Vadim Fishkin’s Lighthouse

When a Heartbeat Becomes Light

When I first came across Vadim Fishkin’s installation Lighthouse at the Autostrada Biennale, it felt like I was watching a living organism. A breathing system of light, data, and real-time rhythm that blurred the boundary between human body and architecture.

The work, which has evolved across nearly three decades (1996, 2011, 2025), transforms a historic tower in Prizren into a beacon that pulses with the artist’s own heartbeat. No fancy lasers, coded patterns, or secret language — just a signal carried through time and space, made possible through the HypeRate API, which streamed Vadim’s heartbeat directly into light.

At its core, Lighthouse is about presence. The artist wears a Bluetooth-enabled heart rate sensor connected to a smartphone that transmits the signal to our API in real time. From there, the data travels to a computer installed inside the Clock Tower at the Archaeological Museum of Prizren, where each heartbeat triggers a flash of light. What you see isn’t recorded — it’s happening now. The tower becomes a physical extension of the artist’s body, responding in rhythm, carrying emotion through code, connection through distance.

That seamless invisibility of the tech — that’s what fascinates me. The cables, signals, network latency, and server calls are all there, but they vanish behind the simplicity of experience. And in many ways, that’s what Vadim Fishkin does so masterfully. He treats technology as language. In Lighthouse, data is no longer abstract — it becomes heartbeat, light, and time itself.

The evolution of Lighthouse mirrors the evolution of the tools that sustain it. The first version in 1996 depended on local circuitry and custom wiring. Today, through cloud-based network protocols and the HypeRate infrastructure, the piece breathes across continents. The artist could be in Ljubljana or New York — and within milliseconds, his pulse would light up the tower in Kosovo. It’s a perfect reflection of what we believe real-time biometric art can be: immediate, embodied, and quietly human.

Nearby, in the Archaeological Museum, Fishkin’s Dark Times (2019–20) offers a counterpoint. Dozens of wall clocks tick endlessly, marking time in cold mechanical precision. In contrast, Lighthouse measures time somatically — by the rhythm of a living body. Together, the two works form a dialogue between objective and subjective time. One counts seconds; the other feels them.

For us at HypeRate, seeing the Lighthouse project realized through our API has been deeply rewarding. We didn’t collaborate with Vadim directly — he simply integrated our endpoint into his creative workflow. But that’s exactly the point. The technology was open and flexible enough to empower this kind of experiment.

That heartbeat data, which could have remained trapped in an app or graph, instead became a shared experience of light, distance, and emotion.

This is what excites me most about real-time art installations: when data stops being analytical and becomes emotional. Lighthouse doesn’t simulate life — it extends it. The signal becomes a raw extension of emotion — and of life itself.

And that’s why this project resonates so strongly with what we do at HypeRate: data can be personal, expressive, and deeply human if handled with care. When used like this, technology disappears, leaving only a raw sign of life.

A lighthouse that guides not because the code said so, but because somewhere out there, a heart is beating.

Technical Details

Lighthouse (1996/2011/2025) — Real-time transmission of artist’s heartbeat via Bluetooth heart rate receiver, HypeRate API, smartphone, web server, computer relay, and internal light bulbs.
Software: Miha Grčar | Curated by: Erzen Shkololli | Location: Clock Tower, Archaeological Museum, Prizren

Dark Times (2019–20) — Wall clocks, paint, ticking

Create Your Own Piece of Art

If you’re an artist, designer, or creative technologist thinking about how to bring real-time data into your own work — we’d love to see what you create.

At HypeRate, we’ve helped innovators from Netflix, Audi, and beyond discover new ways to connect body, emotion, and technology.

You’d be in good company.

Ready? Dare to say hi.
👉 hello@hyperate.io