DIGITAL EXHIBITION GUIDE

J U N E 2 5 , 2 0 2 1 –J A N U A R Y 2 , 2 0 2 2

R A F A E LL O Z A N O - H E M M E R

STOP 5 BEHIND THE SCENES

STOP 6 ART INSPIRED BY PULSE DETECTION

STOP 7 ABOUT THE ARTIST

IMAGE CREDITS

STOP 1 ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

STOP 2 LOZANO-HEMMER’S PULSE SERIES

STOP 3 PHOTOPLETHYSMOGRAPHY (PPG)

STOP 4 LED FILAMENT LIGHTBULBS

STOP 1 ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONPulse Topology is an immersive light and sound environment created by Mexican-Canadian artist RafaelLozano-Hemmer (born 1967), an internationally recognized media artist working at the intersection of architecture, technology, and performance. In his work, Lozano-Hemmer creates platforms for public participation and explores themes of agency, human connection, and civic engagement. This site-specific project features an upside-down canopy of mountains and valleys made from

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thousands of suspended light bulbs that mirror the pulse of visitor participants. The immersive environment highlights the basic but essential biological element—the heartbeat—shared amongst us all. Presented for the first time at Kemper Museum, Pulse Topology is the latest and largest work in Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse series, comprised of projects that use heart-rate sensors to create interactive audiovisual experiences from participants’ biometric data.

NEXT STOP LOZANO-HEMMER’S PULSE SERIES

STOP 2 LOZANO-HEMMER’S PULSE SERIES

“During my wife’s first pregnancy in 2003 I learned that we could listen to the pulse of the fetus. An ultrasound machine does not let you hear the real heartbeat but a sonification of data arriving from a transducer: the machine works by imaging the soft tissue using echolocation, just the way a bat navigates its surroundings. The translation that the heartbeat goes through for detection is significant because it covers many media without losing symbolic, emotional, and

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medical importance: from electrical impulse, to muscle contraction, to echolocation, to greyscale image and finally, to artificially amplified sound that everyone in the room can hear. That the heartbeat is widely used as a poetic representation of life and love is due in part to this facility for translation and the universal recognition of the rhythmic sound we first hear in the womb, our mother’s heart, which is then accompanied and superseded by our own. But even though we can instantly recognize a heartbeat, what is more poetic is the fact that we do not control it, that our life depends on involuntary spasms of muscular tissue. In the 1930s, pioneering Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenbleuth studied a clinically brain-dead patient who had no electrical signals passing to or from the brain but whose heart kept beating. As the limbs of the body were moved, the pulse would rise to ensure tissues were properly oxygenated. How could this be?

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With American polymath Norbert Wiener, Rosenbleuth conceived of a theory of messages and feedback that could account for this “self-regulation” of the heart. Years later, Norbert Wiener published his seminal postulation of the theory of cybernetics, and despite its fundamental importance in fields such as engineering, sociology, computer science, and philosophy, to me it is significant that our culture of control and automation originates from studies of the human pulse.

In 2006, my wife was pregnant again, this time with fraternal twins. I asked for two ultrasound machines, so we could hear simultaneously the heart of the boy and the girl. The heart rates were similar but not the same. They began phasing in and out, creating new, complex sounds, something I had heard in the works of composers such as Steve Reich, Conlon Nancarrow, and Glenn Branca. My work with the human pulse, starting with Pulse

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Room, was motivated by the desire to make visible these slight differences, to create immersive experiences that are platforms for participation, where the sum of the heartbeats could create an unforeseen biometric landscape beyond the symbolism or medical importance of a single heartbeat.

With each new piece in the Pulse series, I try variations of media, scale, and concept—always aware of the rich tradition of visualization of vital signs in the history of art. My more recent works are concerned with the relationship between biometric technologies, public or private control, and identification systems. The use of fingerprinting, for example, dates back to 1891 when it was developed by Juan Vucetich for the Argentinian police. Today, billions of fin-gerprint scanners secure access to our phones and our countries. At a time when we are seeing ethnic nationalisms on the

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rise, dividing people along simplistic categorizations, it is critical to misuse these mechanisms of control to create connective, anonymous landscapes of belonging.”

—Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

NEXT STOP PHOTOPLETHYSMOGRAPHY (PPG)

STOP 3 PHOTOPLETHYSMOGRAPHY (PPG) TECHNOLOGY

For the first time in the Pulse series, which began in 2006 with Almacén de Corazonadas (Pulse Room), Lozano-Hemmer has integrated touchless remote photoplethysmography (PPG) technology that uses computer vision algorithms to optically detect heartbeats.

