CARDIAC, a project currently developed by FreshDeuce, focuses initially on the individual cardiac muscle cell, the cardiomyocyte that contracts spontaneously and individually.

CARDIAC is divided into three elements:
1. The projection of images of living cardiomyocytes onto the gallery space.
2. Paintings inspired by images of cardiomyocytes and cardiac cells. Certain paintings will be almost imperceptably overlain by pulsating images of the cardiomyocytes, engendering a physical response from the viewer.
3. An interactive component that researches the possibilities of synchronizing the heartbeat of a group of museum visitors. When grouped together under the control of the heart’s pacemaker, each cardiomyocyte beats in tandem with its neighbour.

The experiment asks questions about how these cells operate at a social level, engendering social interaction and negotiating relationships between each person and the community in which they live.

Participants wear wristbands (clients) that communicate with the server. Wristbands receive analogue heartbeat signals, convert these to digital and report a person’s heartbeat in Beats Per Minute to the server which calculates the average BPM and returns this value to all clients.
Accordingly, each client calculates a ‘personal average’ BPM, relayed as audio output to the headset. Over time, the ‘personal average’ will converge towards the global average. Each person is unaware that the heartbeat they are listening to is not their own, but an average. As a result, we may see a gradual shift of the individual heartbeat towards the average value, thus the heartbeats of each group of observers may become synchronous (unconsciously).

FreshDeuce will present CARDIAC at 20:30, at the Spatial Slide Salon, Mediamatic October Salon on October 10, Amsterdam.