What does online feel like (day 105)

I had an interesting discussion with Miles today about what the feeling of being online.  I've been thinking about this a lot lately because of my self-surveillance project that snaps a picture of my desktop every 15 minutes on all 3 of my screens if they are active (and sometimes my iPhone too, though that is not automatic).   I've now collected close to 500 screenshots and looking at them in a fast (10 screenshots/second) sequence it doesn't even get close to the feeling of being online.  I'm going to investigate varying the duration of each frame by random amounts and see how that changes things.  I've added a bit of blur to the movie for privacy but here is what the movie for one my screens looks like for now:


226 screenshots (test) from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.

The feeling of being online is hard to describe.  It's not embodied but it can feel vast and rich.  It sometimes feels social but sometimes anxious.  Much of my time is spent processing the information that is coming at me (the social network as recommendation engine).   Making decisions about this information seems to be the source of a low grade anxiety stemming from a reluctance to spend time and the fear of missing out (FOMO).  There are moments of relaxation into a time commitment such as watching a show, scanning family albums, or programming an application.  There are quick smiles like interesting pictures in twitter.  There are lots of interruptions, little blips and popups.  Email anxiety is never far but seems to ebb and flow depending on time of day and how much the physical world needs my attention.  There is a both a satisfaction to answering email and an anxiety about the conversation progressing too quickly from there.  There are moments of boredom when there is not enough will to separate from the online but not enough interest to continue (the feed has slowed and the stand-bys are exhausted).  There is definitely a feeling of being in the flow of information but it is usually interrupted by having to click or type which brings me back to the screen.  A bit like being into a novel and someone asking you a question about work.

The more I think about it the more the rhythm seems to be important.  I'll see about adding different timings.   I also thought about doing a character recognition scan which would give me a data set to maybe assign an emotional 'score' to an image (many of my screenshots are mostly text).  Either way I'd like to play around with adding an emotional curve which can then be mapped the lung breathing pattern.

A song for this post.

Inside/Outside awareness (day 101)

I created another test of the lungs breathing.  The breathing pattern is the calm breathing that I had worked out with the egg.  The videos are the same two videos of the pelicans and garden.  One video plays on the lungs and the other on the trachea and bronchi.  The lungs fade out at the top of the in breath and fade back in at the bottom of the out breath.  The video slows down at the in breath and goes to normal speed at the out breath.


I was trying to emulate a feeling I have when I meditate of the out breath being a little anxious with only a slight pause at the top, and the out breath feeling more relaxed with an extended pause before the next in breath.  In that pause there is lots of space and a feeling of being more aware of the outside.  This is why I ended up with the fade in at the bottom of the out breath.  I initially had tried it the other way (fade in at in breath) but it somehow didn't work. 


The next step is to get the video to slowly come in to the trachea/bronchi as the breath comes in.  I have to write a small shade to do this.  I'm hoping to have some time tomorrow.


Here is a video.  Unfortunately it's only 2 minutes long.  It's really  nice to keep breathing with the lungs.  Very calming.  Next time I'll make the video loop.  It's too late right now to rectify that little oversight.



fade out lung test from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.


A song for this post.

Breathe with the egg (day 96)

I've started to animate spheres stretched into egg shapes (as stand-ins for lungs).   They breathe.  I'm trying to simulate regular breath, calm breath, excited breath, anxious breath, and so on.  So far I've got calm breath down I think.  I'll post a video soon.  It's an interesting process.  I tweak the animation curves and breathe with the egg.  I keep breathing with the egg and notice how I'm feeling.  Sometimes I end up out of breath and feeling like I need to breathe more often or more deeply.  Sometimes I feel I have to get up and do something.  Sometimes I feel light-headed.  Sometimes I even feel good.  It's an interesting process.

Just looking at the eggs breathe makes me think that we might want to consider a more stylized model for the lungs.  Not necessarily cartoony but maybe something with more personality.  I'm not sure which would be more effective.  Certainly the anatomical look of the current lungs gives a kind of visceral feeling.  Something would be lost with a more drawn look.   May be worth a try though. 

A song for this post.

Self-surveillance (day 91)

I just started taking a snapshot of my computer screen every 15 minutes.  It's all automated on all three screens I typically use (mac laptop, PC laptop, PC desktop).   It's actually fascinating to see the shots at the end of the day.  How long I spent on something.  The tidbits I read during the day.  The videos I watched.  The emails I wrote.  Sometimes I don't remember having looked at a particular thing.  It all goes by pretty quickly and somewhat compulsively.  It would be neat to get a snapshot of my face as well...and to record my breathing pattern.  For now, it's just screenshots.  It's for the Breath I/O project.  I'll collect hundreds of screenshots and make a quicktime to map into the environment and onto the lungs.

