Παλμός (palmós)

Generative sound, moving image and expanded-media performance · 2019–present

Παλμός means pulse or heartbeat.

The work explores vibration as a connective force between the physical, biological and social: from a single oscillation, to the rhythm of a beating heart, to the collective movement of bodies through public space.

Three generative works form its core. Παλμός α′ / vibration begins with a single vibration; Παλμός β′ / a heartbeat with cardiac activity; and Παλμοί / pulses with data derived from the movement of crowds around points of social interest. These datasets become compositional material, navigating bespoke generative systems for sound and moving image.

Rather than functioning as scientific visualisations, the works translate measurement into sensation. Pulse becomes rhythm, vibration becomes movement, and data becomes an unstable audiovisual field in which intimate bodily experience encounters larger collective structures.

From the pulse of a single body to the pulse of the collective.

Body / World

Παλμός emerged from a longer investigation into embodiment, physiological signals and computational systems in my practice. Earlier works including Tune In and Mutual Wave Machine explored heartbeat, breathing, brain activity and synchronisation as materials through which relationships between internal bodily processes and external environments might become perceptible.

The first ideas that would develop into Παλμός began to take shape in 2019. Their development intensified during the period of social isolation surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, when I began repeatedly observing and measuring my own heartbeat and breathing.

Attention to these bodily rhythms became a way of remaining connected to a world that had suddenly become physically distant. The pulse was simultaneously intimate and universal: evidence of an individual body, but also a rhythm shared with every other living body.

Παλμός developed through this tension between interiority and collectivity — between the rhythm of one body and the larger rhythms in which it participates.

Three movements

Παλμός α′ / vibration

The work begins at its smallest scale: a single vibration.

An elementary oscillation becomes the source from which a generative system unfolds, producing increasingly complex relationships between sound, movement and image.

Παλμός β′ / a heartbeat

The second work moves from physical vibration toward the biological rhythm of the body.

Data derived from cardiac activity becomes material for temporal, sonic and visual organisation. The heartbeat is approached not simply as measurement, but as an unstable rhythm continually altered by thought, emotion and movement.

Παλμοί / pulses

The scale shifts from the individual body to collective activity.

Data derived from the movement of crowds around points of social interest becomes the basis of the work, extending the idea of the pulse from the physiological toward the social.

Individual rhythms accumulate into a larger field of movement: many bodies, many trajectories, many pulses.

Live performance

The original collection subsequently developed into Παλμός as a live expanded-media performance.

The three movements provide its conceptual and compositional foundation, while sound, moving image and light are reconstructed as a continuous temporal environment in performance.

The progression from vibration to heartbeat to collective movement remains at the centre of the work, but its relationships are no longer fixed. Materials expand, contract, overlap and transform in real time, allowing each performance to become a new articulation of the underlying system.

What begins with the smallest possible oscillation gradually extends outward: from vibration to body, from body to crowd, from individual experience to a larger social field.

Context

The heart functions throughout Παλμός both literally and metaphorically.

It is a biological oscillator and a culturally persistent image of emotion, intimacy and vulnerability. Its rhythm is involuntary yet responsive: continuously altered by movement, memory, anticipation, fear, excitement and attention.

Vibration provides the broader principle connecting these different scales. Physical oscillation, physiological rhythm and collective movement are treated not as separate phenomena, but as manifestations of dynamic systems unfolding through time.

The work asks how computational processes might make these relationships perceptible without reducing them to information alone.

Data therefore becomes neither evidence nor illustration. It becomes artistic material: something that can be stretched, fragmented, amplified and transformed until measurement gives way to experience.