Battito (2023) takes the most intimate human rhythm as material for an endless contemplation of time, mortality, and the strange intimacy between bodies and machines. For this work, Stefano Contiero trained a machine learning model on six years of his own heartbeat data, creating a system that predicts and visualizes cardiac rhythms in perpetual, ever-changing patterns. Each refresh produces a new reading of the source data and, with it, a new interpretation of what it means to measure a life. Moment by moment. Beat by beat.
These temporal compositions are both precise and poetic: individual dots marking heartbeats, horizontal lines tracking minutes, vertical layers accumulating hours. Multicolored striations flow across the digital canvas like Anni Albers’ woven investigations of rhythm and repetition, yet here the threads are temporal rather than physical. This approach departs from earlier temporal explorations like Stagioni (2019) and Vita (2019), which celebrated external natural rhythms, toward something more directly embodied. Where those works examined cyclical time through abstract representation, Battito embeds the artist’s physiological reality into the generative process itself.
At the center of the work is imperfection and indeterminacy. Presented as part of the “Uncomputer” exhibition examining computational error and randomness, Battito reveals how machine learning introduces uncertainty even into the most personal data. The AI’s predictions become interpretations rather than reproductions, connecting to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s pulse installations while shifting focus from collective rhythm to individual vulnerability through machine learning’s inherent uncertainty.
Battito opens a new direction in Contiero’s practice where technology becomes collaborator rather than tool, bringing vulnerability and machine interpretation into the same system.