For those that are interested, it's pretty easy to set this up.  It's easiest on a Mac because cron runs natively.   All you have to do is issue the command "crontab -e" and edit the file that opens.   I run the following script in mine:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/screencapture -x $(printf "/Users/mlantin/Pictures/screenshots/macscreen-%04d.png" $((`ls ~/Pictures/screenshots| grep -c ''`+1)))

On a PC it's not as easy.  I downloaded and installed the MiniCap application.  Then I made a script in cygwin, again using bash.   Then I made a batch file to run the bash script.  Then I made a shortcut to the batch file so I could set it to run minimized (so it wouldn't pop up the svchost.exe window). Then I used Scheduled Tasks to make the script run every 15 minutes.  Here is the bash script:

#!/bin/bash

/cygdrive/d/Program\ Files/MiniCap/MiniCap.exe -capturedesktop -exit -save "$(cygpath -w $(printf "/home/mlantin/screenshots/desktopscreen-%04d.tiff" $((`ls /home/mlantin/screenshots | grep -c ""` + 1))))"

Here is the batch file (called takeashotdos.bat):

D:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -l /home/mlantin/takeashot

exit

Here is the command in the Scheduled Task:

D:\cygwin\home\mlantin\takeashotdosshort.lnk

A song for this post.

Infopong (day 79)

Informavore is a term that Frank Schirrmacher uses to describe our current propensity to ingest information.  It's obviously a term that relates to information overload but without a negative connotation.   I like the term and I'm certainly a fan of food and eating metaphors but I wonder if it's the correct metaphor.   Obviously I'm biased here because of the Breath I/O project but it seems to me that a breathing metaphor may be a little more apt.  I say this because the act of digesting is inherently a one way transformation  (not to get too graphic) whereas the act of breathing is one of exchange and shared environment.  This is an excerpt of a response from Daniel Kahneman to the Frank Schirrmacher interview on Edge.org

The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath. The link with Bargh is also interesting, because John pushes the idea that we are driven from the outside and controlled by a multitude of cues of which we are only vaguely aware — we are bathing in primes.

I think too that the metaphor of ingesting information implies the right of first refusal -- that we are not being force-fed.  In reality, it's a combination.  We can choose what information we take in by choosing our context (who/what we follow, who we friend,  what we surf) but the information bits that are presented to us are not of our own choosing.  For certain, this can be a great thing, rather like christmas morning when you get a particularly relevant tidbit you weren't expecting.   But there are also many instances where our context may be chosen with a particular purpose in mind (shopping for food, for instance) but is usurped for another purpose (selling celebrity lifestyles or diet fads).  So we are forced to hold our breath or just breathe and deal with the cough later.

For sure neither metaphors go far enough in describing the affect of having a multitude of information feeds that we somehow process, pass on, and contribute to.   There is something too crude with food, and too insubstantial with air.  And both suffer from a certain amount of passivity.  A better metaphor might be a game of pong with thousands of balls in play.  But then we're back with the no-body problem.

It seems too that any metaphor should have a dual, a metaphor to describe the negative space of what's happening -- what is not felt.   In the case of processing information, I feel this may have to do with space itself.  A sense of the bigger context that comes with a moment of reflection.

A song for this post.

Email Apnea (day 77)

An unexpected find today had be smiling all the way to the bus stop.  I was listening to the Spark podcast of November 3rd (which is a great one btw, two longer interviews both on fascinating topics).  Nora interviewed Linda Stone who coined the term 'email apnea' to refer to the lack or shallow breath that happens when we are anticipating the next email, tweet, or txt.  This is wonderfully in line with the investigation in the Breath I/O project.    This is an excerpt from our grant application:

We have chosen to work with lungs as a visceral representation of personal interior space that is in a direct relationship of exchange with the environment. Even more directly than the heart, the lungs are a link to life and health. They offer the first clue to the quality of the surrounding environment, and breathing patterns are in a reciprocal relationship with emotional states. With these traits in mind, sounds and image streams are added to the environment of the lungs to mimic our modern situation of being surrounded and sometimes overwhelmed with images and sounds. Our relationship with media sources competing for our attention is often one of unconscious ingesting in a constant search for meaning, connection, diversion. This can be compared to shallow breathing where the body is forgotten and left to react to a starving mental state. Conversely, images and sounds may bring attention to the body by matching its rhythm or otherwise bringing the mind out of its usual patterns, triggering curiosity or calm attention. This can be compared to deep mindful breathing. Breath I/O intends to investigate the individual and collective act of apprehending media spaces as it relates to personal history and the physical body.

