P U L S E S
an interactive exhibition
May 21 - July 21, 2021 | Houston, TX
This exhibit visually translates haptic ways of knowing into interactive projection images. It transforms the diagnostic styles of pulse and palpation from text to touch to sound and shape. Last summer, we began with a primary source analysis of the twelfth-century reproduction of the Mai Jing 脉经, first composed during the Western Jin dynasty (265–316), and compared it to its seventeenth-century Latin translation, Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682), and the eighteenth-century Jesuit report De la Médecine des Chinois (1735).
Through a collaboration among medical scholars, cognitive scientists, and artists, this exhibit invited creative coders to teach participants how to create responsive digital mapping for displaying biometric information. By introducing early modern non-English-language sources into the new field of digital health humanities, we compared different diagnostic approaches to the body that remain otherwise overlooked in contemporary discourses of health practice.
Sponsored by the Humanities Research Center's Spatial Humanities Initiative at Rice University
Special thanks to Solar Studios
Contributors: Anthony Acciavatti (cartography), Chi Li (music), Echo Weng (literature), Eddie Jackson (pulses), Guangming Li (classics), James Clifton (art history), John Mulligan (digital humanities), Josh Harper (processing), Katherine Wu (pulses), Lan Li (history), Lily Weeks (film), Rodrigo Ferreira (data ethics), Tian-tian He (pulses), Tianna Uchacz (art history), Tristan Revells (processing)
background
Pulses were difficult to grasp. The ancient technique of feeling at the wrist remained a key component in classical forms of health diagnosis. In the classical text Mai Jing 脉经, first composed during the Western Jin dynasty (265–316), pulses were not the geometric movement of beats and rhythms but instead textures that came in over two dozen types. Some felt like "sawing bamboo," while others felt like "rain-soaked sand." These signs determined the patient's interior life. They expressed the nature of previous and impending states of health and disease. They connected to the internal organs and indicated depletion of internal Qi and other types of Chinese humors.
Pulses remained so important to medical training and treatment that centuries later, the Jesuit missionary Michael Boym translated Mai Jing in his seventeenth-century manual, Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682), which played a crucial role in introducing Chinese pulse diagnosis to readers in Europe. Today, pulses have been stripped to a simple beat. In contemporary biomedicine, pulses exist as systolic contractions and diastolic expansions, moving like a metronome—running slow at 70 bpm or fast at 120 bpm—even as the body continues to offer a broader taxonomy of signs that few are trained to read.
tour the exhibition
This research and pedagogy exhibit aims to spatially capture the many dimensions of pulse reading. It transforms the diagnostic styles of pulse and palpation from text to touch to sound and shape. Last summer, we began with a primary source analysis of the twelfth-century reproduction of Mai Jing 脉经, first composed during the Western Jin dynasty (265–316), and compared it to its seventeenth-century Latin translation, Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682), and the eighteenth-century Jesuit report De la Médecine des Chinois (1735). The summer workshop extended into a year-long crash course that trained participants to use a visually oriented coding language called Processing, an open-source language and IDE (integrated development environment) based on Java. Processing allowed participants to translate haptic sensations into animated shapes, sounds, and colors.
Through a collaboration among medical scholars, cognitive scientists, and artists, this exhibit invited creative coders to teach participants how to create a responsive digital display for reimagining biometric information. By introducing early modern non-English-language sources into the new field of digital health humanities, we compared different diagnostic approaches to the body that remain otherwise overlooked in contemporary discourses of health practice. The many kinds of qualitative, textured expressions of pulses engage with different cosmologies, which we aim not only to work into everyday language but also to re-represent across multiple modes of visual and auditory expression.
room 1
room 2
room 3
As a coding language, Processing is a flexible graphical interface commonly used among artists and, as a practical tool, can be connected to microprocessor boards such as Arduino, as well as interactive design kits like p5.js. This aspect of the workshop offers participants basic skills to engage with more creative coding platforms and expand their capacity for collaboration.
The workshop's spatial component relies on active translation grounded in participants' awareness of their interior bodily movements and their exterior expression. Pulses introduce a critical engagement with body kinesthetics—from touch, to words, to images. Palpation takes into account bodily kinetics: each participant must articulate their physical state and position, since posture—standing, sitting, or lying down—along with one's state of health, will change the expression of the pulse. Because pulses involve the interaction between two people, the individual taking the pulse must remain actively aware of their own body as they press upon a colleague's wrist. To whom do the pulses belong?
