During my wife’s first pregnancy in 2003 I learned that we could listen to the pulse of the fetus. An ultrasound machine does not let you hear the real heartbeat but a sonification of data arriving from a transducer: the machine works by imaging the soft tissue using echolocation, just the way a bat navigates its surroundings. The translation that the heartbeat goes through for detection is significant because it covers many media without losing symbolic, emotional, and medical importance: from electrical impulse, to muscle contraction, to echolocation, to greyscale image and finally, to artificially amplified sound that everyone in the room can hear. That the heartbeat is widely used as a poetic representation of life and love is due in part to this facility for translation and the universal recognition of the rhythmic sound we first hear in the womb, our mother’s heart, which is then accompanied and superseded by our own.

But even though we can instantly recognize a heartbeat, what is more poetic is the fact that we do not control it, that our life depends on involuntary spasms of muscular tissue. In the 1930s, pioneering Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenbleuth studied a clinically brain-dead patient who had no electrical signals passing to or from the brain but whose heart kept beating. As the limbs of the body were moved, the pulse would rise to ensure tissues were properly oxygenated. How could this be? With American polymath Norbert Wiener, Rosenbleuth conceived of a theory of messages and feedback that could account for this “self-regulation” of the heart. Years later, Norbert Wiener published his seminal postulation of the theory of cybernetics, and despite its fundamental importance in fields such as engineering, sociology, computer science, and philosophy, to me it is significant that our culture of control and automation originates from studies of the human pulse.

In 2006, my wife was pregnant again, this time with fraternal twins. I asked for two ultrasound machines, so we could hear simultaneously the heart of the boy and the girl. The heart rates were similar but not the same. They began phasing in and out, creating new, complex sounds, something I had heard in the works of composers such as Steve Reich, Conlon Nancarrow, and Glenn Branca. My work with the human pulse, starting with Pulse Room, was motivated by the desire to make visible these slight differences, to create immersive experiences that are platforms for participation, where the sum of the heartbeats could create an unforeseen biometric landscape beyond the symbolism or medical importance of a single heartbeat.

With each new piece in the Pulse series, I try variations of media, scale, and concept—always aware of the rich tradition of visualization of vital signs in the history of art. My more recent works are concerned with the relationship between biometric technologies, public or private control, and identification systems. The use of fingerprinting, for example, dates back to 1891 when it was developed by Juan Vucetich for the Argentinian police. Today, billions of fingerprint scanners secure access to our phones and our countries. At a time when we are seeing ethnic nationalisms on the rise, dividing people along simplistic categorizations, it is critical to misuse these mechanisms of control to create connective, anonymous landscapes of belonging.