At An Ashram Near You: His Aura
4 December 2001

Meditation is not widely known as a spectator sport. The most introverted and ascetic of activities, it doesn't usually involve tech gadgetry, rave-style visuals or a sizeable audience.

But when Ansuman Biswas meditates, people pay attention. Perched in the lotus position for six hours at a time, the Bengali-born, London-based artist is currently using a homemade electrocardiograph (ECG) device, laptop computer, video camera and real-time video imaging software to reveal his internal processes to the outside world.

"Basic meditation has nothing to do with performance," said Biswas, whose work focuses on the relationship between art, science and vipassana, a 2,500-year-old meditation practice that uses self-observation as a way to eliminate the "noise" of everyday life. "It's about deliberately, radically, not performing."

Yet in Biswas' work, vipassana is a powerful way to connect scientific processes with intangible, "unscientific" concepts such as perception and the emotions, making them come alive for other people at the same time.

The 36-year-old artist's latest work, Self/Portrait, uses signals generated by the human heart as a way of visually representing constantly changing emotions and feelings.

As Biswas meditates, real-time Technicolor images of the artist are projected on the wall. Sometimes the images rest quietly, while at other times they vibrate violently, like the erratic blinking of a faulty light bulb.

Technology provides the interface between the artist's body and what the audience sees. The homemade ECG device connected to a laptop computer reads Biswas' heart-rate variability through electrodes connected to his chest.

Meanwhile, data from a video camera positioned in front of him is mixed with the ECG signals and projected in real-time onto the wall using Imagine video software created by the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Holland. "The machine is programmed in such a way that chaotic variation in the body's rhythms will tend to distort the picture," Biswas said. "As the rhythms become more regular, harmonized -- as the body becomes more peaceful -- so the picture becomes clearer."

Biswas first became interested in the idea of externalizing the meditation process when he observed a demonstration given by scientist Alan Watkins. Watkins was using an ECG unit to show how emotional states affect the heart's movements.

The device allows people to watch their heart rate as it varies continuously, captured by the spikes on a graph. When Biswas, who has been practicing meditation for 15 years, had a go on the machine, his reading came out as a flat line. "Both Alan and I were intrigued by my anomalous trace," Biswas said. "It got me interested in seeing how you can measure something you feel."

The relationship between our feelings and the way the heart beats is no new theory. Research centers, such as The Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California, specialize in developing technologies to help people overcome overpowering emotions such as anxiety, anger and stress. "Heart-rate variability is a great way to get constant feedback on what's going on internally," said Dr. Rollin McCraty, director of research at HeartMath.

McCraty disputes a long-standing belief within certain psychology circles that emotions are the product of the brain rather than the heart. "A lot of research has been done in the past to try to find physiological correlates for emotional states. But no one has yet been successful," McCraty said. "Emotions are a product of the brain and heart in concert."

Despite the artistic merits of Self/Portrait, Biswas admits that his adaptation of ECG technology remains crude.

"Ideally, I'd like to be able to differentiate between the patterns within heart-rate variability," he said. "But I'd need to write complicated software for that." Computer scientist Alberto Ricci Bitti agrees that Biswas' technology could go further.

"The ECG vocabulary includes basic states such as fear and exhaustion. It's not suitable for providing the sharp resolution required to focus on such an advanced concept as meditation," Ricci Bitti said. Still, he does not consider Biswas' work an abuse of technology. "If we cannot probe our internal feelings, we cannot assert they are internal at all."

In fact, Biswas' work is raising more eyebrows within meditating enclaves than amongst the science crowd. "The meditating community can be dogmatic," Biswas said. "Dabbling in other things can look like a distraction."

Copyright Wired Digital Inc.