Can a building have a heart? A durational slowly evolving AI artwork

Good art binds together communities and bridges across diversity. ‘Living’ art —art that changes over time— is a relative rarity, especially if it involves AI. The Heart at Melbourne Connect is a site-responsive, slow Artificial Intelligence artwork to be lived with over decades. Created by artist Robert Walton, it was installed at the entrance of the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Connect building in April 2023. The Heart reveals the pulse of a superorganism: the community visiting, living, and working in the building, a city-block size home of businesses, university departments, a kindergarten, dormitory-style accommodation, and a science gallery/museum.

The Heart beats indefinitely for and with the life of the building and its community. Responding to 4800 Building Information Modelling (BIM) sensors that monitor CO2, humidity, room occupancy, temperature, movement, light, and more, the building adjusts its interior environments to create the optimum conditions for human comfort and safety. Normally, the automated work of building sensors and systems is dispersed and imperceptible. The Heart externalises the building’s ‘sensations’ in a way people can perceive and begin to empathise with. Its form in the foyer of Melbourne Connect is a 10-metre-tall volume of brass droppers, reconstituted brick fragments, and LEDs in the shape of a giant human heart. The LEDs are driven by an AI algorithm that convolves periodic inputs from the 4800 building sensors into a spatially organised pulsating display that is constantly changing depending on the sensor readings. The convolution combines actual readings of the moment with a learned pattern reflecting the typical activity of the building at the same time on previous days, resulting in both a dynamic rhythm of light movement and a gradual change in the learned pattern for use in future days.

Presence, being there, underpins the collective corpus of the community and the ability of The Heart to respond. Simply arriving at the building, moving through its spaces, and even breathing impacts the environmental sensors and by extension, The Heart. In this sense it may provoke contemplation of ourselves within the superorganism, and the relation between our personal and collective conduct. It may draw attention to the plurality of experiences occurring simultaneously and the diversity of the community undertaking a collective endeavour. It may prompt mindfulness of the state of others: their quality of breath, their movement, tension or ease within the environment. By extension it may prompt self-awareness and contemplation of what we carry within us into the building, both as superorganisms ourselves, and as physically, culturally and linguistically diverse people.

The Heart invites visitors to donate their own pulse to the building by placing a finger on a monitor. This action connects an individual’s heart and somatic state represented by the pulse with that of the building. From one superorganism to another: we are unified by our diversity, perennial mysteriousness, and the quality of being greater than the sum of our parts.