In Pulso

Overview

Exhibited at the fourth edition of the Salón Atenas in Bogotá, In pulso was one of the first video installations in Colombia. To make it, Llano-Mejía visited the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana's physics department to undergo an electrocardiogram, a procedure in which electrodes attached to the body send signals to a machine known as an electrocardiograph, which records the heartbeat. The artist recalls, "A doctor provided me with an electrocardiograph, which I placed on a small table next to a chair adjacent to the wall where my work was. The idea was for viewers to take their emotions with them in the form of those cardiac images." In this work and in others in which she used brain scans, Llano-Mejía interrogated the subtlest, and the most basic, signals that science and technology use to capture signs of life. Rather than presenting a traditional self-portrait, she instead proposed a subjective approximation of her persona through scientific means.