The Heart (Video Documentation)

The Heart is a site-responsive, slow Artificial Intelligence artwork to be lived with over decades. It reveals the pulse of a superorganism: the community visiting, living, and working in Melbourne Connect, a city-block size building, home of businesses, university departments, a kindergarten, accommodation, and a science museum. The Heart beats indefinitely for and with the life of the building and its community. The Heart is connected to 4800 Building Information Modelling sensors. These monitor CO2, humidity, occupancy, movement, light, and more. The building adjusts the environment to create the optimum conditions for human comfort and safety. Normally, the automated work of building sensors and systems is dispersed and imperceptible. The Heart stages the building’s ‘sensations’ in a way people can perceive and begin to empathise with. It does this by taking form in Melbourne Connect as a 10-metre-tall volume of brass droppers, reconstituted brick fragments, and LEDs in the shape of a giant human heart. The Heart operates within a perpetual present, responding live to the activity occurring in proximity to its sensors in perpetuity, and responds through changes in heart rate and animation. Visitors can also interact directly with The Heart by touching a heart rate monitor and adding their pulse to the building. The Heart uses Manifold Learning to become accustomed to the live ‘sensations’ it receives from its ‘body’ (the building) over the course of each day. At night when The Heart sleeps, it creates a new manifold merged with previous days’ manifolds. When awake, it compares what it ‘feels’ in the present against its habituated experience of the past. The Heart also uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to develop a capacity to anticipate what it is about to ‘feel’ based on its ‘lifetime’ of habituated experiences. Visit: 700 Swanston Street, Melbourne Artist: Robert Walton AI Programming: Zaher Joukhadar Design: ADDITIVE Heart OS: Brad Hammond

Webpage: robertwalton.net/project/the-heart/

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