On Halloween 2014 Thrill Laboratory broadcast a live experiment created to reveal the effect of horror films on the human brain. Data was monitored and streamed online for interaction by ‘science enthusiasts’ far and wide, via an animated brain-in-a-jar and an online visualisation. Broadway Cinema commissioned the experiment for the Mayhem Film Festival. The underlying […]
Brendan Walker is an experienced public speaker and broadcaster. He presented 3 series for Channel 4 (Titanic The Mission, The House The 50s Built and Terror In The Skies), before joining the BBC Coast team. Brendan is a true polymath. His expertise span art, design, science, technology, and engineering. He has spoken at Tate Modern […]
Brendan Walker launches Studio Go Go – a 21st century ride design company, creating truly thrilling, motion-based ride experiences, using the sensing and content-delivery capabilities of mobile VR. Read more.
This summer I had the pleasure of working closely with folk-rock musician and artist Keaton Henson as he developed a new composition that explored his personal relationship with anxiety. Together we created interactive stage lighting, which we designed to reveal and amplify an audience’s varying states of anxiety elicited by the six different movements of […]
Thrill Laboratory™ is an ongoing project of aerial. It is dedicated to the practical pursuit of creating, producing, and examining new forms of thrilling experience. Thrill Laboratory is a fluid organisation of scientists, artists, designers, engineers, and technologists all of whom have a passion for experimentation. Thrill Laboratory website —>
A sensor on Hastings Pier is monitoring waves and transmitting live data over the World Wide Web. Teacups in The Hub connected to this data are exhibiting some rather unusual behaviour in response. Hastings has experienced twelve major storms over the past twelve months, and another could soon be on its way… Commissioned by Hastings […]
An immersive interactive artwork based on two popular entertainment technologies: the multi millennia-old swing and the 21st century Oculus Rift – the former designed to excite the vestibular system, the latter designed to excite the visual cortex. Commissioned by Sheffield Doc/Fest, Site Gallery and Crossover as part of the Virtual Reality Arcade, where contemporary art, […]
Captain Walker worked with Year 9 pupils to create a flotilla of steam-powered Pop Pop boats, fabricated from recycled tin cans. Boats were bio-fuelled with oil pressed from sunflower seeds, grown by the boys in their classroom hydroponics tent. Boats were tested at the Victoria Model Steamboat Club – home of the Pop Pop world […]
The Black Box installations present fictitious impending air disasters – freezing the scene moments before impact. Each diorama captures the deliciously traumatic instant of realisation as each tranquil world is visited by alien technology, culture and mayhem. Black Box plays on our ambivalence about air travel – our romance with flight in conflict with our […]
I produced a collection of images capturing the emotions of riders at the fairground as they experienced a moment of ultimate thrill. I built a body mounted auto-portrait machine that detects the emotion of thrill through real-time sampling and analysis of physiological reactions. As a rider experiences euphoria, the machine fires its camera mechanism, automatically […]