Portrait of the Artist (done with all her heart)

airbrushed machining foam, acrylic

7" x 4" x 2.5"

This is an object-artifact of a single beat of the heart. By inserting a small condenser mic into the tubing of a stethoscope, it becomes possible to record a heartbeat, and a sonograph (x-axis = time, y-axis = frequency, color gradation = amplitude) of this sound is easily graphed in a sound editing program. A screen-shot of the sonograph, saved as a grayscale bitmap image, can then be imported into a CAD program, wherein a heightfield from the image (based upon the black and white gradations) can be generated. This resulting surface is loaded into a CAM program, assigned to a piece of material, and machined out with a 3-axis CNC mill.