George Khut is a Chinese-Australian artist based in Dimboola, Victoria, on the lands of Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia and Jupagik people.

He holds a Doctorate of Creative Arts, from Western Sydney University, for his research on biofeedback art, and has been a leading proponent for the use of interactive art in health care settings. He was the recipient of the 2012 Queensland Art Gallery, National New Media Art Award, and has exhibited in group shows across Australia, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, China and the USA.

The interactive artworks he has been making since 2004, use bio-feedback technologies to enable people to sense and initiate qualitative shifts in their own nervous system orientation, and re-imagine connections and continuities between body, mind and aesthetic experience.

Can you tell us about your ANAT Synapse residency and where the research has led you?

For my 2011 Synapse residency at Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Kids Rehab, I collaborated with Brain Injury Specialist, Dr Angie Morrow and her research team — to explore applications for my heart rate-controlled interactive artworks — as arts-based interventions for reducing pain and anxiety experienced by children undergoing painful procedures, with a focus on children and young people who undergo botulinum toxin (botox) treatment for muscle spasticity. 

With the support of this ANAT Synapse residency grant and additional funding from the James Kirby Foundation, I was able to observe a range of clinical procedures at the hospital, meet with clinicians to discuss my work and ways it might be incorporated into clinical practice, and then test some prototype artworks with patients, staff and visitors at the hospital. The resulting prototype app, “BrightHearts,” developed with interaction designer Jason McDermott, went on to win the 2012 National New Media Art Award and is held in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art.

An updated version of the app is available on the Apple App Store – and is compatible with heart rate sensors that use the Bluetooth 4.0 heart-rate protocol (not compatible with Apple Watch or Fitbits).

ABC News story on the 2017 Big Anxiety Festival “Mobile Moodlab” featuring an interview with Synapse collaborator Dr Angie Morrow, Brain Injury Specialist at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Kids Rehab.

This initial design phase supported by the ANAT Synapse Residency laid the foundation for the completion and public release of the BrightHearts app for iOS devices in 2014 and several more studies, including a second randomised control trial scheduled to commence in 2025:

1. 2011: Design phase – Meeting with various patients and clinical teams, introducing my work and our proposal to bring this work into clinical settings for painful procedures.
2. 2014-2018: Feasibility study – To assess the feasibility of the app in clinical settings.
   
3. 2015-2018: Clinical Trial #1 – HPV high-school vaccination programs in Western Australia and Victoria. 
Number of participants: 71 female high school students.
4. 2017-2021: Pilot Study – Cerebral Palsy and Chronic Pain. Number of participants: 10 children with cerebral palsy, using the app at home.
5. 2017-2022: Randomized Control Trial #1 crossover randomized controlled trial –
Number of participants: 38 children.
6. 2025 – now: Randomized Control Trial #2 –
To assess the effectiveness of routine care plus BrightHearts vs routine care only – in managing procedure-related pain and anxiety. Required minimum number of participants = 48 children.

What is the biggest challenge of being an interdisciplinary artist?

In the clinical research we have been doing at Kids Rehab, the focus continues to be on very specific research questions, and methodologies: how to quantify the efficacy of the BrightHearts app in reducing anxiety, and pain in specific contexts.

In contrast to the kinds of art-in-health work now being delivered in many hospitals around Australia where there is a growing recognition of the intrinsic and self-evident value of creative arts programs to enhance the overall experience of being at a hospital – funding and support for creative interventions at the clinical level – can only be granted on the basis of evidence, specifically via such methods as pilot-study evaluations, randomised-control studies and systematic reviews.

Detail of alpha-brainwave controlled graphics and sounds, from the participatory installation “Behind Your Eyes, Between your Ears,” in “George Khut: Contemplative Interactions,” DADAA Fremantle Gallery, Western Australia, 2019.

Clinical research takes place over a much longer timeframe than in visual arts. In addition to the time it takes to obtain funding for researchers and project expenses, medical research ethics approval processes, recruitment, data collection, and statistical methodology and analyses – all require collaboration and input from many team members.

For the BrightHearts project, this required paring down our questions and hypothesis to very specific and measurable outcomes e.g. the use of specialised and clinically validated survey tools for measuring pain and anxiety states and traits, and carefully designed statistical methods to discern the extent of the intervention’s impacts.

By contrast, in the creative arts, the focus is primarily on the development of the form/content of the artwork itself, and its subsequent exhibition and documentation. Questions of clinical efficacy, and nuanced statistical analyses are of little interest or value in this context/discipline, as there is no methodological requirement for evidence-based evaluation. Within this fine arts context, my work with arts-in-health and biofeedback has had a very mixed reception: the idea of “art” being “instrumentalised as a functional intervention, runs counter to attitudes of antagonism, disinterestedness and critical distance that have until recently, been important and defining qualities of contemporary art discourse.

