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Besides shyness, I had initially thought about breathing and a heartbeat as an interesting fundamental feature distinguishing (roughly speaking) life from non-life. Subject from object. It was fun to see that Vivien had apparently also considered the property of breathing as a creature characteristic.
We probably both hopped on a similar train of thought when pondering what makes us human/animal, and considered breath as one of the most fundamental visual cues. We take breathing for granted, but if animal were to unexpectedly be hindered in breathing, all alarm bells would go off in a heartbeat. It is quite amazing that organisms figured out a way to harness the trees' awful byproduct that is oxygen, which we can handily and luckily use to our benefit, whereby we in turn produce carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Besides that, it also provides us with a handful of other handy forms of expression, such as speech, laughter, coughing, crying, sneezing, chuckling at your mobile screen, meditation, and in case you're bored already by this enumeration, yawn. As Vivien put it, breathing is intimately linked with our mental states. The everlasting popularity of meditation is a reason not to discard the value of breath exercises. To put it dryly, humans are the only organism - as far as we know - to attempt to become conscious of the unconscious act of breathing, and this practice is independently developed across different cultures and societies. Why do we care so much about breath?
On Vivien's artificial creatures
I really liked Vivien's ideas on creatures displaying various expressive breathing patterns (laughing, sighing, moaning etc.) which can be influenced by the audience. As she put it, "The creatures can synchronize breathing patterns when they are in proximity. For example participants can align a calm creature with a hyperventilating creature to sooth it with their slow breaths".
The medium by which the participants interact with the creatures would thus be by changing the positioning of them relative to each other. To me it would also like to make the suggestion to have this interaction be based on the participants' breath patterns. This way we can stimulate people in a different way to become conscious of their breath and the way their breath is interlinked with the creatures' mental states, which are somehow influenced by the audience. Besides breath, also touch as input could be interesting, as there is already much expression in touch, and I can imagine how certain touches can lead to crying, laughing, moaning, sighing, etc.
The way Vivien described the creatures synchronizing breath patterns also reminded me of self organizing systems, where each local creature adheres to some principles, which together renders complex collective behavior. Such emergent synchronicity is common in nature, and can be an interesting area to look into with respect to breathing; e.g. breathing cellular automata. I think the underlying truth here is that, in a way, all of our individual human cells also need to respire to produce the energy they need, and use oxygen and produce carbon dioxide in the process. Somehow the entire collection of these individually breathing cells make up a system that itself also breathes. I am drawn to find the simplest local rules for a given individual cell to breath, which collectively make up a seemingly breathing system as well. Perhaps this system can grow from one cell to another, and the participant's breath can be the driving force, e.g. helping to synchronize partnering cells' breath rhythm to create new tiny but growing cells.
Interpersonal Synchronization
Moreover, Vivien's notion of the creatures calming and influencing each other, reminds me of the way in which I used to sometimes synchronize my breath to that of my previous partner, or I would negate her rhythm, (to not both inhale at the same time), to fall asleep easier I do not know if I did this intentionally or if it just happened, but once I became aware of its relaxing effect, I kept trying to do it. Similarly, "researchers have discovered that romantic couples’ heart rates, breathing patterns and brainwaves sync up while they are in each other’s presence (intriguingly, a similar phenomenon also occurs when non-couples sing together)".
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