I am Dr. Jens M. Stober, media artist and Creative Media PhD. For over twenty years I have moved at the intersection of hacking, game design, and media art. My dissertation, Hacking as a Playful Strategy, treated code as a playground for emergent meaning. My 2015 project Ride Your Mind fused brain-computer interface (BCI) with virtual reality and machine learning to let the player’s brainwaves shape the world in real time. One question has guided every line of code, every wireframe, every electrode: what remains of the human when machines take over everything else?
The history of progress is a history of replacement. The Industrial Revolution replaced muscle. The AI revolution replaces routine cognition. Machines compute faster, code cleaner, recombine patterns with ruthless efficiency. They do not tire. They do not doubt. They do not feel.
So what is left?
After two decades of hacking game systems, designing interactive narratives, and building media artworks that breathe with the player, my answer is Emotional and Playful Artistic Intelligence.
This is not a slogan. It is the core.
In Ride Your Mind the player wore a 14-channel EEG headset. Raw brainwave data—alpha, beta, theta, delta—streamed into a custom-trained neural network. The network did not merely classify states; it translated them into world parameters
The player never pressed a button. The world was the mind. The AI was the translator, not the author. Every shift carried the imprint of lived emotion—imperfect, unrepeatable, unmistakably human.
This is the tension of our era: human vision versus machine efficiency. The will to begin without a map. The acceptance of broken symmetry. The lived texture of joy and pain in the act of making.
When everything else is replaced, this remains.
The last bastion of the human mind.
