Pulse Topology: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s 6,000-Bulb Heartbeat Canopy at Design Miami/Basel

ART & CULTURE · BASEL

Reading time: 10 min

For six days in June 2022, the foyer of Design Miami/Basel went dark and filled with 6,000 suspended bulbs, each one holding a visitor’s heartbeat until the next arrived to replace it. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer built Pulse Topology from a sensor he first needed for a much smaller reason: to stop people having to touch a shared switch during a pandemic. Superblue and BMW i staged it in Basel as one stop on a tour that has since reached Paris, Hong Kong and Rome, and BMW borrowed the same touchless method for the back seat of its i7.

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Every fair hall gets dark for something eventually, but Eventhall 1.0 South at Messe Basel went dark for six days in June 2022 for a reason most of its neighbours could not claim. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, the Mexican-Canadian artist known for turning biometric data into public spectacle, filled it with Pulse Topology, an installation of 6,000 suspended light bulbs, each one carrying the heartbeat of whoever last touched its sensor.

Superblue and BMW i presented the work at Design Miami/Basel from 14 to 19 June 2022, the design fair that runs alongside Art Basel’s Swiss edition each summer. Four pulse readers divided the canopy into four sections, each one measuring a participant’s pulse and adjusting the brightness and rhythm of the bulbs above them in response. BMW’s engineers had already been talking to Lozano-Hemmer’s studio about a related problem: how to make a car notice a passenger’s heartbeat without anyone touching anything. The Basel showing sat between those two conversations.

What follows is not a single object’s origin story. It is one week in a nine-year expansion of a much older idea, and a genuine piece of shared engineering between an artist’s studio and a car maker, rather than a sponsorship logo attached to an unrelated artwork.

What filled Eventhall 1.0 South

Pulse Topology at Design Miami/Basel was built from 6,000 bulbs suspended at varying heights, forming what Lozano-Hemmer has described as a landscape of crests and valleys that visitors were invited to walk beneath and through. The room required near-total darkness and silence, so blackout conditions were part of the install rather than a curatorial preference. Four pulse readers stood inside the canopy, each covering its own quarter of the room, and each fed the heartbeat it captured into the bulbs nearest it, brightening and dimming in time with that visitor’s own rhythm.

A new heartbeat does not add a new bulb. It replaces the oldest recording already stored in the system, so the canopy is never a static record of everyone who has passed through. It is a rolling one, always shedding its earliest guests to make room for its newest. Lozano-Hemmer has called the effect a memento mori: a light glows, holds a stranger’s pulse for a while, and then fades as somebody else’s takes its place.

The artist behind the topology

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967 and now works from Montreal. In 2007 he became the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale. His work sits in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, SFMOMA and Tate, and he has twice won a BAFTA British Academy Award for Interactive Art, alongside the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2015.

He describes his practice as relational architecture, a term he chose deliberately over “interactivity”, which he has said he associates with a push-button aesthetic that only runs in one direction, from a user’s input to a machine’s response. Relational architecture is his term for work that instead produces unplanned connections between strangers who happen to be in the same room. He began numbering the works in the series formally: Vectorial Elevation, staged across the Zócalo in Mexico City for the 1999 to 2000 millennium celebrations, using networked searchlights that anyone with an internet connection could choreograph, carries the designation Relational Architecture No. 4. Pulse Topology belongs to the same lineage, just built from heartbeats instead of light beams aimed at the sky.

From a hand on a switch to a heartbeat read across a room

The idea behind Pulse Topology is close to twenty years old. Lozano-Hemmer has traced it to 2005, when his then wife was pregnant with twins and an ultrasound let him listen to each baby’s heartbeat separately. He began wondering what it would sound like, and look like, if thousands of individual heartbeats were captured and played back together.

That thought became Pulse Room in 2006, a wall of up to around 500 incandescent bulbs that lit in sequence as visitors held a handheld sensor. The Hirshhorn Museum brought Pulse Room together with two related works, Pulse Tank (2008), which turned a visitor’s pulse into ripples across an illuminated water tank, and Pulse Index (2010), which paired a fingerprint with a heart rate across a grid built from ten thousand recorded visitors, for the exhibition Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse, which ran from 1 November 2018 to 28 April 2019 and was, at the time, the museum’s largest interactive technology show to date.

Pulse Topology is where the series changed its sensing method as well as its scale. Earlier works asked a visitor to touch a shared switch to register their pulse. The version that reached Basel instead uses photoplethysmography sensors that read a heartbeat from a short distance, by detecting the faint shifts in skin colour that each pulse produces, with no contact required. Lozano-Hemmer has said the contactless method was developed specifically as a hygiene measure during the coronavirus pandemic, which is also roughly when the piece itself first appeared publicly, with a Canadian premiere at The Bentway in Toronto in October 2021, running at 3,000 bulbs, followed by a run at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City that opened the following June. LED filament bulbs, which draw far less power than the incandescent ones used in Pulse Room, are what made scaling from hundreds of bulbs to thousands of them practical at all.

