What to do with breath?

Blogpost "Breath-obsessed" by Vivien Vuong

1 day ago

I enjoyed Vivien’s exploration of breathing, as it did not really concern a creature characteristic - like being clumsy, lazy or shy - but rather focused on an activity that naturally happens in the body of all living creatures and that they are usually not very conscious of - "breathing". It was an interesting read with lots of cool examples. She also mentions 3 keywords for a breathing creature: abstractness, synchronization and intimacy. I think these keywords might be essential when focusing on one aspect of breathing, but not so much when focusing on other aspects - I will make this more clear in my breathing creature exploration.

Somnox

Before diving into my own exploration, I wanted to add onto the exploration by Vivien. When she mentioned the keyword 'synchronization' as an important factor of breathing creatures - for aligning rhythms and bodies - it immediately made me think of the Somnox robot pillow that an acquaintance of mine owns. Instead of synchronizing with the breath of the user, it produces a constant breath-like rhythm to try and synchronize the user's breath with its own. In that way, it tries to reduce stress and make the user fall asleep quicker and with better quality.

A Whistling Creature

When thinking about breathing, we often think about inhaling air into our lungs with the purpose of nourishing our body with oxygen, followed by exhalation to get rid of CO₂. We perform this breathing routine in a constant, often unconsciously regulated rhythm - which is faster when you are working out and slower when you are sleeping.

For my hypothetical work, I want to look beyond this main purpose (exchanging O₂ and CO₂) of breathing, as well as contrast the 3 words that Vivien defined to be important in a breathing creature: abstract, synchronized, intimate.

ABSTRACT

SYNCHRONOUS

INTIMATE

REPRESENTATIONAL

ASYNCHRONOUS

PUBLIC

So, I would like my bot to represent some concept, while not being in synchronization with anything around it. I want it to portray no intimacy towards the visitor and make its output understandable for the public.

And I would like it to use breath in a non-standard way.

This is how I came to a whistling creature.

Whistling is a way of using air in a representational way - sequences of tones represent a tune or a song.

You might whistle synchronously with other beings, but whistling is not synchronous to the natural rhythm

of our breath.

Lastly, when done in public, (musical) whistling is mostly not an intimate thing, everyone can hear it,

whether they would like to or not.

Hypothetically, my robot would be in the middle of a space, looking basic/uninterested in its environment (to remove any form of intimacy), and just whistling a random tune all the time. The robot would whistle the loudest and most annoying tunes when there would be no sound of human talk in the space, and it would whistle softly and/or more peacefully when there is a lot of human (talking) sound. Thus, it would react to human presence in such a way that it would want to get rid of any awkward silences and fill those up with whistling.

People find awkward silences annoying, but they probably find whistling even more annoying, at least half of our population.

What we could learn from the work

Awareness of silence

and/or the absence thereof.

How do we deal with silence?

What if there is none?

How do we minimize our sense of being annoyed?

(Human-produced sound loudness vs. whistle loudness).

Awareness of whistling,

how some people unconsciously use it to fill up silence,

and how that annoys other people.

An interesting experience

that will likely make some people very annoyed

and make others laugh.

While typing this blogpost, I was listening to these annoying/nice/fun/weird/awkward whistling sounds:

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