Breathe the Machine
interspecies morph edition featuring a video conference and solo or synched blow-ins
Teresa Carmody Dengke Chen Matt Roberts Terri Witek
The FaaS were future-oriented. Every day, they contemplated the question: what kind of ancestor will you be?
A collaborative group composed of a prose writer, new media artist, 3-D animator, and poet enter your personal computers and suggest that in this particularly viral moment, individual breaths + machines may be the closest we get to community touch. An animated video conference offers the project\u27s conceptual framework, including questions about invasive species and intimacy in this new world where we stand masked and apart, not quite meeting another’s onscreen eyes. Participants in Breathe the Machine will each breathe into their own computer mics to both create onscreen reactions and change an animated world. Each transformation will become part of a larger story built from the computers’ individual data. At a designated moment in the conference, we\u27ll combine breaths in a synched group Blow-In.
Their conceiving mind quit avoiding their body; their body, they realized, had already FaaD.
Donna Haraway is just one theorist who argues that as we acquire more mechanical parts, and as technology takes on increasingly human functions, we are already participants in interspecies interactions; a fact made disturbingly clear and re-capitalized by the unseen transmissions of a global pandemic. Breathe the Machine challenges us to think of screens as partners in new, combinatory narratives that converge technology and the human into uneasy, resilient allies. Each breath, then, can become a cross-species touch, an interactive installation, an archive, a fiction, a world and a landscape. A prompt.
This is how we morph.
Project website: https://btm19.weebly.com/
To participate in this event, download and open the app, then blow onto your computer’s microphone. Using this app, we will meet at a specific time to participate in a live streamed event. The app, instructions, and story of the FaaS can be found on our project website