PPG uses low-intensity infrared (IR) light. When light travels through biological tissues it is absorbed by bones, skin

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pigments and both venous and arterial blood.

Since light is more strongly absorbed by blood than the surrounding tissues, the changes in blood flow can be detected by PPG sensors signaling cardiovascular activity or heart beats.

Visit onpulse.net to experience this technology through your computer or smartphone.

NEXT STOP LED FILAMENT LIGHTBULBS

STOP 4 LED FILAMENT LIGHTBULBS

In place of incandescent bulbs which have been used in Lozano-Hemmer’s previous works, Pulse Topology is powered by LED filament light bulbs. Decreasing the energy required to power the installation has allowed Lozano-Hemmer to significantly increase the scale of the project: while previous installations have included 100–300 lightbulbs, Pulse Topology uses more than 3,000.

Each of the 3,000 LED-filament lamps is suspended from an individual cable at

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custom a length. The following are ways that these LED-filament lamps act:

1. When you place your hand under one of the three sensors throughout the gallery, your heartbeat will be detected. After several seconds, the LED-filament lamps directly above you will begin illuminate a radius pulsing with your heartbeat. If all three sensors are activated, This will be happening simultaneously at the other two stations in the gallery. The three pulsing areas (representing the heartbeats of three individuals) will grow and eventually overlap.

2. After you’ve experienced the LED-filaments directly surrounding you pulse to your heartbeat, a single bulb will eventually continue to pulse with your heartbeat alongside the thousands of other bulbs reflecting the heartbeats of other visitors to the exhibition.

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3. A bulb will continue pulsing to your heartbeat in the gallery space after you leave the museum. You have contributed to creating the work.

NEXT STOP BEHIND THE SCENES

STOP 5 BEHIND THE SCENES

At the far end of the gallery there is a viewing square built in the wall. Take a look inside to see the custom computer developed for Pulse Topology.

NEXT STOP ART INSPIRED BY PULSE DETECTION

Throughout the centuries and across innovations in audiovisual and bio-technologies, artists have explored new ways to record, replicate, and magnify the human heartbeat.

Chosen by Lozano-Hemmer, the following works offer a glimpse into the extent of this collaboration between art and technology and the various meanings revealed in the intimate measure of a pulse.

1957 Paul Taylor, Panorama

In this piece by American choreographer Paul Taylor, three performers danced to recorded heartbeat sounds.

1962 Chris Marker, La Jetée (The Jetty)

The soundtrack for this science fiction

STOP 6 A BRIEF TIMELINE OF ARTWORKS INSPIRED BY PULSE DETECTION

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masterpiece by French filmmaker Chris Marker featured prominent use of dramatic heartbeats throughout, which take particular importance as the film is composed of still images.

1966 Mark Boyle y Joan Hills, Son et Lumière for Bodily Fluids and Functions

This series of projection-based performances across the United Kingdom ambitiously attempted to incorporate all bodily materials in existence. It consisted of projections of bodily fluids such as tears, saliva, sperm, vomit, and urine, accompanied by a score of amplified body sounds, including heartbeats. All materials and sounds were collected and projected in real time.

1966 Brian O’Doherty, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp: Lead 1, Slow Heartbeat

Irish artist Brian O’Doherty recorded an electrocardiogram of Marcel Duchamp’s

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heartbeat and animated it with flickering light inside a small wooden box.

1967 Richard Teitelbaum, MEV Concerts

A pioneer of music produced by brainwaves, American composer Richard Teitelbaum co-founded the free improvisation ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) with Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski. They produced numerous musical performances used biofeedback circuitry connected to brainwave sensors, heart rates, EMGs, skin conductivity, and other devices. Members of the audience frequently participated in the concerts.

1968 Jean Dupuy, Heart Beats Dust

In a collaboration facilitated by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a nonprofit organization designed to connect artists with new

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industrial technologies, French artist Jean Dupuy and American engineer Ralph Martel created a sculpture consisting of a glass cube filled with dust particles that are activated by the sound of a beating human heart.

1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Baby’s Heartbeat

A track in the experimental album Unfinished Music No. 2 :, Life with the Lions featured the foetal heartbeat of Ono and Lennon’s unborn son, John Ono Lennon II, before Ono’s miscarriage. The recording was made with a Nagra audio recorder.

