Pursue the Pulse is an international collective of artists from the disciplines of performance, music, video and multimedia art

In the work of Pursue the Pulse, the different skills of the collaborators unite around common social and environmental concerns. We are particularly interested in patterns of human interaction and communication, and in the use of new technology as a tool to heighten our means of the creative expression of these patterns.

Our projects aim for a wedding of form and content, so that the concepts we are approaching are embedded in the very process and structure of our work. In bringing together artists from very different fields to create something collaboratively, we do not simply explore ‘interaction’ on a conceptual level, but rely on our practical ability to interact and learn from one another to guide our creative process. In working with interactive technology, we are investigating the very nature of interaction.

We believe that much of the problems that beset our war-torn world are reflected in the patterns of communication and interaction that we engage in on a personal basis, on a daily level. The aim of the group is to address these problems not only by creating work that investigates patterns of interaction, but by finding models of sustainable and fruitful interaction by which we can work creatively.

All interaction is communication, and all the constant changes in our physical state are themselves a form of communication – we cannot not communicate! Every pattern of communication exists within a larger system – its environment – and changes in the environment will affect communication just as changes in the system of communication will affect the environment. Our interactions have environmental impact! And we are interdependent on both our environment and the various actors within it to communicate. In view of the increasingly rapid deterioration of our natural and social environments, the need to investigate complex systems of interaction becomes particularly urgent.

Our use of sensor technology aims to avoid simple cause-effect paradigms. Interaction is never unilateral, and we therefore move away from using sensors as simple control mechanisms. We think of interaction in terms of feedback loops between distinct identities, in which the behavior and response of different actors to one another create particular patterns of interaction, lending to rich content which is particular to its context. The sensors, then, are used to facilitate a live response between distinct actors as well as between elements which are different in kind (such as a person and video), and would not otherwise be able to interact. In this manner, rich content immediate to its particular context is generated.

Our work reflects our interest as a group in the fluidity of structures, in a lived reality that is transformed by interaction and defined by change rather than by static frameworks. Ours are ongoing experiments in change as it occurs within and through patterns of communication and interaction.