The Heart Library Project combines interactive heart rate controlled audio-visuals with audience participation to create a unique environment where people can reflect, explore and share experiences connected to ideas of embodiment and presence. It allows a way of relating to the body that attempts to go beyond Western art and medicine’s preoccupation with pathology.

Changes in your heart rate (influenced through slow breathing and stress or relaxation responses) alter the projected image of your own body floating above you. The image responds to your state using temperature mapping, becoming redder in colour as your heart rate gets faster, and then yellow, green and eventually blue when you have reached your most relaxed state and your heart rate is at its slowest. By voluntarily imagining or remembering certain experiences – exciting or stressful, peaceful or quiet – you can learn to affect the appearance of the artwork.