Pulse on pulse: modulation and signification in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's <i>Pulse Room</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the relation between signifying processes and non-signifying material dynamism in the installation Pulse Room (2006) by Mexican Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. In Pulse Room the sense of pulse is ambiguous. Biorhythms are transmitted from the pulsing energy of the visitor's beating heart to the flashing of a fragile light bulb, thereby transforming each light bulb into a register of individual life. But at the same time the flashing light bulbs together produce a chaotically flickering light environment composed by various layers of repetitive rhythms, a vibrant and pulsating “room”. Hence, the visitor in Pulse Room is invited into a complex scenario that continuously oscillates between various aspects of signification (the light bulbs representing individual lives; the pulse itself as the symbolic “rhythm of life”) and instants of pure material processuality (flickering light bulbs; polyrhythmic layers). Taking our point of departure in a discussion of Gilles Deleuze's concepts of modulation and signaletic material in relation to electronic media, we examine how the complex orchestration of pulsation between signification and material modulation produces a multilayered sense of time and space that is central to the sensory experience of Pulse Room as a whole. Pulse Room is, at the very same time, a relational subject–object intimacy and an all-encompassing immersive environment modulating continuously in real space-time. Pulse on pulse: modulation and signification in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse Room All authorsMerete Carlson & Ulrik Schmidthttps://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v4i0.18152Published online:15 June 2012Display full size Merete Carlson is Ph.D. Fellow at the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. Her current research focuses on corporeal issues of sensory and affective engagement in contemporary media art. Carlson's Ph.D. thesis is entitled Towards a Responsive Aesthetics: Sensation, Self-Movement, Affect [in Danish]. Pulse on pulse: modulation and signification in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse Room All authorsMerete Carlson & Ulrik Schmidthttps://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v4i0.18152Published online:15 June 2012Display full size Ulrik Schmidt is postdoctoral fellow, Ph.D., at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. His main research is in cross-aesthetic issues within modern and contemporary art, film, sound and media culture. Schmidt has published in Danish and English on various topics including music, sound and design in Phil Spector, mass comedy in Buster Keaton, ubiquitous computing, digital art, and minimalism in art and music. His dissertation investigates ambient aesthetics in modern art, film, music, and architecture (The Ambient, Aarhus University Press, 2012 (forthcoming) [in Danish]).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".