to both the sound and the affective states driving it. This is achieved through real-time processing in Max/MSP, which synchronizes video content with incoming EEG and HR data, allowing the visual narrative to unfold organically alongside the music. As the performer’s emotions shift, the video’s colors, rhythm, and shapes change too, blending sound and visuals into a unified, synaesthetic experience.

Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives—from neuroscience to philosophy and the arts—Rustle transforms the brain’s and heart’s hidden rhythms into sound, revealing how emotion moves through the nervous system and takes form as movement, light, and sonic gesture. The title Rustle evokes the quiet disturbances at the edges of awareness—bodily microstates, environmental whispers, inner fluctuations—that here become compositional material. The piece is presented to its audience as an evolving landscape of perception, where sound and image are not only heard and seen, but also felt, both as internal vibration and as a shared, immersive experience.

Honourable Mentions

This year’s submission also resulted in a selection of honourable mentions including

• Threading Thoughts by Carolyn Davison
• Silence Serrie by Burhan Yılmaz
• Self-authored Entropy by Cindy Ren
• The Purkinje Listener by Youlan Li

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