The Rise and Fall of the Alpha: Biometric Interactive Art Installation Launch – October 30 2026

What: Sassy

Tuna Studio, the St. John’s creative studio led by artist and filmmaker Julie Louise Lewis, will publicly launch The Rise and Fall of the Alpha at Signal Hill Campus, Emera Innovation Exchange on October 30 2026, with free public sessions open to all ages.

The Rise and Fall of the Alpha is a biometric interactive installation that uses a participant’s own heart rate, breathing patterns, and motion, captured through a custom wearable sensing system and interpreted through a real-time sensor-fusion pipeline, to animate the extinct Newfoundland wolf in real time. It is built on a proprietary sensor-fusion pipeline developed in St. John’s, and accompanied by a 26-minute documentary exploring the species, the science, and the Indigenous relational frameworks of kinship, reciprocity, and intergenerational accountability the project is grounded in, developed in ongoing partnership with Indigenous cultural consultants and artists.

Why: The October launch also serves as the projec