The Heart Archive – Christian Boltanski
French artist Cristian Boltanski started this project in 2008, collecting people’s heartbeats around the world as a proof of their existence. The Heart Archive, a small single-installation museum on Teshima Island in Japan, is a site to permanently store and display these heartbeats. Visitors can also record their own heartbeat on site.
The exhibition is made up of three rooms. Recording Room collects visitors’ heartbeat; Listening Room has three computers where you can listen to recorded heartbeats in the archive; Heart Room, which is the most experiential among the three, plays heartbeats from different people, with a light beaming in synchronization with the heartbeats. You will see your own reflection in the mirrors on the wall, in the flickering light.
This project creates a conversation that transcends time and space, in forms of both collective memory and personal narrative. Heartbeat is the very representation of life, and also one of the most intimate sounds of a human body. Listening to the heartbeats was like experiencing the liveliness of another human being.
Listening Room
Heart Room
Volume – SOFTlab
Volume is designed by New York based design firm SOFTlab, using responsive mirrors to “redirect light and sound to spatialize and reflect the excitement of surrounding festival goers(Volume-SOFTlab)”. The installation is comprised of 100 mirror panels with an array of cameras to track the movement of people around the installation. The mirrors will turn to the nearest person, while the sound increases volume when more people approach the project. The light reacts to the ambient sound in the space.
This installation is an experiment using lights and sounds to reconstruct the empty room and blur the lines between ephemeral and physical space. Instead of simply responding to viewer’s movement, it creates a bilateral conversation by staring back at viewers and collaging the viewer’s image back into the space reconstructed by their movement. It not only manifest small vibration of invisible particles floating in the space, but also creates a strong self-awareness of one’s own being.