I was so happy to hear/read Linda Stone talk about her breathing practice and how she noticed that when she sat down in front of the computer her breath became shallow and sometimes stopped.  She has since studied the phenomenon and how it relates to the sympathetic nervous system.  She has written an article about this in the Huffington Post and this is an excerpt from her interview with Nora Young (starts at about 28 minutes into the podcast).

...email apnea means...temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing in front of any screen it could be a computer screen it could be a television set it could be a mobile device.  ...with anticipation most mammals humans most certainly do a sharp intake of breath like that and so between the inhale not exhaling because of our posture we were breath holding and many people think of breathing really as an inhale take a deep breath and they go but the really most important part of breathing is the exhale...There are a number of things that begin to happen when you cumulatively over time shallow breathe or breath hold the first is that it kicks sometimes low level sometimes not so low level flight or fight stress response.  The part of the autonomic nervous system that is all about flight or fight is the sympathetic nervous system so this breath holding up regulates or really activates the sympathetic nervous system sending us into flight or fight.  A few things happen when we're in fight or flight.  The part of our brain that creates habit is activated, it blooms so to speak. and we become more compulsive in all our bevaviours and I'm sure that we've experienced and those listening can recognize gee I just can't stop texting or I just can't stop checking my email.  It activates actually the part of our brain that compulsively behaves.

The interview is really interesting and I highly recommend hearing it in its entirety.  I completely relates to what she is saying and I would love to integrate some of the thinking into the Breath I/O project, particularly integrating some of the sounds of our devices that call us to immediate attention: the small chirp of TweetDeck, the trill of the iPhone when a new txt comes in, the ding dong of a new email.  The moment where there is nothing happening and we wait for it like a kid anticipating the movement of a monster in the closet.  Or we stop waiting for it and turn on the light and look everywhere.   For me the sounds are much more evocative of what she is talking about than the actual content of the information that is constantly pouring in.  It would be great to bring the affect of that anticipation into the chorus of lungs.

A song for this post.

Feel the lungs (day 59)

Today I had lunch with Joy James and we talked about the Breath I/O project.  She asked me some interesting questions about the type of affect we would like the piece to have.  Why do what we are doing?  How will people feel the experience of the lungs and the video and the sound and the interface?  As she was talking and asking questions I could feel my mind going from the how to the why.  I am so often preoccupied with the technical details of doing something.   It felt nice to speak of the audience, to picture them in the room,  to imagine the sounds they might hear.  At first I pictured only one person entering a large dark room (the mocap studio actually) where the sound was louder than the picture.  The sounds were enveloping, breath like, rhythmic and calm.  There are several places to sit down near the ground and in front of each seat there is an object, each one different.  The lungs are in a chorus formation breathing in sync, the video interchanges between them.  The person picks up an object and holds it.  One of the lungs gradually takes on more importance visually and the video is more consistent and clear.  The sound of the video is heard over the breath.  The singled out lungs have more personality and are not so in sync with the rest of the chorus which has faded to the background.  The lungs are reacting to the video that is playing within them, sometimes sighing, sometimes coughing, sometimes fast breathing, sometimes deep breathing.   The object vibrates in a association with the lungs.   When more objects are picked up more lungs approach and start to interact with each other and the objects. 

The feeling of the environment to be calm and conducive to a reflection on the bittersweet nature of life,  the life cycles, the exchanges we have with people, the constant give and take of life.  The preciousness and sadness of being human.  The joy of movement and breath, of health.

Thanks for the talk Joy.

A song for this post.

Hello lungs (day 57)

I took some time today to render the lung model to see if I could get the transparency to work correctly and maybe play around with the video mapping.  I got as far as getting the transparency to work and then ran into a resolution problem.  To my chagrin, Touch Designer will only render to a maximum horizontal resolution of 1280...unless I pay $599 for a commercial license (per machine).  I've asked if they have educational pricing and we'll see.  It's strange that I hadn't notice this before when I rendered to the screen in the lab.  But looking back, it does explain the slightly squished look of the lungs.   Even at the slightly lower resolution, the lungs look pretty good.  I'm really starting to get fond of the shape of the lungs.  They're almost friendly and sweet.  Here is a pic (which is down-res'd):

The grey scale give it a medical X-ray look.  I wanted to keep it neutral until the video is added to see if it has a fluoroscopy look.  We'll see.  Trent is currently working on the texture coordinates.

