heartbeat – Artificial Intelligence https://ars.electronica.art/ai/en Ars Electronica Festival 2017 Tue, 28 Jun 2022 13:43:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.6 Fidgety (In Between Up & Down) https://ars.electronica.art/ai/en/fidgety/ Tue, 08 Aug 2017 05:04:30 +0000 https://ars.electronica.art/ai/?p=1773

GayBird (HK)

The adjective “fidgety” describes a nervous and jumpy feeling. Normally people see this as a bad feeling. However, the artist treats it as a musical idea.

For this work the Chinese character 「忐忑」(Figure1) was designed as a pictograph using the words 「上」 (Figure2) for “up” and 「下」(Figure3) for “down” over the word 「心」(Figure4) for “heart” to describe this feeling.

With a 40-channel speaker system, the setting of the speakers looks like a path resembling veins. All 40 speakers play the sound of the artist’s heartbeat. When the speakers start to play one after another they produce a range of various rhythmic and musical compositions. The heartbeat is the most important element in this work; however, it is not easy for the audience to hear, since it was designed as a triggering force rather than an audible element. The low frequency of the heartbeat causes the speakers to vibrate, which then triggers the kinetic installation to produce sounds.

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