Internal Representation

Henry Jones Art Hotel, Packing Room, Hobart, Tasmania, 2024.

SELF by Harry Holcombe-James is a time-based experience that provides a technologically mediated meditation of and with the viewer’s reflection, comprised of a priming film and an individualised experience. SELF provides the viewer with an intimate space augmented by technological intervention of emotive sounds and perspective altering lighting with which the viewer can focus on seeing themselves and engaging in a heightened awareness and understanding of themselves. Through light, sound, and reflection SELF simultaneously dissolves the viewer’s sense of their individuality, whilst facilitating deepened senses of identification, recognition and knowing.

The current exhibition comprises documentation gathered throughout an invite-only viewing of SELF in 2023. Each viewer was accompanied by a bio-data recording device and assigned a unique code that is used as work titles throughout the exhibition. These works extend SELF and its underlying meditation to new media.

The bio-data device that accompanied viewers is small, lightweight and attaches to the viewer’s index finger. This device records a range of physiological signals produced by the human body, including heart rate, movement, and skin conductivity. This collection of biometric data reveals the abstracted and quantified physiological reactions to the experience. The works presented in this section place the electrical output of the experience (sound, light) in dialogue with the electrical output of the body.