Anyhow, down to the brief, we were given the starting point of the senses and/or vital signs. We brainstormed each of the senses and vital signs, then from those brainstorms we drew out associated verbs. We then took the verbs and began to develop our individual ideas. I started to look at - to manipulate, thinking about how I could manipulate and control the vital signs and senses. I pared this down to just looking at one vital sign, pulse.
"Gauging life in heartbeats or breaths reveals, once more, how deeply subjective time is. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that we experience time moving only from past to future. That's because the world we perceive is statistically irreversible. And the rate at which we see time moving in only one direction, is dictated by our hearts and lungs."
That freaks my mind on a massive scale, I have an amaturish interest in physics and I remember reading about how time "bends" around the mouth of a black hole. Based on Lienhards logic we have the time warping capabilities of a black hole in our own bodies, or at least in our minds, the only place where time actually exists!
So I started looking at animals with contrasting hear rates, a mouse and a whale for example, a mouses bpm is 500 while a whale has just 20 bpm. Imagine how they would perceive each other in terms of speed and time? I also contrasted a dog and a rabbit, would a rabbits elevated heart rate cause it to perceive a hunt as lasting far longer then the dog would? Lastly, a hen and a chick, baby animals have higher heart rates then their adult counterparts and this made me wonder did this account for my slower perception of time as a child?
From there i began looking at heart rate as a measure of time. The average person has 2.21 billion heartbeats in a life time, so I took a basic life expectancy test which calculated I would live to be around 84 years old. I then factored in the 19 years of heartbeats I've already had and illustrated this information on a scale of 100:1 (because I'm not made of money yknow!).
I started to think about other ways to observe and document time. So for one day i kept a heart rate diary. Using a stethoscope (from the early learning center!) I listened to my heart and drew a basic cardiogram to record how fast or slow my pulse was. I then took this information (e.g my pulse is high when I'm stressed or active and low when I'm relaxed or still) and tried to fill in on a calendar what my pulse would have looked like since the start of the year.
I also wanted to work with the sound of my heart beat. It was too faint to record from the stethoscope so I listened to my heart at different points during the day, and beat out the rhythm, clapping, clicking, tapping my feet or tapping on surfaces. I recorded 7 in total. I was sure we must have some sound editing software on the computers hear and I was right, I toyed with adobe sound booth until I had made a track of the 4 clearest heart beats, building up together, then layered for a few moments, then individually receding. While I was working with the sounds I discovered that sound booth creates a visualization for each sound you work with. I took screen shots of each heart beat and assembled them like a photo album. I did this all on the day of my birthday so I now have a unique memento of that day!
Finally I wanted something to show that the heart was at the center of our perception of time. So I made a list of time based compound words e.g. time line, time trial, time bomb, and replaced the word time with the image of a human heart. I'd say Mike Canning may not have liked this one, he said he doesn't like sculpture he understands entirely, he likes to ponder!
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