I also spent some time learning Field which I can run now that I have my Macbook Pro.  It feels like learning a new language even if the component elements (Java, Python, OpenGL) are familiar.  It feels to me like a tool I could seriously love after spending some hours with it.   It reminds me of the old Unix days with lots of command line and immediate feedback.  It also makes me a bit worried that I would write something in Field and a few months later remember nothing of the mental model that led me to a particular design (i.e. more than one way to shoot yourself in the foot).   But this minor worry is not going to stop me.   I'll just trust that I knew what I was doing at the time I wrote the program which, believe it or not, is hard to do.  The belief that I am smarter in the present, so smart in fact that I know better than the previous self who was immersed in the code, is always lurking.

A song for this post.

Act now and... (day 55)

Have you ever been so busy that new opportunities seemed more like problems?   Especially ones that come with some kind of expiry date?  Like act now or forever lose out to another that will take advantage of this opportunity because they're not so busy?   I feel this way about a lot of things these days but I figure one of the better skills in life is learning how to properly finish things.   Anyone can start things.  So I must finish some of the projects I've started before taking on new ones.  I know this.  But there is a lagging feeling that perhaps I should 'reserve my seat' at the table of the other opportunities.  Just start it and then sort of sit on it for a while.   It may be disingenuous.  In any case, it's a good problem.

Meanwhile, the projects go on.  The Interactive Futures conference is less than a month away and the lineup of events looks great, if a little full.  I'm very grateful for the help we've had.  Such amazing students helping out.   The lung project is crawling along but definitely still moving.  The lungs look good and I've been able to import them into Touch Designer with some tweaking of the model.   Next up is the bump map texture, and texture coordinates.  After that I'll try to make a chorus and see how many we can get in there before the frame rate drops too much.  Then I'll mess around with the video and see if some good effects can be created in and out of the lungs (then alternate this step with the last one).  This will take us the Interactive Futures easily...and perhaps I'm being overly optimistic about that.  Time moves on.

A song for this post.
(as an additional musical note...I heard Cris Derksen perform tonight at the Western Front and I thought she was fabulous.  Here is one piece that she performed).

Stereo ahoy! (day 35)

This week Leila and Thea were here from Montreal to work on the Breath I/O project.  It was worth the stress of carving time from a busy schedule to work on the project in a more sustained way.  The main thing we are trying to work out is a workflow for the output of the Sony HDR-TG1 cameras we are using to shoot stereoscopic footage.   We had great hopes for the little Sony's and I think they will work out in the end but we've hit many walls along the way.  The TG1 is ideal for us because of its small size.  We can mount two TG1s beside each other on a Slik twin camera mount and shoot stereo at varying inter-ocular distances.   Miles built us a remote that controls both cameras so we can start/stop and zoom them in tandem.  Another ideal aspect of the TG1 is that they record surround sound.   With such a small microphone we wondered how good the sound would be.  It turns out to be quite good!   Overall we were pleased with the output of the camera but we started to hit some snags when it came time to edit the video.  The footage is in AVCHD format and the sound is Dolby Surround.   Here is what we know so far:

• The Picture Motion Browser software that comes with the camera will export the video to mpg2 or wmv with surround sound but not full resolution (it downgrades to 720x480)
• Final Cut Pro downgrades the audio to stereo
• Adobe Premiere can import the mts with surround sound and full res, but cannot output surround sound.  We did find a plug-in that may help but it's $295 and at this point we haven't given up on a cheaper solution.  CS4 says it comes with a trial version of said plug-in but we don't seem to have it.
• Stereoscopic Player does not play the surround sound (this is just a minor irritant since eventually we'll be playing the stereoscopic footage in a virtual environment)
• Interlacing is an issue.  The TG1 records at 1080 60i and needs to be deinterlaced to 1080 30p.  

So we currently don't have a workflow that preserves both resolution and surround sound.  The belief that this it must be possible keeps us searching.

