There is an unnerving sound embedded into two of Dario Robleto’s latest artworks. It’s a bleak drone that lives in a melancholy space between a hum and a whir, conjuring mental images of endless, barren skies and vast, abandoned landscapes.
It is the sound of the world’s first beatless artificial heart, quietly echoing from inside of a living human. Powered by whirling motors, the device spins, rather than pumps, blood through the body.
In 2011, Houston surgeons implanted the heart into Craig Lewis, a 55-year-old man dying of amyloidosis. Soon after, Robleto documented its unprecedented sound from inside another patient testing the device. Now, Robleto has unveiled the haunting reverberation as part of “The Heart’s Knowledge,” a new exhibition at The Block Museum of Art.
“It is the most complicated sound I have ever heard in my life,” Robleto said. “One of the doctors who developed it said it sounds like ‘an empty, windswept landscape.’ It’s very difficult to describe. You just have to hear it.”
The story of the first beatless heart is just one of the deeply human — yet scientific — narratives in Robleto’s new exhibition. The multimedia feat also includes familiar thumps from the first-ever recorded heartbeat in 1854, the crackling brainwaves of a woman in love and a heartbreaking tale of a 19th-century physiologist who recorded brainwaves from a dreaming, dying child.
Weaving together these seemingly disparate stories, Robleto arrives at a rarely explored intersection, delicately hovering between science and art. Robleto uses film, sound installations, sculpture and prints to give viewers a multisensory experience that draws them closer to the faint traces of life buried inside the scientific record.
“These waves are not just medical data anymore,” Robleto said. “They are somebody’s lived experience. I want to merge those sensibilities together.”
The exhibition marks the culmination of Robleto’s five-year engagement as artist-at-large in the McCormick School of Engineering, where he regularly engaged with faculty members to expand conversations around ethics, empathy, curiosity and compassion. A self-described “citizen scientist,” Robleto contends that scientists and artists are driven by the same thing: To increase the sensitivity of their observations.
“One of the goals of science, as of art, is to peer into the unknown,” said synthetic biologist Julius B. Lucks, who worked with Robleto throughout his time with McCormick. “To understand the unknown, scientists must first use creativity to imagine new ways of how such pieces fit together and then use tools of the scientific method to prove or disprove their models of how the world works. Without creativity and imagination, there is no new science. Robleto has enabled us to journey outside our research expertise to imagine how our technologies may interface with and impact society.”
“The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto” is currently on display through July 9.
Robleto joined Northwestern Now to discuss his new exhibition, the inspiration behind it and how hospice workers shaped his life from a young age.
One theme that runs through your work is the message to remember others. Why do we have that responsibility?
That’s the biggest, most important question to me. Humans are a unique species that have long-term memory that affects the way we choose to live our lives. What’s different about the human mind is that we’re aware of our own mortality. We have the power to remember — both in a sense of memorial and as a form of action because it inspires behavior. We can change our behavior because we care about our responsibility to those who have come before us. We hope the future will care about us in the same way. The succinct way I say it is: ‘If you remember, I will remember.’ It’s part of my philosophy in art making. Memory is the thread that connects us, and that connection matters. We owe it to each other to remember.
How do you illustrate this philosophy in your exhibition?
The particular narrative of the history of the heart illustrates this philosophy in a very direct way. We are responsible for each other’s hearts — both in a deeply poetic sense as well as a technological sense. The pulse wave interests me as an unexplored way that information is passed down. Thinking about Ann Druyan, who recorded her brainwaves for Voyager’s Golden Record. She had just fallen in love with her future husband Carl Sagan and was secretly thinking about her love for him while recording her brainwaves. She sneaked love on board of a spacecraft. In that moment, she was thinking about billion-year timelines as far as the obligation of memory to extend forward in time.