1970 Juan Downey, Inflatable Chairs

For a show at Howard Wise’s experimental media art gallery in New York, Chilean artist Juan Downey designed chairs that inflated and deflated in sync

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with the breathing and heartbeat of their occupants.

1971–2001 Merce Cunningham, Loops

Composer Gordon Mumma created a score that amplified dancer/ choreographer Merce Cunningham’s breathing and heartbeat during live performances of Loops, a solo work that Cunningham performed from 1971 through 2001. Although Cunningham never had another dancer perform the work, he collaborated from 2001 to 2011 with digital artists Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser, together known as OpenEndedGroup, to create several virtual versions of the piece.

1971 Heinz Holliger, Cardiophonie

Swiss composer and oboist Heinz Holliger attached an amplified stethoscope to a wind instrument, adding the soloist’s pulse to the music.

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1971 Jack Goldstein, The Burial

For his California Institute of the Arts master’s thesis exhibition, Canadian-born artist Jack Goldstein had himself buried alive on a hill overlooking a Los Angeles freeway. The burial location was marked with a small beacon that pulsed in time with Goldstein’s heartbeat, using data gathered from a stethoscope attached to the artist’s chest.

1972 Teresa Burga, Autorretrato. Estructura. Informe. 9.6.1972 (Self-portrait. Structure. Report. 9.6.1972)

This sprawling multimedia installation portrays Peruvian artist Teresa Burga through her medical data. In addition to diagrams, photographs, and medical records, the installation included a phonocardiogram, which made Burga’s heartbeat a visible and audible component of the work.

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1973 Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon

This seminal album by the British band Pink Floyd began and ended with a heartbeat.

1974 Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations

In this pioneering document of avant-garde musical thought, the composer asked participants to form all the sounds of their environment into a musical drone, and then to include internal sounds such as blood pressure and heartbeat in order to listen to listening.

1977 Ann Druyan, Interstellar Message Project

When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, the space probe carried a gold phonograph record containing sounds and images that represented life on Earth, including the

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recorded heartbeat and brainwaves of Ann Druyan, creative director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project.

1978 Sandra Llano-Mejía, In Pulso (In Pulse)

For her 1978 video work, created in the Physics Department of the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City, Colombian video art pioneer Sandra Llano-Mejía placed electrodes on her body and used an electrocardiograph machine to visualize the data on graph paper and a video monitor.

1979 Diana Domingues, Electrourbs

In this work by Brazilian media artist Domingues at the N.O Space in Porto Alegre, visitors used an electronic stethoscope connected to amplifiers to make a sonic landscape of their hearts. An oscilloscope was also employed to visualize the heartbeats as electrical waves in the exhibition space.

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1983 Bill Viola, Science of the Heart

A human heart was projected behind an illuminated bed in Bill Viola’s installation Science of the Heart. The audible heartbeat and the video sped up and slowed down as the piece unfolded in time.

1991 Jonathan Borofsky, Heart Light

A sculpture comprised of a glowing red orb mounted on a tripod, Borofsky’s work flashes to the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat while embedded speakers emit its sound. For Borofsky, this visualization of his own pulse data was an attempt to convey a spiritual presence.

1992 Seiko Mikami, Borderless Under the Skin

Housed in a biohazard tent, Seiko Mikami’s installation consists of IV drip bags that contain surgical gloves. As

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sensors collect the heartbeats of the visitors, the fingers of the gloves light up. Each IV drip bag is labeled with information about the transmission of a specific viral disease.

1992–1993 Ulrike Gabriel, Breath

German artist Ulrike Gabriel’s interactive projection relies on a biofeedback system that uses sensory belts to record the breathing patterns of visitors and create a visual and acoustic response in real time. The resulting computer-generated composition of oscillating polygons responds to the frequency and volume of breath, becoming, inversely, more complex and chaotic as the breathing becomes more regular.

1993 Christian Möller, Light Blaster: Immaterial Membrane

This interactive light and sound installation uses a fiber optic cable, a

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laser, and an electronic pulse and oxygen monitor to transform a visitor’s heartbeat into a pulsating audiovisual light show.

1994–1995 Jim Campbell, Memory Works: Portrait of My Father

In the mid-1990s, San Francisco–based artist Jim Campbell incorporated his breath and heartbeat into works dedicated to his recently deceased parents. In the first, a portrait of Campbell’s father appears and disappears to the rate of the artist’s heartbeat.

1996–1997 Stelarc, Amplified Body

In his performances, Australian artist Stelarc used sensors to allow lighting installations to flicker and flare in response to measurements of the electrical discharges from brainwaves (EEG), muscles (EMG), pulse (plethysmogram) and blood flow

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(doppler flow meter).