Despite these setbacks we had some nice stereoscopic results with the footage that Leila shot of her nephews in track and field, and hockey.  The twin camera mount needs a level so some of the footage  had some vertical disparity but we were able to fix that in post-processing.  We tested the stereo footage on the old lung prototype and it looked interesting.  It kind of looked like the lungs were transparent.  Not exactly what we were looking for but perhaps with a little bit of a bumpy surface on the lungs, they won't look so mirror-like or transparent.

Another highlight was Trent's new model of the lungs.  They look great!  With any luck we'll be working with these on Monday (Leila's last day).

Miles was also around working with different sounds.  Making soundtracks on the fly for the silent videos we were playing.   We talked about different ways of teasing out the deeper resonance of someone voice in real-time.  He showed us an effect in super-collider which may be the start of what we're looking for.

A song for this post.

Mood dips in step with temperature (day 34)

I've noticed that the stock market gyrations need a story.  You can't just say "the stock market dipped by 300 points today".  You have to say "the stock market dipped dramatically following investor doubts about...".   I have read many of these headlines.   Over time an image has formed in my head, helped by the many trading room stock photos.  I picture chemicals (economic indicators) being piped in and landing on the crowds of traders in uneven but clustered patterns.  They there is general barking and howling that spreads to local neighbourhoods.  A frenzy of anxious trading takes place, and when the chemicals subside, exhausted stunned traders reckon with the result.   To put a story on this behaviour is interesting but most surely wrong because the traders are barking out of habit and neighbourly influence as much as reason.   The headlines are like a running commentary on a cock fight.   They create mini-dramas out of very immediate facts.  Some of these mini-dramas will actually fit the facts longer than others and you'll feel good about the narrative arc.  It's good to feel like you might know the next thing that happens, or to feel like a tragedy is in the making.  The anticipation is good.  Good like dessert.

The problem is that eventually drama exhaustion sets in.  There is only one cure for drama: deep engagement.  But how does one actually get beyond the fine grained noise to the deeper currents in financial systems?  It's not clear to me that anyone is even relatively sure of the deeper narrative taking place.  And maybe there is none.  It's quite possible that we've created a machine so mesmerizingly complex and with such high stakes that we're stuck in a fearful narcissistic moment.  This may be one reason to see the movie "cloudy with a chance of meatballs".

There is not real conclusion to this post.  The compulsion to stay at the surface of things because it's more immediately interesting is a trap that eventually robs us of insight.  It's related to discernment in the choice of information we take in.  It's also one of the topics we are researching with the Breath I/O project.  The frenzied consumption of the new eventually leads to shallow breathing and anxiety.  What kind of media consumption leads to a deeper breathing?

A song for this post.

Curious noise (day 20)

Today Miles and I talked about what an environment of mixed soundtracks might sound like.    In Breath I/O the videos and their associated soundtracks will 'swirl' around in the environment surrounding the lungs, mixing with each other.  When there is no video playing on the lungs it makes sense for the sound to be noisy with a slight foreground of interest, a hint of some of the soundtracks.   As more videos are playing, the noise retreats more and more to the background but is still present.  There is a seamless blend between when the soundtrack is fully audible and when it goes back as part of the noise.   All of this is in five channel surround sound.   One of the things we talked about is that the noise would be algorithmically composed of the granules from each soundtrack.  Much like the video pixels are being used to shade the atmosphere surrounding the lungs.  I like that parallel a lot.  Miles had some great examples of composers who work with noise and subtle foregrounds of interest.

One of the aspects of the atmosphere that we still need to develop is whether it will be influenced by some kind of action.   We've even talked about the possibility of the virtual affecting the real by being able to generate air currents in the installation space.   Personally I think it would be ok if the environment was like weather, unpredictable and interesting.  Something the lungs would be subject to.

A composition for this post (courtesy of Miles). 
More of Rosy Parlane can be found on myspace.

Emotional breather (day 18)

I described the Breath I/O project earlier in which lungs will be used as vessels for video and sound. 

I've been wondering if it would be possible to annotate video with emotional content so when they are mapped onto the lungs the breathing style could vary to match or enhance the emotion.   Since at this point we are not planning on using dynamic video, it may be feasible and desirable to manually annotate the video with some state parameter corresponding to the type of breathing that would be appropriate.  From there the lungs could alter their breathing and seamlessly blend between states. 

