The sound of a heartbeat can draw us into the present with a rare strength and swiftness. In placing one ear on another’s chest, we get and immediate and arresting sense of the rudimentary elements of their being. The intimacy of the moment is heightened with every pulse, and this rhythmic marker of time passing can be a sobering evocation of mortality. Such a powerful experience pierces the stream of distractions that crowd our attention and relocates us in the material of life. George Poonkhin Khut’s practice is attuned to this understanding; to this end, he has often employed the audience as part of the medium in order to provide them a particular awareness of the world that exists uniquely within.

Distillery: Waveforming is the evolution of a project initially developed as an experimental relaxation training system for managing the pain and anxiety experienced by children undergoing recurrent painful clinical procedures. The hardware of the work is comprised of a clip-on heart monitor and an iPad that displays layers of geometric-styled graphics with an accompanying soundscape. The iPad ‘app’ is currently driven by an additional computer that analyses and translates the user’s heart rate pattern, but future upgrades will see this operation run within the iPad. The system’s configuration enables the ‘sitter’ to interact with a live, abstract visualisation of their own heart rhythm. Layers of luminous, continually morphing geometric form, create a circular loop of information between body, mind and machine known as biofeedback.

Khut’s invitation to the audience is to explore the connections between mental, emotional and physiological phenomena they experience. By using a combination of measured breathing and quiet attention, users can produce resonant, wave-like oscillations in their heart rate pattern that coincide with a breathing rate of around ten seconds per breath-cycle (six breath per minute). These pronounced, wave like changes heart rate, occur spontaneously in many forms of meditation and devotional practice. Through this arrangement of technology, otherwise hidden or hard to perceive body-mind interactions are made appreciable, and plastic through the enhanced awareness they provide.

Initially developed for use in a medical context at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead Kids Rehab unit, New South Wales, the therapeutic and pedagogical intent of Khut’s work is clear. Transferred to a gallery space, the engaging nature of the work presents the opportunity for a unique aesthetic experience of one’s own life force and immediate interactions between attention, emotion and physiology.

Khut’s desire to focus our attention inwards towards a poetics of attention and being present to our experience of ourselves, relates to the writings of contemporary North American philosopher Richard Shusterman and his concept of ‘somaesthetics’. Somaesthetics is conceived as a sub-discipline of aesthetics in which Shusterman has attempted to broaden our aesthetic experiences from its definition as a sensory experience of the outside world to include the ‘beautiful experience of one’s own body from within — the endorphin-enhanced glow of high-level breathing, the tingling thrill of feeling into new parts of one’s spine’.[1]