01 — Experience
Breath as passage
A visitor straps a breath sensor around the body and wears a virtual-reality headset. There is no controller to hold. Respiration drives movement through an underwater world and changes the virtual water level, shown on a gauge in the scene. Because the scene follows each person’s own breathing, every passage through it is different.
Interpretation
Breathing is the most ordinary thing a body does. SEAing Breath makes it legible as a relation.
Sea-level rise is slow, distributed and hard to perceive from inside a single day. The work translates it into the scale of a breath: each inhalation and exhalation becomes a perceptible exchange between a body and the water around it. The environment does not explain itself; it responds.
Sea creatures move with the breath. A simulation of Miami Beach places that exchange on a recognisable shoreline. Alongside the virtual environment, the project recorded interviews with researchers and local climate advocates, whose voices are collected in Films.
The headset immerses the visitor in a virtual ocean. A breath sensor turns their breathing into a signal that shapes movement and changes the water level around them.
The artwork proposes an embodied, environmental form of attention to sea-level rise in Miami. It makes no clinical or educational efficacy claims. For the science, see research and ecological resources.
Source:Hannes BendSEAing Breath project archiveThe Art NewspaperApparatus
Breath → sensor → scene.
See it in motion: Inside the VR experience · the headset and breath-sensor setup
- 01
Breath
The visitor breathes normally. Chest and belly expand and fall.
- 02
Sensor
A breath-sensor belt reads the movement of each breath.
- 03
Scene
The VR scene answers: movement through the water and the level on the gauge shift.
Browser illustration of the feedback loop
Manual · no sensors used
Historical hardware, as documented
- Headset
- Mobile VR headset (the project log describes it as grey).
- Source:SEAing Breath project archive
- Breath input
- Swim belt with breath sensing, reading the depth of breaths; earlier tests used an airflow sensor.
- Source:SEAing Breath project archiveHannes Bend
- Daydream version
- Production documentation by collaborator Gordey Chernyy describes a Google Daydream experience in which the Daydream controller was used as a biometric device to steer by breath. Not every presentation is documented in detail.
- Source:Synesthetic Echo (Gordey Chernyy)
The 2017 mission, adapted
The original project statement described an art and science VR experience with breath biofeedback, offered free to the public and within the Sea Level Rise programme of Miami-Dade County and the University of Miami. It aimed to make new technology and research physically accessible at public venues, and to invite environmental and personal awareness through an embodied encounter with the Atlantic.
Its announcements of upcoming venues belong to 2017; documented presentations are listed under Exhibitions.
Source:SEAing Breath project archiveSEAing Breath project archive