1997 Catherine Richards, Charged Hearts

In this site-specific, interactive work created by Canadian artist Catherine Richards for the National Gallery of Canada, visitors were invited to step onto a glass floor, reach into a cabinet, and pick up a glass heart. When touched, electrons in the heart became excited and turned phosphorescent, externally simulating the electromagnetic operations of the heart.

1998 Char Davies, Ephémère (Ephemeral)

The second in a pair of virtual reality works that Canadian artist Char Davies created in the 1990s, Ephémère is an interactive installation that measures the breathing and balance of the participants and immerses them in an environment that shifts back and forth between a

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natural landscape and the interior of a human body.

2001 Antonia Hirsch, Pulse

German-Canadian artist Antonia Hirsch created an installation in which a heart’s contractions, seen on a radar screen, occurred in sync with an audible universal time signal, and then grew apart.

2003 Noriyuki Fujimura, Heartbeats

An interactive art performance consists of balloons that light up to the heartbeat of the participant, who holds a sensor placed at the end of balloon’s rope.

2004 Diana Domingues, Heartscapes

Heartscapes by Brazilian artist Diana Domingues is an immersive virtual environment in which heart rate sensors allow participants to modify the visuals

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and sounds inside a VR projection CAVE environment.

2006 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Almacén de Corazonadas (Pulse Room)

The first piece in Lozano-Hemmer’s series of works using the pulse premiered at the abandoned La Constancia textile factory in Puebla, Mexico. One hundred bulbs flickered, showing the pulse of the past one hundred participants. The piece has been shown at different scales, depending on the venue, and, since 2008, it includes a sound component.

2006 Peter Votava and Erich Berger aka Terminalbeach, Heart Chamber Orchestra

The artist duo known as Terminalbeach devised this audiovisual performance in which the heartbeats of twelve classically trained musicians create a “living score.”

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2007 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse Front

Pulse Front was a matrix of light over Toronto’s Harbourfront neighbourhood, made with light beams from twenty powerful robotic searchlights, entirely controlled by a network of sensors that measured the heart rate of passers-by.

2008 Christian Boltanski, Les Archives du Coeur (The Heartbeat Archive)

For the past decade, French Conceptual artist Christian Boltanski has been amassing an archive of recordings of heartbeats collected from people around the globe. Les Archives du Coeur is housed at the Benesse Art Site on Teshima Island in Japan.

2008 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse Tank

First presented at the first New Orleans

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Biennial, Pulse Tank takes the familiar scientific apparatus of the ripple tank to visualize the heartbeats.

2010 Aurel de Coloblo Mendoza, La Cámara de Descompresión Urbana (Urban Decompression Chamber)

Described as an “itinerant sensory experiment,” this work by French artist Aurel de Coloblo Mendoza is a soundproof booth built inside of a truck that traveled to several locations in Mexico City. Visitors were wired with an electronic stethoscope and invited to enter the booth alone, where they sat in the dark, listening to the amplified sounds of their own heartbeats.

NEXT STOP ABOUT THE ARTIST

STOP 7 ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (born Mexico City, 1967) is an artist based in Montreal, Canada, where he earned a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University and now directs Antimodular Research studio. He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale in 2007, and has had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., MUAC Museum in Mexico City, the Musée d’art

WATCH RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER’S ARTIST TALK

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contemporain de Montréal, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. His work is in many respected collections including MoMA, Guggenheim, Museo del Barrio in New York, the Tate and Science Museum in London, CIFO in Miami, Jumex and MUAC in Mexico City, SFMOMA in San Francisco and others. Lozano-Hemmer was recently appointed to the board of directors for New York’s Public Art Fund and was given the Governor General’s award in Canada.

IMAGE CREDITS

IMAGE CREDITS

STOP 1Installation view, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse Topology, June 25, 2021–January 2, 2022, Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2021.

STOP 2Installation view, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Pulse Room, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2014. © Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, courtesy of Antimodular Studio. Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.

STOP 3Docent preview, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse Topology, June 24, 2021, Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: Kenny Johnson, 2021.

STOP 4Installation view, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse Topology, June 25, 2021–January 2, 2022, Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2021.

STOP 5Installation view, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse Topology, June 25, 2021–January 2, 2022, Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2021.

STOP 7Rafael Lozano Hemmer, 2014. art and photo © Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, courtesy of Antimodular Studio.