Heart beat

Stephen Eastaugh Intimate Slots 2000
Stephen Eastaugh Intimate Slots 2000

Stephen Eastaugh has used the line of a human heart beat to inscribe a line of human presence in Antarctic ice.

Jonathan Harris uses a cardiograph as a navigational metaphor for plotting his Arctic journey: Whale Hunt :

Running along the bottom edge of the screen is a timeline, representing the entire whale hunt trip, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The timeline is pictured as a medical heartbeat graph whose magnitude at each point corresponds to the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment.

I use my own cardiograph in the animation of Bill Manhire’s poem, Erebus voices, to link to the lives of the people who died.

It is not surprising that three people arrive at the same metaphor for human presence at the poles. Awareness of your heart pumping blood is heightened there. In rare moments of silence, when the wind drops, this is all you can hear.