A quick search later, I just found the specs for MPEG 7 video standard.  It allows for just the kind of annotation that we would need.  I'm not sure what the status is on mpeg7 and whether any of the applications we are currently using (Virtools, Touch Designer, Field) will even play it.  It's been around for a bit so perhaps it's more integrated than I think.  Regardless, we could use some of the concepts in the specifications and roll our own little annotated video player.

The more I think about it, the more I can see interesting uses to the new annotation standard.  Obviously many people have been thinking about this for a while on the standards side, but its interesting to me that it hasn't hit the mainstream yet in terms of all the possible uses and proper tools to support those.  The Wikipedia entry contains some examples of what people have done with the standard so far.  The IBM video annotator VideoAnnEx seems like it might be interesting for us.  There is also a Java library to extract annotation that we could use in Field.

There may be more appropriate standards or ways to do this, I'm not sure.  It made me happy to see mpeg7.  It seems like a good starting point to start making enquiries about the field.

A song for this post.

Sensual water breathing (day 7)

Steve came back from swimming and said the water felt good. It surrounded his body, gently, sensually. I immediately could relate to what he was saying. I know that sensation of floating, gliding, blowing air bubbles, being surrounded.

This feeling of being surrounded by water is the metaphor I would like to invoke in relation to the lungs being in an environment filled with image and sound. The problem is that generally people associate the combination of lungs and water with anxiety and death. My intuition is that there is a way to depict the lungs in water without triggering this association. Char Davies' work Osmose associates breathing with movement in a way that could make you forget that you may have been moving in environments inhospitable to human breath. I think if the lungs weren't breathing, the water surroundings could seem peaceful, like in so many images we see of babies in utero and like the feeling that Steve described. The problem is really about the lungs breathing. So perhaps it may work to automatically create space around the lungs when they breathe out. A kind of air bubble that slowly dissipates. This way perhaps the feeling of suffocation or breathing water would not arise. There is still the issue of breathing in, but I wonder if we could deal with that by creating many small air bubbles as the lungs breathe in. The lungs would be creating their own air as they chose the media to breathe in. Could be an interesting effect.

The contrast between having the lungs in or out of the water could be quite evocative. The water environment is much slower, enclosed, sheltered, quiet, mysterious. The air environment is much more direct, insistent, dangerous, spacious, loud, social. Playing with these contrasts may work to invoke some of the feelings associated with different media environments and our reactions to them. What does it look like to be assaulted by media? What does it look like to be lured and seduced? What does it look like to like what we see or hear, hate, dislike? add on? forward? share? There are so many ways in which we are affected by media and participate in its affect on others.

In the next month we'll be working on getting a prototype of the lungs ready and creating visual effects reminiscent of water, fog, air movement, etc. It would be great at the beginning of next month to have the lungs animated and surrounded by media, not necessarily breathing the media yet, but just be able to see which environments we'd like to work with for the next iteration.

Take a deep breath and... (day 2)

first breath
breathe easy
take my breath away
breathless
hold your breath
don't hold your breath
the breath of life
hard breathing
bad breath
shallow breath
just breathe
breathe deeply
foul breath
last breath

I'm working on a research project called Breath I/O along with Leila Sujir, Joy James, and Ron Burnett. We feel very lucky to have this project funded by SSHRC for three years through their research/creation program (on hold for the moment). It is luxury...working with a team of researchers and students (Miles Thorogood, and Thea Jones are research assistants) for an extended period of time like this.

The form of the project is a virtual stereoscopic video sculpture with lungs as its subject. The lungs (single, multiple - a chorus of lungs) are in a constant exchange with the environment which is filled with sound, image and video.

The choice of not breathing cannot be sustained. We breathe and know something about where we are. We breathe and others know something about how we are. This idea of being subject to and indebted to the environment is what is compelling to me. In relation to the environment of sound, image and video (perhaps text?) I would like to know what it is to breathe image and sound. I read recently that the CEO of netflix thinks that web 3.0 will be a full video web. Like watching TV all over again but this time...with feeling? I don't know. I'm assuming he means that it will be democratic this time. That it will be the whole world cooking up a media storm for a public banquet of (biblical?) proportions. Or maybe more of a potluck...more like YouTube feels like now but less clicking. Who knows. My lungs will know if they are breathing the foul air of fast food.

The investigation has just started. We have a prototype but it's not quite right. We'll keep working at it, creating lungs that breathe naturally, convincingly. We'll come up with ways of seeing video mingling in the environment and finding its way into the lungs which take and give back. We'll find ways for people to converse with the virtual chorus with their hands and voices.