About the work:
Emergence is an interactive biofeedback art installation
that invites the viewer to examine the relationship
between biology and technology. When a viewer touches the
installation, the electrical impulses generated by each
beat of the viewer's heart propagate throughout the
viewer's body and are detected and digitized by the
installation. During this interaction, Emergence
synchronizes its own electrical pulses with the viewer's
heart to create a syncopated light and sound-scape that
reflects its intimate experience with the viewer and also
includes the installation's "memory" of previous viewers'
heart rhythms. Through a single eye, Emergence retains a
visual memory of its encounter with the viewer. With each
beat of the viewer's heart, Emergence captures an image of
the interaction and digitally pulses the memory through
the surrounding infrastructure and uploads it to the
internet where it can be seen on flickr or facebook. By
drawing parallels between the human body and the
infrastructure of the digital age, Emergence invites the
viewer to think about what fundamentally differentiates
the electrical impulses of the internet from those
impulses constantly traveling throughout their own body.
Photo by Joe
Corrigan/Getty Images North America
Photo by Joe
Corrigan/Getty Images North America
Huge thanks to the following sponsors for
showing Emergence in some fantastic venues:
Many additional thanks are deserved for making this piece
a reality. Producer Matthew Arrow, my wife Erica, brother Ian,
sister-in-law Vanessa, brother-in-law Jon, friend Susan,
among others, worked tirelessly to artfully wrangle
thousands of feet of wire and cable into submission. Thank
you so much!
This work was built on the accomplishments of several great open source projects including openFrameworks and Arduino.
