Project Treatment : Heartbreak

This project entitled Heartbreak, will be an interactive art installation, focusing on interactivity and syncing sound and visuals. With the use of TouchDesigner, a heart rate monitor, and a music track playing throughout the space to help set the tone of sorrow. Whenever a viewer makes a connection between them and the sensor, the music will dim, allowing the viewer to hear their heartbeat through the speakers.

With this art piece I want to invoke emotion, while the viewer is faced with something familiar. Conveying the feeling of trauma and despair that everyone feels, but for each person how different those emotions sound based upon their heartbeat.

The story behind Heartbreak, comes from the medical term Cardiomyopathy, as well as my personal stories of downfalls from over the years. Cardiomyopathy is a chronic disease of the heart muscle mirroring similar symptoms of a heart attack. Some symptoms include chest pain and shortness of breath. This heart condition happens after an emotionally charged event like death, betrayal, separation, divorce, or being overly stimulated. This case of the heart is found mostly within women, through it can affect younger women, it is mostly common in women over 55. This is not a life threatening diagnosis but 10% of women will suffer another episode sometime within their life. This particular event of cardiac diagnosis tends to flare up during the summer, giving Lana Del Rey’s, Summertime Sadness a new meaning. The muscular tone of the heart is damaged when affected by Cardiomyopathy, reducing its ability to pump blood. Chordae tendineae, also called heart strings, are tendon like fibers holding the atrioventricular valves allowing blood to pump throughout the body.

Over the years, I have had my fair share of relationships all of them teaching important lessons about the type of love I have encountered. One theme that tends to repeat itself is the ending blow of the relationship. Looking at four relationships from my past, I created story splines thinking about how I felt, and the emotional chaos state I was in, once I reached the finish line. During that time in favor of drawing, I would listen to music, closing my eyes letting the melody carry me. To this day, I have songs that when I hear them, I still can feel the energy connected to them some still making me cry.

Combining all three of these ideas intertwine together to create a larger story of me working through my emotions of pain, while inviting you to confront yours.