Heart Sense

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OVERVIEW

How can the very creation, rendering, and experiencing of biological data be distinctly feminist? For example, how can it start from women’s lives in all our plurality and complexity, break down binaries such as objectivity/subjectivity and science/feminism, and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of our bodies – a kind of knowing that is in and of the world?

Heart rate data may seem like a counterintuitive choice as an entry point into these questions. The monitored heart rate can be very mechanistic and even disciplinary: the persistent mechanical beeping during surgery (Kneebone, 2017), the fetal heartbeat of anti-choice politics (Edgar, 2017), monitors that can spur excessive intervention in childbirth (Cartwright, 1998), and even fitness monitors that incite increased intensity in exercise (Pirkko & Pringle, 2006: 59). Heart rate can be a site of plural layers of “control by quantification” (Browne, 2015: 9). Yet the heart remains ambiguous and undisciplined. In times of emotional intensity, a racing heart rate can feel very much out of control. At the same time, we can feel our own heartbeat, and that of others with whom we are intimate. In this manner, heart rate offers an accessible route into engaging with our bodies. This mundaneness and accessibility, in turn, makes it less likely that data about the heart could mechanize subjectivity the way that data about, say, the brain might. The heart’s pace is at once most intimate and personal, while simultaneously deeply connected to others and the outside world. Creatively engaged, heart rate can offer an intriguing point of departure for feminist engagement with the entangled nature of data, matter, and meaning both in theory and practice.

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EXHIBITIONS

Collective Reflection on Embodiment

 

Individual Reflection on Embodiment

This installation takes a participant’s heart rate, galvanic skin response, and breathing as input to produce flower-like visualizations that illustrate physiological responses to a short, emotionally engaging video. The visualizations work eschew standard body tracking visualisations by presenting representations that are whole and designed not to be optimizable. They give participants a sense of their embodied responses to the video and a chance to reflect on their embodied responses in the process. Each heart visualization displays a person's physiological response to watching an emotionally-engaging video. Different physiological characteristics (heart rate, galvanic skin response, and breathing patterns) were used as variables to create a flower-like visualization.