Online Shopping Center Sam Lavigne, 2016

Over the course of a week I used a consumer-grade EEG machine to record my brain activity while shopping online and thinking about my own mortality.

With this data, I trained my computer to predict whether I am thinking about shopping or death.

I used a decision tree classifier on the two sets of labeled brain readings, which means the computer is only able to interpret my mental state in terms of a shopping/death binary: my brain activity is either "shopping-like" or "death-like".

I filmed myself sleeping for three nights while wearing the EEG machine. The machine communicates with my computer, interprets my mental state, and then browses websites on my behalf.

I've sped up the videos around 2000%.

If my mental state seems morbid the computer visits websites related to death. If it believes I am thinking about commerce it goes shopping for me, selecting items at random from aliexpress.com or amazon.com and adding them to my shopping carts.

After three nights my shopping carts have reached capacity.

Thanks to Dylan Fashbaugh for his advice on EEGs, Darius Kazemi for his Random Shopper project which partially inspired this work, and to Pioneer Works.