Heart-Donor is a wearable art project by artists Laura Beloff, Erich Berger and fashion designer Elina Mitrunen. The wearable vest collects and stores up to 30 recordings of heartbeats from friends and family. An individual’s heart beat is recorded by pressing the palms of one’s hands together using a glove interface. As a heart beat is recorded, the LED lights on the vest blink and the heart beat pattern is assigned to one of the 30 LEDs.
Recording heart beat
The blinking heartbeats function as personal mementos of friends and family. They are also physical intimate traces of collected memories. In addition, the heart beats are linked to a skype account (via a mobile phone embedded in the vest) belonging to the individual. Thereby the vest is aware of the virtual/on-offline status of an individual. When an individual is off-line, the heartbeat blinks green and when online the heartbeat blinks red. The wearer of the vest can follow his/her selected social network of people shifting their presence between the physical and the virtual layers of the world wherever he/she and the people in the network may geographically be.
