Elements

The Heart is a ‘full stack’ work that incorporates custom hardware and software elements built from the ground up.

Neon Heart Node

The central node of the artwork is a custom tapered, vertical neon tube that functions dynamically to animate the pulse of the building in bright red light. In contrast to the LED lights in the work, this ephemeral gaseous light is The Heart’s equivalent of an ‘eternal flame’ that will pulse indefinitely. This brass, glass, and neon centrepiece includes a 2.5-metre section of self-suspended glass that bears the weight of more brass and a brick element below it.

Heart Array

The Heart Array consists of thousands of bespoke LED light fittings within the volume of the ‘ghost-heart’ outline. It is made of 1.5 km of brass rods in 142 droppers supporting 1450 printed circuit boards (PCBs), 10,000 white LEDs, and 284 cores in the outline of a human heart made with bricks from the Royal Woman’s Hospital. The Heart Array is effectively a ‘volumetric screen’ that can display moving 3D forms. Each PCB is laser inscribed with song lines that inspired the project.

Heart Sensor

The installation includes a brass heart rate monitor that visitors can touch to interface with The Heart directly. The sensor emits a red light the same colour as the neon which illuminates the finger that touches it. When a heart rate is detected, it melds with the pulse of the building in The Heart’s animation.

Lighting Control, Computers, Network, Sensors and Cloud Computing

The artwork connects to 4800 sensors distributed around the building and appropriates their data. This is processed by cloud computing resources that funnels information to a local computer that in turn directs the lighting control hardware. As The Heart is sensitive to the people living in the building (their movement, location, respiration etc.) it might be thought of as temporarily appropriating them within the artwork.

Artificial Intelligence

Manifold Learning

The Heart uses Manifold Learning to become accustomed to the live ‘sensations’ it receives from its ‘body’ (the building) over the course of each day. At night when The Heart sleeps, it creates a new manifold merged with previous days’ manifolds. When awake, it compares what it ‘feels’ in the present against its habituated experience of the past. If current ‘sensations’ fall outside of the manifold it experiences surprise and increases its pulse.

Generative Adversarial Network

The Heart also uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to develop a capacity to anticipate what it is about to ‘feel’ based on its ‘lifetime’ of habituated experiences. This ability increases slowly as The Heart ages and the GAN is trained over years. In this way, The Heart matures as a longform ambient artwork and experiment that grows with the community over decades. It is a provocation to work with heart and attune to the non-verbal, sensate environment our lives are bound up within and not separate from.

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