From this, participants will develop their own visual scheme for pulses that includes characteristics such as floating, superficial, knotted, bound, surging, flooding, excess, full, replete, forceful, leathery, drumskin, tympanic, hard, slippery, rolling, hollow or scallion stalk, green onion, tight, tense, soft or soggy, long, scattered, wiry, taut, forceless, empty, deficient, minute, faint, indistinct, deep, thready, thin, hidden, short, firm, confined, regularly intermittent, weak, rapid, slow, racing, swift, hurried, slowed down, moderate, or relaxed, rapid-irregular, skipping, abrupt, choppy, hesitant, moving, throbbing, stirring, large, big.
meridian modes
This collaborative art installation began as a crash course in coding. We focused on learning the fundamentals of coding using Processing, an open-source language and IDE (integrated development environment) based on Java. In addition to having a graphical interface ideal for those in the new media arts community, Processing is a great jumping-off point for Arduino, p5.js, and other creative tools.
meridians
While meridian paths are often associated with acupuncture tracts, they can also be accessed at the wrist through palpation. When one palpates, one accesses deeper movements in the body by grasping six sites on each wrist. With one hand, you can access three floating sites closer to the surface of the skin, in addition to three sunken sites when you press further down. The surface sites are classified as Yang sites, and the deeper sites are classified as Yin sites. These sites are associated with meridian paths.
Each site is, more importantly, associated with a particular organ. These organs include the small intestine, heart, gall bladder, liver, bladder, kidneys, large intestine, lungs, stomach, spleen, sanjiao, and pericardium. Practiced palpators read the state of these organs. In theory, the Yin-Yang organs that ground the Yin-Yang meridian paths are further connected to particular colors and musical modes. This exhibit features original music composed in the associated musical modes, translated through their associated colors.
modes
Chinese music theory recognizes varying diatonic scalar structures, but the essential tonal material has, since ancient times, been five tones. These five tones are named gong, shang, jiao, zhi, and yu, which are identifiable with C, D, E, G, and A in intervallic relation to common (or Western) music theory. The tone gong is "the lord [master] of all tones," while shang, jiao, zhi, and yu also function as tonics (or central tones) in traditional Chinese music. Hence, there are five modes in Chinese music—Gong mode, Shang mode, Jiao mode, Zhi mode, and Yu mode—although the music of Jiao mode is rare.
gong
shang
jiao
zhi
yu
Performed by:
Chi Li
Tristan Revells
Josh Harper
Guangming Li
Lan Li
references
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OTHER RELEVANT SOURCES compiled by Dr. James Clifton
Primary Sources
[Allemand, Louis-Augustin.] Les secrets de la medecine des chinois, consistant en la parfaite connoissance du pouls. Envoyez de la Chine par vn François, homme de grand merite. Grenoble, 1671.
[Boym, Michael]. Specimen medicinae sinicae, sive opuscula medica ad mentem sinensium. Ed. Andreas Cleyer. Frankfurt, 1682.
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De explanatione pulsuum regulae, et discursuum verorum by "Vám Xó Hó" [Wang Shu-he] (48 pp.)
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Pulsibus explanatis medendi regula by "Vám Xŏ Hŏ" [Wang Shu-he] (54 pp.)
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Tractatus de pulsibus, ab erudito Europaeo collectus, including codex "Nuy kim" (99 + 9 unnumbered pp.) [30 plates]
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De indiciis morborum ex linguae coloribus & affectionibus (16 pp.)
Boym, Michael. Clavis medica ad chinarum doctrinam de pulsibus. Ed. Andreas Cleyer. 1686.
Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste. Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l'empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise. 4 vols. Paris, 1735 (esp. vol. 3, pp. 379–436).
Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste. A Description of the Empire of China and Chinese-Tartary, together with the Kingdoms of Korea, and Tibet: Containing the Geography and History (Natural as well as Civil) of those Countries. 2 vols. London, 1738–1741 (vol. 2, pp. 184–207: Wang-shû-ho, "The Secret of the Pulse"; trans. into French by Julien-Placide Hervieu, S.J.).
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