The History of You
A wearable that captures and displays the heart rates of the people its wearer encounters.
On my sleeve, I wear the history of you and me.
The History of You is a wearable that captures and displays the heart rates of the people its wearer encounters. A pulse sensor records a person’s heart rate, which is then displayed with a pulsing LED matching that heart rate on the sleeve of the wearable. The sleeve of the wearable is lined with 5 LEDs, and the pulsing LED closest to the wearer’s hand is the most recently recorded heart rate. As more heart rates are recorded, previously recorded heart rates move upwards in the line of LEDs, meaning that connections made farther in the past are pushed out of the display. The wearable displays a brief history of who the wearer has most recently connected with.
from the artist.
The people we interact with have an impact on us however permanent or fleeting that impact may be. The pulsing lights symbolize more than another’s heart rate; it’s a memory of who they were in that moment, who I was in that moment, and our relationship in that moment of time. I wanted to visualize how the people we continuously surround ourselves with and connect with leave an immediate impact on us. When we connect, we become woven into the fabric of each other’s lives. In this work, I also aim to highlight how factors such as time and distance between two people can cause someone to be a fleeting memory, a memory of who we once were and who they used to be. I like to think that when a heart rate is pushed out of the display, the person that it represented now disappears into the fabric that is us and the fabric that makes up who we are.
SPECIFICATIONS
THE HISTORY OF YOU. 2022. INTERACTIVE WEARABLE ART.
CREATED WITH: NEOPIXELS, CONDUCTIVE THREAD, GEMMA M0, PULSE SENSOR, BATTERY
COMPONENTS WERE SEWN ONTO A SWEATER.
SEE MORE OF MY ARTWORK: LIGHT X BODY | ISEEU | LIGHT PAINTING | THIS IS THE DIGITAL AGE | 4266 | THE BABY HEAD PROJECT | ART ARCHIVE