The Heartbeat Clock
Kyla Dooley
See it On Campus: Level 2
The Heartbeat Clock
2025
wood, metal, acrylic, electronics
The Heartbeat Clock is an interactive artwork which ticks in accordance with participant’s heartbeats. The work consists of a large hanging dual-faced clock. On the one side, a regular clock that ticks once per second when unattended. At the bottom of the round is a camera-based video amplification sensor which, when a hand is placed beneath, detects heartbeats. When a pulse is sensed, the “regular” clock stops and the other clock begins, ticking each time the participant’s heart beats.
I’m interested in the politics of time keeping, specifically, the persons and systems that stand to benefit from a regularized, measurable sense of time. The Heartbeat Clock functions as an alternative time piece, one implicit in both quantitative and qualitative—Chronos and Kairos—senses of time, adapting to the person or absence of persons in its presence.
The Heartbeat Clock is part of an ongoing body of work exploring how technologies script and influence our perceptions and behaviours.
The Printer
2024
printer, paper, ten-foot-tall plinth
The Printer is an interactive artwork which prints out answers to questions spoken by participants. By appropriating the humble office printer as the basis for a divine oracle, the work recontextualizes one’s relationship to quotidian technology—both for its technical capacity and appointed purpose.
(Applause)
2024
piano, “APPLAUSE” sign
(Applause) investigates clapping as a form of interaction and as a type of social proof. The work consists of a modified piano such that when someone hits the keys, no sound occurs but instead turns on an “APPLAUSE” sign on the opposite wall.
The Myth of Sisyphus
2024
rock, caster wheels
