Mapping Love

Mapping Love is an interactive work that bridges the mechanical era with today’s technological era. This work integrates fragments of my father’s US patent images from the 1940’s -1960’s (Gifford Mast, 1913-1972) with an iPhone app designed specifically for this piece by Filippo Basso, based on the original HeartsRing app invented by Dan Winter. The app measures the viewer’s HRV (heart rate variability), or ‘heart coherence’, by placing an index finger on the iPhone light. The viewer’s HRV measurement is projected as colored light onto the constellation of a family tree, which floats above the concentric rings of a fingerprint. My father’s mechanical drawings and flecks of paint hover above the whorl of his grandson’s fingerprint, representing four generations that radiate out from him in a Fibonacci-like spiral. Children, grandchildren and great grandchildren form a constellation in which each image is positioned in a circling timeline that reaches the painting’s edge. The projected light generated by the viewer pulsates with the rhythm of the viewer’s heart rate, and varies from deep orange to bright green, according to his/her own heart coherence.