Follow Your Heart!
There sometimes exists a tension between our involuntary biological processes and conscious control of our body. So to, sometimes our rational mind feels estranged from our emotions and subconscious drives. When we feel a visceral awareness of this tension, it is an experience of the momentum of life—what I will call biomomentum: the continued activity of our mind and body beyond conscious control.
It is because of this property that in the deceleration preceding our pause for a moment’s reflection, we may feel a strange awareness that our life has been living itself without us. I propose the creation of an art installation that will engage us with this other self in both competitive and compassionate modes of interaction, thereby enabling deeper self-perception and appreciation of our own biomomentum:
In a dark room, the participant will follow a light that moves across the ground in time to their heartbeat. As the user moves faster, so will their heart rate and so will the avatar of their heart, creating an accelerating feedback loop that inevitably concludes with the participant peaking and then not being able to keep up. When the participant has given up in exhaustion, the light will sympathetically return to orbit them in a protective circle, drawing a sense of closure.
The heart avatar’s continual movement away from the participant intensifies the sense of separation between the two selves of the participant, yet the participant may also feel it to be a playful bonding experience, as in synchronous dance. The inevitability of the increasing pace acts as a metaphor for the difficulty of following one’s (nonliteral) heart’s desire, and speaks to how the limits to highest things we can strive for are internal. The conscious mind is saddled with the weight of our body, while our heart, the manifestation of our subconscious and synonym for spirit, is free to lead us.
Follow Your Heart! extends the concept of the ‘observed artwork’ in the biofeedback-based video artwork Amigdalae[1] in that the participant is simultaneously in kinesthetic interaction with the artwork on a conscious level, in addition to generating the artwork at an involuntary level. Whereas the participant stimulus and the biofeedback-affected component are separate in Amigdalae (respectively, the visual and the audio), these constituent parts are unified into a single avatar in Follow Your Heart!
Most precedents for Follow Your Heart! seem generally outside of modern artistic practice. Children’s games such as shadow tag, the kinesthetic arcade interface of Dance Dance Revolution, spatial navigation of a labyrinth as an metaphor for meditation, therapeutic application of biofeedback, and even the guided fitness routines of cardio-fitness programs all seem to have some associable aspects to Follow Your Heart!
The perception of biomomentum in our lives may cause a frightening, disorienting sense of alienation from oneself and of loss of control over one’s life; it may be the feeling of time lost, or of being a slave to routine. Other times, our momentum feels like it’s definitely in a good direction, as when we are swept up with passion and find ourselves happily in unforeseen situations and doing things that exceed or defy our self-expectations. Follow Your Heart! aims to enable us to move toward a closer, more conscious relationship with our own involuntary and subconscious drives.
1 comment:
Hey, I liked your concept quite a bit. Like I mentioned it had a real similarity to the sort of lighthearted, game-like element that was in your website from 201. I agree with the comments made in class about how it's important to figure out some way to motivate the viewer into that kind of strenuous physical motion.
This is a pretty ambitious project... good luck on getting all the pieces to come together.
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