What kind of mentor-mentee relationships have you experienced throughout your years of practice? Is there any particular mentor or mentee that stood out for you?

During my time as a doctoral researcher at Western Sydney University, and then as an academic staff member at UNSW, I was fortunate to make some very important connections with peers involved in related areas of audience-research, and body-focussed interactions, for example, Lizzie Muller, Kia Höök, Thecla Schiphorst, and Lian Loke to name a few. The conversations and collaborations with these peers have provided fresh and encouraging perspectives on my own work that have been crucial to its continuation over the years. 

In terms of my role as a mentor to others — from time to time I receive enquiries from students (mostly overseas) doing research in applications for bio-sensing and biofeedback in creative arts and interaction design, seeking advice and feedback on their own research. I’m usually fairly generous with my time and insights — we’ll usually meet online and exchange some emails during the course of their research. It has been reassuring to know that this aspect of my practice has some enduring interest and relevance to a newer generation of artists, designers and researchers.

As an interdisciplinary artist, who and what are your biggest influences?

As an artist exploring the intersections of physiology, perception, embodiment, interactivity and participation, and looking for ways to situate these interests in a contemporary art context, artists such as James Turrell, (“seeing how we see”); the lo-fi proto-interactive and arts-health work of Brazillian artist Lygia Clarke; David Rosenboom’s pioneering research on bio-feedback music; and the participatory work of Marina Abramovic and Lee Ming-Wei, were all very formative influences. Later, participatory works incorporating digital media, by artists such as Eugenie Lee (“Seeing is Believing“ exploring chronic pain using hybrid tactile-VR methods), Cat Jones’ “Somatic Drifts“ and Jennifer Kanary Nikolova’s VR project “Labyrinth Psychotica“ have each confirmed for me, the feasibility and importance of this way of working with digital media and embodied experience and subjectivity.

“Pendulum,” Thinking Through The Body research group, prototype developed by Jonathan Duckworth, Maggie Slattery and Catherine Truman, presented as part of “Sensorium Gymnasium” Performance Space. Redfern, 2018.

I also cannot overstate the impact that somatic bodywork, and specifically Moshe Feldenkrais’ “Functional Integration” and “Awareness Through Movement” work has had on my sense of what might be possible for an electronic art that works with body experience.

People usually encounter The Feldenkrais Method as a treatment for chronic pain and immobilisation in relation to neck, spine or limb injuries — in this sense, it can be understood as physiotherapy — but what separates it from conventional physiotherapy and chiropractic work, is the somatic perspective it brings to “treatment”: working in a very nuanced and intentional way with people’s nervous systems, using gentle movement, touch and conversation to enable people to discover ways of standing, moving and sitting that allows for greater ease, reduced effort and improved vitality.

For many people –— myself included — the resulting shifts in how we experience our bodies in motion, and how gravity can be distributed through posture — reverberate at a psycho-physiological level. When chronic pain, discomfort and anxiety recede, the resulting sense of safety we experience through our autonomic nervous system, enables a more expansive, curious and enjoyable experience of being, and relational availability.

The experience of this ability to reach into, and work with the flow of information through the various components of our nervous system — is what inspires me to continue this work with bio-sensing technologies and electronic art.

What are you working on at the moment?

The research at Children’s Hospital at Westmead is ongoing and we are about to embark on a second randomised control trial — funding for this latest clinical trial enabled me to work with interaction designer Trent Brooks on the relaunch of the app for iOS 16 last year. 

As part of this relaunch, Trent Brooks implemented new analysis functions into the app, that enable the app to detect changes in heart rate patterning, which opens the way for more nuanced emotionally-mediated interactions, beyond simple increases and decreases in average heart rate. These patterns can reveal the qualitative changes in our nervous system that relate to feelings of safety, danger and emotional connection.  These functions had already been implemented by Jason McDermott in the 2012 prototype version of the app operating on a combination of iPads and desktop computers (now in the collection of the QAGOMA — but at the time exceeded the computational power of the iOS devices we were designing for.

“Distillery: Waveforming” prototype app, George Khut and Jason McDermott, 2011, screencast demonstrating sounds and graphics modulated by heart rate variability data. Collection of Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art.

Over the next 12 months, I’ll be working on integrating new layers of graphics and sounds into the BrightHearts app — to respond to the functionalities that Trent has implemented. This will be a very significant development in terms of realising my original vision for this app as a hybrid somatic and ambient interaction experience. Concurrently I’m looking for research collaborators with an interest in Polyvagal Theory, somatic practice, counselling and psychotherapy — to work on ways to integrate the BrightHearts app as a creative arts approach for trauma and bereavement support — something very close to my heart given my recent experiences.

I’m presently in the process of relocating to a property I have just purchased in Dimboola, in the Wimmera region of far western Victoria. The past six years on the whole — have been a period of hiatus for me, during which I’ve focused primarily on caring for partners and family, and subsequent journeys of bereavement.