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Breath Work

by Rebecca Aston

Every day I am committing myself to streaming some breath work; breathing and writing while observing my own breath. Entering a feedback loop with myself, plugging in. Explore the archives of recordings or catch me live online.

During the sessions, I will be wearing a breathing sensor that I have created myself to stream my breath online. The breathing sensor is knitted out of yarn and conductive thread. I’m running a few volts of electricity through the sensor and as my chest expands and contracts the resistance changes, capturing the act of breathing and also movement. I am streaming my key strokes as I write. Inviting others to be present with me, to be anonymous voyeurs that enter into my thoughts.

These live streamed sessions, examining an embodied process of digital making, will serve as starting points for further writing and visual exploration.

This work is made as a part of In-grid, a collaborative residency between arebyte gallery and Goldsmiths, funded by Arts Council England.

I think this might be my first archival entry of breath. I think I have the format figured out. I have just been compressing breath and recording it for the first time today. I had to re-format the data. This breathing of mine was taking up too much space on my hard drive. To think that a few minutes equates to a megabyte was worrying. So I distilled it down to the essentials for now. Just the bits I was using, the seconds between each breath and of course the writing.... The key strokes are being stored very minimally in a 2D array so as to save on characters... I'm sure there are better ways to store streams of information but writing to file feels good for now... it's a live streamed blog in many ways... live streamed breath... and live streamed thought... Enough of the guts... the plumbing of this little thing I am making... now to check the size of my breath....

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