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Games

Turn Your Emotions Into Heartworks

Public drawing machine installation is controlled by the feelings of users, submitted online or through an iPhone app.

Phillipa Finch, a character in the new ABC Australia animated series The Gradual Demise of Phillipa Finch, exists in a whimsical online purgatory. Her past and failed relationships have left her dead—or “numb, torpid, stupefied… in quiet dispair” according to the interactive web installation The Waking Heart. To help awaken her emotionally, users are asked to create and submit Heartworks by answering a series of questions about one’s own current emotional state, either online or by downloading the iPhone app.

The results are then generated into physical form on The Waking Heart Machine, a robotic device currently set up at Berkelouw Books in Sydney, Australia, which receives Heartworks from user submissions online and draws them out on a large roll of paper. But, if you’re unable to visit the machine in person, you can also watch your own personal sketch pan out online—you can see our Heartwork above.

While The Waking Heart was created as a transmedia asset for the new television series, we think the cross-media experience bridged by Sydney-based interactive media troupe, Based on Birds, has been brilliantly executed. It not only indulges the creative and emotional potential of each viewer, but visiting the site and flying around Phillipa’s world, discovering her past relationships while listening to an introspective instrumental soundtrack creates an environment that no one wants to leave too quickly.

[via Lost At E Minor]