Signs of Life – Hearts, Blood and our Breath

Abstract

In their piece ‘Signs of Life - Hearts, Blood and our Breath: An artistic dialogue on embodiment and boundaries’, the authors and interdisciplinary artists Jane Prophet and Tobias Klein discuss three recent collaborative artworks made with Victor Leung and contextualise those works by referencing their individual art practices. Sensemaking with the heart and blood is central to these kinetic installation artworks: ‘Blood work 1.0’, ‘Blood work 2.0: Unruh’, and ‘Common Datum’. The trio made them by interweaving methods and approaches from arts-based inquiry and computer science within a feminist technoscience framework. Blood has historically been a powerful and often contested symbol in art, described by Anne Pollock, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, as ‘an object itself and an object within a network of objects’. This article considers the characteristics of blood and what it means to be human by triangulating between the chemical, physical and mechanical characteristics of blood. We focus on blood drawn from both human and nonhuman sources and the passage of air into the blood via the semi-permeable lung-heart connection. The artworks are inspired by the transfusion of blood and the use of organs donated by humans and extracted from nonhumans like horseshoe crabs. These biologically inspired, transparent kinetic sculptures depend on and transform the properties and qualities of blood in different species. The fluidity, coagulation and metal content of blood form the structures and movement of the sculptures. In addition, the artists incorporate shifting energies generated through visible mechanical and invisible magnetic forces to question-through-making the material properties and state change in blood flows.