Visitors are invited to sit at a small table in the center of the gallery and place their hand on a heart pulse sensor. As the sensor calculates their heart rate in real time, the viewer watches a projection-mapped timelapse of clouds rolling by in the sky move in relation to how fast or slow their heart pulse is.

With this work I wanted to create a way to slow down the viewer and make them aware of their heartbeat by visualizing the the heartbeat outside of the body and in relation to their surroundings. I also allude to the idea of time’s ability to heal. The healing power of time is something that’s been rolling around in my head as I get back to my prepandemic routines and have been processing other grief/loss over the past few years (re: parent’s divorce, losing loved ones).

The origins of this work have been percolating since I was in residency at the Bemis Center back in 2015, where I experienced the grand Midwest skies of Nebraska. I’m thankful to finally have put the pieces together and released it into the world. In future iterations I would love to push the scale of this work even more.

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the grey gap between black beats; the Tender Interval. The regular throb itself merely brings back the miserable idea of measurements, but in between, something like true Time lurks.”
– Vladimir Nabokov

The Tender Interval invites viewers to watch and listen to water drip in sync with their heartbeats in real time. Participants may take their jars filled with water and return the water to the Earth in any way they wish.

The Tender Interval uses the body’s circulatory system as a means of fielding questions about close listening and ecological healing. The work creates its own water cycle of sorts, repeatedly dripping water via heart pulse to feed back into the body (which is mostly made up of water), as well as regenerating growth through the watering of plants from the drips collected in the jars. As the Earth’s water cycle supports us, we must reflect how we can return the favor?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Tender Interval exhibition was originally commissioned by DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas and curated by Ashley Dehoyos as part of DiverseWorks’ Body of Politics 2020-21 programming that explores the body as a resource and inspiration for political and cultural investigations of movement, health and wellness, and the environment. The exhibition was originally planned to be presented in the DiverseWorks MATCH Gallery, but due to Covid-19 was adapted to a virtual setting. The project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Midtown Houston Management District, the Brown Foundation, Inc., the Houston Endowment, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Engineering assistance: Devon Bray
Studio assistance: Turner Gillespie
Performance assistance: Erick Benitez

“The breathing, sensing body draws its sustenance and its very substance from the soils, plants, and elements that surround it; it continually contributes itself, in turn, to the air, to the composting earth, to the nourishment of insects and oak trees and squirrels, ceaselessly spreading out of itself as well as breathing the world into itself, so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment, precisely where this living body begins and where it ends.”
– David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

The virtual iteration of Our Wandering Nerve takes place on Twitch.tv, a live streaming website, as a series of interactive durational performances. The performances feature a performer walking/running on a treadmill with the backdrop of slowly shifting time lapse videos of landscapes.

Additionally, the performer wears a heart rate monitor around their chest, and the heart rate is connected to Twitch in real time.

The viewer also hears a custom sound composition commissioned by Houston based artist Lisa Harris, titled “Undulated Vector Raise-Song for Earth”. The composition acts as a guided meditation throughout the full 30 minute duration of the performance.

As viewers continue to watch the repetitious gesture of the performer, they notice the landscape moves in time with the performer’s feet. A custom built sensor connected to the treadmill senses every time the performer takes a footstep, which triggers the next frame in the timelapse video to be played.

Viewers are able to participate and interact with the performance in real-time through coded Twitch Chat commands. When viewers type “!changescene” into the chat, the timelapse changes to a new scene. The timelapses were collected and filmed from various places Dittrich's travels have led to including Houston, TX, Provincetown, MA, and Grand Haven, MI. All imagery focuses on having aspects of land, sea, and sky with a clear horizon line.

Our Wandering Nerve creates a meditative experience that encourages the audience to slow down, engage in sensory perception, and find poetic refuge in moments of crisis. This multi-sensory experience uses the body’s circulatory system as a means of fielding questions about close listening and ecological healing. Our Wandering Nerve offers participants (and viewers) an opportunity to meditate on how the pace of our bodies’ physical processes are often determined by our surroundings and serves as a reminder of how our body participates in the larger ecosystem (e.g. as we breathe in oxygen, and out carbon dioxide, plants take in carbon dioxide and give us oxygen).

The title of this project was inspired by the body’s vagus nerve (“vagus” translates to “wandering” in Latin). The vagus nerve is the longest of the cranial nerves and connects to the brainstem, pharynx, heart, lungs, stomach, gut, and spine. It is responsible for the regulation of internal organ functions, such as digestion, heart rate, and respiratory rate, as well as vasomotor (blood vessel) activity, and certain reflex actions. Through deep breathing, exercise, and singing, one can stimulate the vagus nerve to de-stress the body.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our Wandering Nerve was part of The Tender Interval exhibition commissioned by DiverseWorks, Houston, Texas and curated by Ashley Dehoyos as part of DiverseWorks’ Body of Politics 2020-21 programming that explores the body as a resource and inspiration for political and cultural investigations of movement, health and wellness, and the environment. The exhibition was originally planned to be presented in the DiverseWorks MATCH Gallery, but due to Covid-19 was adapted to a virtual setting. The project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Midtown Houston Management District, the Brown Foundation, Inc., the Houston Endowment, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Undulated Vector Raise-Song for Earth, composition by Li
Engineering assistance: Devon Bray
Studio assistance: Turner Gillespie
Performance assistance: Erick Benitez