The engineering handshake with BMW i7

The same contactless principle is what connects the Basel installation to the car parked beside it. BMW’s designers and engineers had been talking with Lozano-Hemmer’s studio, credited on the project to programmer Stephan Schulz with production assistance from Karine Charbonneau, Steven Hoffart and Luis Morales, about applying that pulse-reading method inside the BMW i7. In the version of the piece that later travelled with the i7 to Superblue Miami, a camera built into the car’s cabin reads the same faint colour shift in a passenger’s face that the gallery sensors read in a visitor’s hand, then plays that heartbeat back through the car’s own screen, sound system and graphics.

It is worth being specific about what that borrowing actually is, because it is easy to read a car parked next to an artwork as sponsorship and move on. This is not that. The engineering problem, detecting a pulse without asking anyone to touch a sensor, was solved once by an artist’s studio working through a public health concern, and then adopted by a car manufacturer’s cabin engineers for an unrelated but structurally identical problem: reading a passenger’s vital signs without adding a wearable or a handgrip to the interior. Two industries arrived at the same touchless method for different reasons, within roughly the same eighteen months, and Basel is where that coincidence became visible in one room.

The i7 itself already treats light as a form of address before a driver ever sits down. Its illuminated kidney grille and crystal-effect headlights glimmer as the car recognises an approaching driver, a light carpet appears across the ground as the door opens, and the cabin then shifts between three lighting scenarios, Relax, Expressive and Sport, selected once the driver is inside. Lozano-Hemmer’s studio was, in effect, invited to add a fourth mode: one set by the passenger’s own pulse rather than chosen from a menu.

Basel was one stop on a tour still running

Design Miami/Basel was neither the beginning nor, as it turned out, anywhere near the end of Pulse Topology‘s public life. After its Toronto premiere and the Kansas City run, the piece reached Basel in June 2022 at its largest configuration yet, 6,000 bulbs, before Superblue and BMW i staged a second edition that November, this time at 3,000 bulbs, inside Superblue’s own venue in Miami, paired again with the i7 and running well beyond the close of that year’s Art Basel Miami Beach.

The tour has kept moving since. Pace Gallery showed it in New York, the Mercosul Biennial brought it to Porto Alegre in Brazil, and it has since appeared at Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, San Francisco’s Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and the Lumiere Festival in Durham. More recently it has become a recurring fixture of the Balloon Museum circuit, shown at La Nuvola in Rome, the Grand Palais in Paris, and Milan, with a Madrid staging announced for 2026. The work now exists as two formal editions, a 3,000-bulb version sized for spaces of 1,000 to 5,000 square feet, held by the Art Gallery of Ontario among its owners, and a larger 10,000-bulb version built for spaces up to 15,000 square feet. Basel’s 6,000-bulb count sat between the two, a configuration built for that particular hall.

Why BMW and Superblue, and why this piece

BMW’s presence at Design Miami/Basel was not an isolated sponsorship. The company has supported the arts since 1972 and has been Art Basel’s automotive partner for more than two decades, running the BMW Art Journey with Art Basel since 2015 to fund research trips for emerging artists. It has a specific track record of pairing concept vehicles with artists working in technology, having shown Studio Drift’s flying sculpture Franchise Freedom alongside the BMW Concept 8 Series at Art Basel Miami Beach. Pulse Topology fits that pattern rather than breaking it: an artist already working with biometric sensing, matched to a car built around sensing its occupants.

Superblue, the experiential art venture co-founded by Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst and opened in Miami in December 2021 opposite the Rubell Museum, operates on a model that shares revenue directly with the artists it presents, which is part of what allowed a touring, technically demanding piece like this one to move between a European design fair and a purpose-built American venue within the same year.

What the room actually gave its visitors

However carefully engineered the sensing is, the piece is built to be experienced rather than explained. Lozano-Hemmer has said the physical shape of Pulse Topology, its crests and valleys of suspended light, drew partly on a scene from the 1960 Mexican film Macario, and visitors walking beneath the canopy in Basel moved through exactly that kind of landscape, dark enough that the bulbs were the only source of light and quiet enough that the accompanying soundscape carried.

Lozano-Hemmer has said he expected the piece to read as mournful, given its memento mori structure of a light that glows and then fades. What he found instead, across its various stagings, were visitors treating it as something closer to romantic, deliberately placing their pulse next to a partner’s or a child’s to watch the two rhythms sit side by side, briefly, before the canopy moved on without them.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Design Miami/Basel’s dark foyer as a fair pairing an artwork with a sponsor, and leave it there. That version is accurate as far as it goes, but it skips the part that makes the piece worth writing about, which is that the sensor doing the work in that room and the sensor doing the work in the car parked nearby solved the same problem, for the same reason, within the same short window of time.

Pulse Topology did not arrive at Design Miami/Basel as a finished object being toured. It arrived mid-development, six years into a series that began with a father listening to his unborn twins’ separate heartbeats, and a year or two into a redesign forced on the work by a public health emergency that had nothing to do with art or cars. BMW’s cabin engineers picked up that same redesign and pointed it at their own back seat. Basel is simply the week both of those things were visible at once, in one hall, for anyone willing to stand in the dark and wait for the next bulb to catch.