“Latency and Pulse”
“Latency and Pulse” is a medically accurate, calculated and interpreted in color recording of a moment in life of the 4 chambers of the heart of the artist Jurgen Ostarhild.
Every artwork is also a self-portrait of the artist, an expression of their intention, skills and innermost spirit. An artist is also a human being. In a living human being, the body, and especially the heart, is not only a source of life and enterprise, but also a natural and sustainable 24/7 source of data. In “Latency and Pulse” the observable vibrations is the heart beat of Jurgen Ostarhild, gathered through ECG, mediated and visually translated into chromatic fields. Latency is the technological distance between the living body and the artwork. The latent emotional and creative potential of the heart is not expressed directly, as in classical art, but indirectly through data analysis and reinterpretation of the AI-driven digital age. The resulting bionic self-portrait is accurate, bust also fluid, abstract and evocative.
The underlying ECG heart data was gathered with a heart monitor on the artist’s breast and processed with custom software to be aesthetically mapped onto the RGB color space, visualising in two dimensions the physical movement of the heart and the relation between its 4 chambers during pulsation, incurring through color change and movement the breathing life of a human body. The heart itself prompts the generative substrate of the Perlin noise function. The light-emitting diodes of the LED presentation panel do not reflect light like paint, but produce it. The color event of each screen pixel is determined by a momentary combination of electrical signals; it is refreshed dozens of times per second. The image on the screen is thus a function of a flow, aligned with the electrical signal triggered flow of the heart rhythms.
“Latency and Pulse” undresses a contemporary artist beneath the skin to the depth of the physical heart in order to not only demonstrate the possibility of the soft cyborg union between body and technology, but also to re-evaluate the age-appropriate self-portrait production process itself. Having departed from manual and mechanical apparatus, humanity relies on calculation in self-analysis and expression and yet the emotional impact of the vibrations of color is still as lyrical, personal and meditative as ever before.
Screenshot from Digital Video, size variable.
Screenshot from Digital Video, size variable.
close up from LED screen
Medium: Digital video, loop 3min, 600 x 600 px on LED panel 128 x 128 px, 51 x 51 x 9 cm