Creating art from heart beats
Theatre moves us, makes us laugh, cry; it touches our hearts. We feel this but what if we could see it too? The Institute for Cultural and Creative Industries’ (iCCi) Art Heart project allows you to do just that as technology records audience experience and artists interpret the data to create new artwork in a different medium.
Working with the Jasmin Vardimon Company, we arranged for a number of audience members to wear heart rate monitors while watching the company’s show, Alice. The resulting data was amalgamated and shared with creatives Wonderland, who took the data and turned it into Heart Art’s first piece of original artwork – a beautiful moving piece of digital art that allows you to see into people’s hearts.
The Art Heart research project will repeat this process over a number of future performances and use the collected data to understand more about how audiences feel and react to art as they experience it. Jim Ang, Deputy Director of iCCi explains:
“Through this project we can understand how humans perceive art as individuals and as groups. By analysing the data over time, we hope to build a picture of how we interact with art more broadly with future implications for the fusion of artistic creativity and human-computer interaction technology. As the project develops we will use the collected information to build a unique and valuable data bank, helping researchers to understand how people interact with live performance. In return for participating, the audience member receives a visual personalised representation of their experience in the form of an artwork generated by their own data.”
If you’re interested in the future creative, fascinated by the ways in which technology inspires and influences art and artists, and curious about how tech can help us understand arts impact on audiences, you can find out more about the Art Heart research project as well as other work we are supporting on our website. Click here for the ICCI website.
With thanks to Jasmin Vardimon Company and Wonderland for their collaboration on this project.