This robot uses your heartbeat to create art

How does a famous-rapper-slash-business-tycoon and a tech titan launch a collaborative project? Apparently, by throwing a fancy soirée graced by the presence of a robotic Picasso. In honor of Intel’s and SMS Audio’s new heart rate-monitoring headphones, a team of interactive artists led by Aramique created a robot that can draw its viewers’ heartbeats. You simply place your hand on a sensor for 30 seconds, and the aptly named Heart Bot’s arms will start moving, sketching your heartbeat with pens. It does so by feeding your heart’s rhythm to a software that translates it to movements for Heart Bot’s pen-equipped mechanical arms.

When we last heard from interactive artist Aramique, he and Jeff Crouse, Gary Gunn, and Bartek Drozdz were debuting the Conductar app at Moogfest; there they let me take a spin in the virtual/augmented reality app’s metaversian world inside the Oculus Rift. Aramique, the interactive director at Tool, is now back with a new team, but this time he’s debuting an installation called Heart Bot, which uses robotics and human heartbeats to make works of art. After SMS Audio (created by Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson) and Intel collaborated to launch a new headphone built around a heart rate monitor, Aramique was brought in to create an idea for an installation that would appear at The New Museum in New York City. With partners Crouse, Matt Mets, Ranjit Bhatnagor, Adam Thabo, and Nikolay Saveliev, Aramique proposed a drawing machine that would be controlled by the heart rate of each viewer. The idea was to create a collaborative piece of art that unfolded throughout the night by inviting all guests to spend thirty seconds with their finger touching a heart rate sensor, while the robotic machine would draw on the wall in real time. By the end of the night, as Aramique told me, they would collectively—humans and machine—create a piece of art together.