Brent Hoff wants to piss you off.
Well, it's not that simple. The filmmaker's current project, the Emotional Arcade, pits regular people in a competition to experience emotions as strongly as they can, while monitoring their brain activity. Once you've worked yourself into a boiling rage, a peaceful bliss or a meditative chill? You get a lollipop.
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The Emotional Arcade is a blend of art, neuroscience and technology. According to Hoff, it's a portable version of earlier films he's made. Hoff's film Love Competition, for example, challenged seven competitors to love someone or something as strongly as they could for five minutes, while a Stanford fMRI brain scanner and several researchers measured participants' neural activity. The Emotional Arcade expands the range of emotions and takes the experiment on the road.
Emotional Arcade observation 1:
Girls start slow, but eventually dominate lust competitions. pic.twitter.com/xKYqFwbVRX
— brent hoff (@brenthoff) November 28, 2013
Several of Hoff's experiments involve EEG headsets, which monitor and record brain activity. In the experiment shown below, the headsets convert that activity into air pressure, which subsequently fills a balloon. Two contestants compete to feel a certain emotion. Whoever's balloon pops first wins.
"We've tweaked these headsets quite a bit, so you pretty accurately have to be feeling rage or one of the other emotions to trigger it," Hoff tells Mashable.

According to Hoff, most of the games utilize EEG, while others incorporate facial recognition or other biometric sensors to measure emotional output.
Hoff's mind games are equal parts quirky and tortuous. "Reflective Roulette" pits contestants against each other to see who can feel the most apathetic. Ironically, whoever wants the prize the least will, in turn, win the prize. In another game Hoff is planning competitors will race robots controlled by their brain activity. The feeling that will power the robots to the finish line? Sadness. Hoff jokes that he can't wait to try it with children.
As strange as it sounds, challenging kids to feel sad while controlling awesome robots with their brains is what the Emotional Arcade is all about: making it okay to feel and express emotions in a society that Hoff believes is losing its ability to do so.
"I really just want to live in a world where there's at least one place where we are encouraged for feeling emotion," Hoff told Mashable. "It seems like we're so afraid of emotion in society now, so I'm really glad that people have responded to this."
Due to the nature of the brain activity sensors, it is technically possible to "cheat" in any of the Emotional Arcade's competitions. Any intense activity in the frontal lobe caught by the sensors could be misread as another emotion.
"If you're in a lust competition, you could technically generate a lot of rage in your body and win, because this sensor that we have right now won't be able to tell the difference," says Hoff. "But really, if you're doing that, you probably have bigger problems."
After watching hundreds of competitions, Hoff says he's noticed a few patterns.
"In lust competitions, guys start almost immediately. But they basically have a hard time finishing, especially if people are watching," says Hoff. "Girls start slower and end up winning. It's so weirdly cliche."
Rage competitions, he says, happen in sporadic bursts of emotion.
"You'll find that so many people think about work in rage competitions," he says. "For lust, people think about their exes more than anything else. And the biggest thing people think about in fear competitions is financial failure."
According to Hoff, the Emotional Arcade is a way for people to explore themselves and let go of their emotional restraint through play.
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Image: Vimeo, One Million Square Feet