Link to videos from this year’s Nuit Blanche event
The Heart Machine is a collaborative project that combines sculptural structures, flame effects and technology to create compelling interactive art that both welcomes and needs participants. In order to accomplish this, the Heart Machine was built through the combination of many creative minds, hearts and hands. In addition to volunteers who helped with the creation of the heart machine during educational how-to workshops, the project had a core team responsible for getting the heart machine to Burning Man for 2010.
Link to Original Burning Man 2010 The Heart Machine
The Heart Machine Team is broken into two portfolio pieces; our original version and team for Burning Man 2010 and our Scotia Bank Nuit Blanche 2011 version and team to be exhibited in Toronto. The Heart Machine is an official Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2011 Exhibition ~ This page is dedicated to the Scotia Bank Nuit Blanche 2011 exhibition and team.
About The Heart Machine for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2011
Premiered at Burning Man 2010 in Nevada, The Heart Machine is a collaborative project spanning a 70 foot diameter that combines sculptural structures, flame effects and technology to create a compelling interactive art experience that welcomes and needs participants. Citizens must tend to The Heart Machine, as the machine and city coexist in a symbiotic relationship.
Protruding from a large central heart are four “arteries” each connected to sensors that, when touched, will cause flames to shoot up to 25 feet into the air from 16 foot tall columns. How we perceive technology guides our interactivity with the machine. Do we watch passively for the machine to react to our presence or do we take active control? Do we reach out and explore without fear or do we wait to take the lead from others?
Inspired by Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis, The Heart Machine serves as an interactive metaphor between citizen and city, citizens and technology. Citizens being the arteries and blood, have a choice to exist silently or be active participants in a city’s future. The work questions people’s symbiotic relationship with technology. At the heart of the city, the heart of our Metropolis, exists a machine: the heart machine.
Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2011 Artistic Team
Some of of Burning Man 2010 team members have returned to join with new team members in the revamping of The Heart Machine for Toronto’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2011. This exhibition means a lot to many of our team members as this is the first time we can share this large piece of interactive art with friends and supporters locally who could not make it to Burning Man for the premier of The Heart Machine .
Adam Smith
About Adam: Adam is rad. He can do anything, and probably has or will. Portfolio Work With interactive arts (i.a.): The Heart Machine Burning Man 2010 Artistic Team Sculpture Team Flux & Fire Nuit Blanche 2010 Artistic Team Flame Effects Team Nuit Blanche 2010 Onsite Core Team Flux & Fire Winterlude 2011 Artistic Team Sculpture …
Alex Leitch
About Alex: Alex lives and works in Toronto, where she works in IT for Major Public Institution (x). She is much better known for her work in brand and logo design with various arts groups around the city, including Site 3 coLaboratory and hacklab.TO. Alex dreams of leaving Toronto, flamethrowers in tow, to move to …
Andrew Miller
This Toronto based photographer hails from the east coast of Canada. With 14 years of image capture and editing the last 3 years have been a journey and evolution of his art by also creating works of writing, creative theory to redesigning modern infrastructures, costume design, mixed media imagery, and exercises in fire performance. Inspired …
Chloe Leonard
About Chloe: Chloe “Rawhide” is a passionate artist and active community member who loves connecting and creating with others. Sun and fire and all things Lifey inspire this woman. She is committed to walking a path that integrates all ways of learning and self growth, including visual arts, meditation, physical health, spiritual growth, intellectual stimulation, …
Christine Beaumont
About Christine: Christine is a badass torch weilder and welder that Kamin discovered in a recreational welding class, who joined the ranks of heart machinists in the early days, and was then dragged out to the desert for her first Burning Man festival in 2010. We are stoked that she is kicking so much ass …
Christine Irving
About Christine: Christine Irving is a management consultant, artist and project manager in the technology industry. She was the first Canadian female artist to be commissioned by Burning Man for large interactive art. Irving is one of the founders of interactive arts and the concept artist, financer, and driver behind The Heart Machine and, but her …
Dani Cullimore
About Dani: Dani is a sometimes artist, academic, and anthropologist, interested in community engagement, metal, public art, yoga, the desert.. Dani has spent a significant chunk of time doing volunteer construction in the Black Rock Desert for the Burning Man festival, the event that began her foray into the world of interactive art. Shortly after …
dian carlo
