Evolving creative practice: a reflection on working with audience experience in Cardiomorphologies

Cardiomorphologies is a computer-based interactive installation that uses bio-sensing and multimedia technologies to create real-time visual and sonic representations of the audience’s breath and heart rate. As you will see the form and detail of the work is continually developing throughout the process of creation we describe here. However in order to give an imaginative starting point we will describe the basic set-up that has so-far remained more or less constant in its several iterations. Individual participants are seated before a large screen in a dimly lit and enclosed space. The participant is fitted with a breath sensor (usually a stretch-sensor fastened around the body below the rib cage) and heart rate sensors (either attached to the arms or held in the hand). The pattern and frequency of breath and heart rate is projected onto the screen as animated visualizations in various ways such as expanding and contracting circles or changing colour fields. A surround sound system plays back a complex soundscape with amplified heart sounds that beat in time with the participants own heart-rate. During the course of their interaction participants are encouraged to use the work as a feedback system to observe and experiment with their own breath and heart-rate patterning. While the elements that constitute the artwork are unfixed the creative aims which underpin it are more constant. The goal is to create a work that allows participants to explore the embodied nature of their subjectivity and to experience a visceral and highly personal insight into the interrelation of cognition, emotion and physiology. There are two propositions that lie behind these aims. First that biofeedback interaction opens up a very different experience and representation of the “body-mind” to everyday experience, and second that interacting with transformed images of ourselves through computer mediation makes us aware (in a possibly unique way) of our embodied subjectivity. As artist and curator, but also as practice based researchers we needed to develop a methodology for understanding and demonstrating whether or not actual audience experiences supported these propositions, but also a way to achieve, and to demonstrate that we were achieving our aims. The realisation of Cardiomorphologies depends entirely on the physical and psychological involvement of individual participants. The audience’s embodied experience is both the site and the content of the work. Therefore working with the material of audience experience needs to be at the heart of both our creative and research processes. The approach that we are developing to meet these needs draws together our respective curatorial and artistic practices and their related contexts of studio and gallery to create an iterative development process structured on ongoing dialogue with audiences. It is based around the use of the exhibition as a site of collaborative public research. Our challenge throughout is to find ways to record, understand and integrate relevant and authentic audience experience. To meet this challenge we have sought methodological approaches that share our commitment to the primacy of lived, embodied experience. We have found them in the theories, tools and techniques of phenomenologically influenced practitioners in Human-Computer Interaction. This paper presents the development of Cardiomorphologies as a case study of the application of the methods we adopted from HCI as a means of creating interactive art experiences that involve novel