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.