About Dian: Artist/Designer Full time maker and lover of life and adventure. Portfolio Work With interactive arts (i.a.): The Heart Machine Burning Man 2010 Artistic Team Sculpture Team Sculpture Design Lead Provider of the Main Build Shop for Part I of Build (SODI Designs) Core Instructor for Welding and Metal Fabrication Materials Provider Burning Man …
Howard Betel
About Howard: Having stumbled onto the Burning Man festival in the summer of 1999 while searching for gardening tips, Howard made his first desert pilgrimage that same year. Merely being involved in some minor projects just didn’t cut it anymore, and in 2010 he got involved in the making of “The Heart Machine”. Computers, software, …
Ian Grindall
About Ian: www.firelightarts.com www.illuminair-entertainment.com Portfolio Work With interactive arts (i.a.): The Heart Machine Burning Man 2010 Artistic Team Sculpture Team Flame Effects Team Co-Lead (with Priya Sarin) Burning Man 2010 Onsite Core Team The Heart Machine Nuit Blanche 2011 Artistic Team Sculpture Team Performance Lead Official Media Photographer and Videographer Flux & Fire Nuit Blanche …
Jason Bellenger
About Jason: Most of the time I make 3D digital modeling tools for industrial designers, filmmakers, and certain kinds of kids. This makes opportunities to volunteer with IA a special treat: to participate in transmuting physical materials into products of the imagination. In the early winter of 2010 I organized a workshop in Toronto: Flame …
Kamin Andresen
About Kamin: I guess it took me a while but I’m finally getting used to the moniker “artist” after cutting my teeth on The Heart Machine. I’ve been a world traveler for the past seven years & am the token Australian on The Heart Machines core team. Initially the designated “cat herder” for the sculpture …
Mags Ngo
Mags is a beast of relentless exuberance– a cultivator of both good and mischief through all motions of time. Since she is the only one of her kind and is cross-adapted to multiple habitats, sightings can often be difficult to predict. Lucky urban wildlife enthusiasts may sometimes find her prancing about her primary domain, the …
Marc Reeve-Newson
About Marc: Am I an artist? I think that’s for you to decide, personally I find the label a strange garment, I’ve never really thought of myself as such. Now a mad scientist’s lab coat, that fits much more comfortably. I’ve always liked to create. From block houses big enough to climb into as a …
Mark Szilard
About Mark: Fire combines the spirit of life, art and science for Mark. Inspired by four trips to Burningman, a fascination with the zen of design and creation, and working side by side with friends, Mark believes fire art is a great medium to help others connect with the magic of the universe. A Professional …
Max Stevens-Guille
About Max: By day, Max is an executive for a global technology company. In his spare time, he works on interactive projects that combine hardware and software to create compelling – and hopefully artistic – experiences. Max creates both hardware and software, but enjoys systems integration most of all. For pleasure, he enjoys tinkering with …
Neko Rutherford
Neko was co-sculpture designer of the Heart Machine project, with the method `design the idea, engineer it later` much to the chagrin of the other sculpture team members. She was raised by artists to believe there is no other way through life except making stuff. Neko’s work on the Heart Machine pre-dated her return to school …
Paul Fegan
Originally from Glastonbury UK, I’ve always considered myself as an artistic squirrel with never ending ideas recoiling in my mind but never having the command to execute them. for the last 7+ years I have been cultivating that discipline through event and theatre photography, poetry, performance art, costume design and creative arts. I have also …
Paula Myrick
Originally from St. John’s, a place she still considers home even though over half her life has now been spent in Ontario. She always thought ART was something other people did and is absolutely delighted to have met people who have not only broadened her definition of art, but taught her how it’s not just …
Peter Stevens-Guille
About Peter: Peter is a professional engineer who has an interest in art projects. From assisting with the first all-welded stage set in South Africa as a student, he has progressed to working on The Heart Machine for Burning Man 2010, Flux and Fire in 2011 at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa and the now revamped Heart …
Priya Sarin
About Priya: Lawyer by day, artist by night and always thirsty for a new adventure, Priya has had a long history of balancing her need to express her creative energy with her practical and responsible side. After years of involvement in music, dance and visual arts, Priya joined forces with an amazing crew of friends and artists to …
Reid Orsten
About Reid: Reid is driven by three things: figuring stuff out, making stuff and communicating. And since Reid has to keep living, he searched for something to do where there would always be something to figure out, always something to make, and always something to communicate. The only thing he found was art, and he …
Victor Samou Wong
Victor Samou Wong, after having explored the fields of molecular biology and visual effects animation is currently an animation, digital media, photography and science teacher for the Toronto District School Board. Here, Victor is currently the head of the ADVANCE Specialist High Skills Major, an exciting new program designed to prepare high school students for …