Turn of the Tide is an installation/performance based work which draws on site-specific research conducted on the beaches of Cape Cod. Within the installation blue lights give the room a dim glow. One hears the faint tones of wind chimes and sees a large (approx. 13’ x 8’ ft.) custom curved wall in the rear of the gallery. On the wall a projected video of the Atlantic’s oceanic tide can be seen rising and falling, filmed from the Breakwater in Provincetown, MA. In front of the projection a performer is seated on a meditation cushion. The designated performer wears a wireless stretch sensor around their diaphragm. As the performer inhales, the tide in the projected video rises, as the performer exhales, the tide recedes. The surrounding space encourages visitors to sit and spend time in the space. The atmosphere is meditative and calming. When a performer is not present, the projected video is manipulated by the recorded data of a performer’s breath.

Turn of the Tide invites viewers to consider the authority of their own somatic experience, and renews awareness of our physical connection to the earth within the context of a rapidly changing landscape threatened by rising sea levels.

As the piece was developed over several months, Dittrich channeled her interests in the gestural and architectural aspects of music through an ecological lens. She has sought to compare rhythms of the human body with changing rhythms in the landscape, as a method to consider—and place within personal, felt experience—human relationship with the changing climate.

Wavelengths grew out of other recent cyanotype based works where I am interested in building imagery resembling nervous and respiratory systems through the cyanotype process. To me the laser cut pattern of this particular piece can resemble ripples in water, sound waves, veins, and even finger print ridges. I am interested in the melding/intersection of body and landscape. Just as our bodies consist mostly of water, so does the Earth.

Keeping Pace is a series of works that build collaged imagery resembling nervous and respiratory systems. They are created through a cyanotype photographic printing process where tree leaves and other foliage are exposed to the sun on chemically coated paper to create cyan-blue prints. The process of cyanotype printing with multiple exposures is slow, repetitive, and laborious. The process is itself healing. It is a tool to get the body moving while also giving time to reflect on the interconnectivity of the body and the land it inhabits.

"As the crickets’ soft autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and the hills." 
—Gary Snyder

Going/Staying is a performance/installation that uses long range bluetooth technology to send signals from pressure sensors in the artist’s shoes to a kick drum when the artist is within a 1 mile range of the drum. This technology enables an immediate real-time connection with no delay between the artist’s footsteps and the drum beating. The drum “plays” recorded data when the artist is not present.

The work investigates the unconscious everyday rhythm of walking. This awareness makes one more conscious of where they are and where they are going, and creates a new awareness and appreciation of these unconscious movements.

“He listens—and first to his body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves him as a metronome.” — Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 

Score for Room is an experimental music notation installation that transforms the gallery into a participatory performance and composition studio. The entire floor, patterned to look like enlarged sheet music, accumulates the wears and tears of everyday rhythms. As visitors walk through the gallery, the sound of their footsteps are picked up by hidden floor sensors (contact mics) and emitted from an amplifier, producing a sonic architectural landscape. Over time, visitors’ footprints will mark and soil the paper, leaving a written record. Near the end of the installation, a musician is invited to translate the score underfoot into an audible composition as a live improvised performance.

This multimedia work recalls a range of historical precedents, from Allan Kaprow’s happenings and Alvin Lucier’s sound works, to the notational experiments of such Czech artists as Jan Sagl and Vladimir Havlik. Drawing on these contexts, Score for Room further investigates communal aspects of music creation, and aims to give a renewed awareness of the body to the viewer.

Arrhythmia of the Body is a series of twenty photographs documenting the artist's movements in a photographer’s studio while wearing a pair of absurdly large prosthetic hands and feet carefully crafted from papier-mâché and foam.

The clumsy and unwieldy prosthetics are designed to disrupt Dittrich's everyday movements in order to no longer take them for granted. Heightening the sense of these limbs and phalanges makes one not only care more for their body and its needs, but also their surrounding environment.

"We are only conscious of most of our rhythms when we begin to suffer from some irregularity." 
—Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis 

Cadence involves two performers both attached to a heart pulse sensor. Each sensor is connected to a motor which is attached to a drumstick. Each drumstick taps to the individual's pulse. The work brings the internal unconscious rhythm of the heartbeat to the exterior, creating a reminder of a commonality we all share. The rhythmic tension created by the patterns and irregularities of the drumming heartbeats reinforces how fragile our bodies are as well as the fragility of the relationships our bodies share with each other.

The piece can be performed in two variations. In a durational setting, such as a gallery exhibition, predetermined performers can sit with the drum for 30+ minutes at a time throughout the course of the show. Video documentation can be incorporated when performers are not present.

At an event with a set time limit, volunteers can be paired at random and instructed to sit with the drum for two minutes at a time while an audience watches the interaction of the two people’s heart beats.