EXHIBIT
What: Impulse
Where: G++ Interactive Media Gallery, 1119 Fort St.
When: Opening reception Friday at 8 p.m. Runs Friday through Aug. 1
As any paramedic or personal trainer could tell you, heart-rate monitors are pretty useful things.
But a new exhibition at G++ Interactive Media Gallery, a window-front installation space, is taking the gadgets into the realm of experimental art.
Vancouver-based artist Danielle Gotell has teamed up with the engineers at Victoria's Limbic Media to create Impulse, a work that transforms participants' vital signs into an electronic light show.
Starting Friday, people passing by the company's Fort Street office will be able to grab one of four hand-held heart-rate monitors and look through peepholes into a blacked-out storefront display case.
Each station will be connected to a coloured light, which will flash in time with the pulse of the corresponding participant.
"I wanted to represent something that's unconscious, something that's happening inside your body just regularly that you're not fully conscious of," says Gotell of the initial concept for the work.
Her kernel of inspiration morphed into the idea of using one's vital signs to animate a real-time interactive work of art.
"You're giving life to a piece by what is happening inside of you," says the 25-year old, a student in the Film, Video and Integrated Media program at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
"I wanted people to see how they're affecting their environment on an unconscious level."
In addition to illuminating how humans' life forces interact with their surroundings, the show, Gotell says, is a comment on human diversity.
"I think there's a wide range of normal heart rates, but the normal range varies depending on - your gender, how old you are and how healthy you are."
The flashing lights won't be the only objects occupying the display case.
To fill it out, Gotell has created a video - a deconstructed montage of a bucolic Saskatchewan landscape - that will play on a monitor and a sequin-spangled mold of her "very feminine" physique.
She says the sculpture injects ideas about gender into the piece, adding that she likes the thought of a male viewer being confronted with seeing a projection of his heartbeat reflected off a womanly figure.
"I think it's important to question gender and your comfort with how you relate to the world, and to see the fluidity within."
To facilitate this kind of deep self-reflection, Gotell, who describes herself as "shy," insisted upon making the spectacle visible only to active participants. (LED lights will twinkle on the exterior, though.)
"Because it's secluded, you can get outside the feeling of being overwhelmed by other people seeing what you're creating."
Impulse is the fourth instalment in the gallery's Interactive Film and Video series, in which Limbic Media engineers help emerging artists create new-media installations for the tech firm's storefront window.
Armed with a grant from the B.C. Film/B.C. Arts Council Interactive Fund, G++ debuted the project in November 2011.
"We were looking for artists that hadn't necessarily used interactive technology in their works before," says Justin Love, the gallery's director and Limbic Media's vice-president of operations.
Though he isn't certain of its precise hours of operation, Love expects Impulse to run from 9 a.m. to midnight each day until Aug. 1.
The final display, an interactive clay-mation work by Vancouver artist Annie Briard, is scheduled to be unveiled Aug. 3.
cruf@timescolonist.com
