Before entering, a representative records:
AGE
GENDER
PROFESSION
BIRTHPLACE
ONE WORD FOR WHO YOU ARE
NO NAME.
The representative provides the same information in return, except her age, which she withholds because it may cause the participant to decide what they are seeing too quickly and distract from the work itself. Her decision is guided by instructions she believes that we have all inherited long before.
Participants enter room one wearing a pulse sensor.
The pulse is recorded continuously.
The sensor registers changes in pace, interruption, and recovery.
It cannot reveal what a participant feels.
It records change without explination or meaning.
Faster does not necessarily mean arousal or fear.
Slower does not necessarily mean calm or rest.
She assigns meaning anyway.
Using the information collected before entry, the waveform is studied and interpreted alongside timestamps marking what preceded each change:
a sound,
an object,
a silence,
an image,
a gesture,
an instruction.
Using what little she knows about the participant, her assumptions about the heart, and what remains unknowable, she assigns meaning.
She may be wrong.
She changes the work anyway, guided by instructions she inherited before.
She observes what coincides with change and allows herself to be directed by ambiguity—
to produce attention.
Boredom.
Anticipation.
Intensity.
Relief.
What to repeat.
What to conceal.
What to remove.
What to become.
Through this process, the a service representative learns how to shape experience.
How to provide good service.
How to please.
How to provoke.
How to make the work.
How to take it apart.
How to give it new form.
Maybe incorrectly.
Maybe only in part.
Maybe not at all.
The waveform of the pulse becomes a sonic score,
a choreographic score,
and a spatial score.
The next participant enters the result.
They inherit decisions produced by a body that is absent,
and by an interpretation shaped by everything the representative learned before.
No iteration will remain exactly the same.
*The pulse component of Inheritance grew from Measurements, an earlier project built from sustained personal experimentation with listening to my heartbeat across sleep, movement, fear, discomfort, arousal, and ordinary daily life.
Through that process, I became interested in the body as something never truly still: always moving, adjusting, anticipating, recovering, and responding to its surroundings. A faster pulse does not necessarily mean fear, and a slower pulse does not necessarily mean calm. The body registers change without explaining it.
In Inheritance, I use that uncertainty as material. I interpret the body’s movement and response, knowing I may be wrong, and allow that interpretation to shape what the next participant inherits.*