George Khut
George Khut, The Heart Library
with Caitlin Newton-Broad, Greg Turner and David Morris-Oliveros
The Heart Library (2008) is a collaborative installation with two inter-related components. The first, Biofeedback Mirror, uses technology appropriated from the realm of psychotherapy to translate heart rhythms into an immersive audio-visual environment. Individual participants are invited into a semi-transparent enclosure where they recline on a bed-like platform looking up at a ceiling projection. Two hand-held sensors are used to measure heart rate variation. The video responds in real-time to the changes in the participant’s psycho-emotional state using colour, light and pattern concentration, transparency and sound.
Khut encourages the audience to explore the impact of different thoughts, memories, and moods on the body’s physiological responses. In this way, they are able to self-consciously mediate their own embodiment as displayed audio-visually in the gallery space. Participants are then invited to reflect on and share their experience of Biofeedback Mirror through a process of storytelling and illustration. The resulting ‘body maps’ and conversations recorded on video are re-inserted into the installation space to form a growing library of descriptions of experience.
Earlier works by Khut have similarly mobilised biofeedback technologies to generate interactive audio-visual environments. Drawing Breath (2004-2006) and Cardiomorphologies (2004-2007) use breath, and breath/heart-related data respectively to manipulate real-time visualisations and soundscapes based on participants’ psychophysiology. These works also invite audiences to explore the connection between their emotional and physiological states, and their agency in controlling this correlation. However, The Heart Library Project indicates a significant shift toward a dual mode of reflexive engagement. Here, the addition of a social dimension reconfigures interactivity within an inter-subjective, rather than strictly technological framework.
The free-form structure of The Heart Library’s storytelling component is facilitated, but not directed by the artist and his collaborators. It focuses entirely on the ‘meaning making’ preferences of the participant. It is a speculative exercise, allowing an endless range of responses, and draws out a distinct contrast in the different modes of participation that the project enables. The dialogic potential of Biofeedback Mirror is generated from an experiential mode that is intensely intimate and subtly premised upon proprioceptive sensation, rendered from within. In the mapping and storytelling activity, on the other hand, the subjective agency of the participant is outwardly expressed via discursive and performative responses.
The cycling of these reflexive traces of participants’ experiences back into the installation as content reinforces the contingent, spontaneous, and dynamic framework of The Heart Library’s interactive premise. The dual layering of the work’s ‘relational’ structure discloses Khut’s fundamental interest in using the subjective space of art to provide a catalyst for rethinking the relationship between cognition and sensation in the broader context of everyday experience. By generating a situation in which the usually subconscious and automatic activity of the body is consciously registered – both through visual and auditory feedback, as well as socially-mediated reflection – Khut creates the potential for a shift in how we understand and relate to our embodiment. The Heart Library allows participants to go beyond a perfunctory attentiveness to those facets of sensation we consider abnormal or problematic. It provokes other kinds of reactions – such as intrigue, delight, and sensitivity – which help to build a register of comprehension that contains a broad spectrum of possibilities.
Text by Anneke Jaspers
Anneke Jaspers is an emerging writer, curator and arts administrator based in Sydney. She is currently Project Assistant for British Council Australia, having worked previously as Assistant Curator, UTS Gallery, and Gallery Associate at the commercial space GRANTPIRRIE. Jaspers writes regularly on contemporary Australian art, and has published in platforms including Column Journal (Artspace), Artlink, Runway and RealTime, in addition to commissioned catalogue essays for regional, commercial and artist-run galleries. She is the forthcoming guest Co-editor of Runway Issue #11 themed ‘conversation’, and in 2007 curated the project ‘between you and me’ as part of Firstdraft’s Emerging Curators Program.
Details of work
The Heart Library Project: Biofeedback Mirror (2008), with Greg Turner and David Morris-Oliveros: heart rate sensors with interactive sound and video projection.
The Heart Library Project: Body Maps (2007-2008), with Caitlin Newton-Broad: drawings on paper by project participants and video documentation.
This project was supported by Australia Council for the Arts, Visual Arts Board (New Work grant), UTS Creativity & Cognition Studios, Xenian, UTS Gallery, Greg Turner (interaction design and signal analysis tools), David Morris-Oliveros (computer visualisation system, and photography), Caitlin Newton-Broad and Naomi Derrick (audience participation and drawing component).
Artist Biography
George Khut b. 1969, Adelaide, Australia. Currently resides Sydney, Australia. Khut has a Doctorate of Creative Arts (Research) University ofWestern Sydney, Sydney (2007). Recent Exhibitions include I Took a Deep Breath, Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) (2007); Strange Attractors, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai,(2006); This Secret Location, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2006). Awards include Art Lab research grant Australia Council for the Arts, Inter-Art Office (2008); New Work grant Australia Council for the Arts, Visual Arts Board (2007); New Work grant Australia Council for the Arts, Inter-Art Office (2005); Australian Postgraduate Research Scholarship (2002-2005).
George Poonkhin Khut’s art practice focuses on the use of biofeedback and physiologically responsive media as tools for sensing and re-imagining the lived experience of mind-body interrelation. His interactive installation works enable participants to experience and interpret aspects of their own bodily processes, as dynamic audio-visual environments. Recent works include Drawing Breath (with John Tonkin) and Cardiomorphologies v.1 (with John Tonkin) and Cardiomorphologies v.2 (with Lizzie Muller and Greg Turner), both of which where developed as part of his Doctorate of Creative Arts research. In addition to his recent work with interactive media, George has worked as a sound designer and video artist on numerous dance, theatre and community arts projects, and an arts administrator and professional development adviser (Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, TAS and Accessible Arts, Sydney, NSW).