Breathe the Machine

The FaaS were future-oriented. Every day, they contemplated the question: what kind of ancestor will you be?

A collaboration between prose writer Teresa Carmody, new media artist Matt Roberts, 3-D animator Dengke Chen, and poet Terri Witek. In Breathe the Machine, we repurpose computers in an existing university lab to respond to human breath. Blow on the computer; something happens. The computer lab becomes an installation, an archive of a near future where some creatures have learned to morph. With each breath, the individual computers send data to a hub computer, co-creating a story displayed on a larger screen (projected on wall of lab). Simple biological actions momentarily converge human and mechanical worlds.

Their conceiving mind quit avoiding their body; their body, they realized, had already FaaD.

F2Machine Edition

  • April 2019: Stetson University, Teaching and Learning Day

  • September 2019: University of Washington-Bothell, &NOW Festival

  • September 2019: Stetson University, Values Day

Breathe the Machine was created with support from a Brown Center Inquiry Circle, Stetson University. Love this article about BTM in the West Volusia Beacon.

interspecies morph edition featuring a video conference and solo or synched blow-ins

  • July 2020: ELOrlando

In 2020, breath took on a series of other significances. We brought Breathe the Machine to ELOrlando 2020. Attendees joined the FaaS during our collective Blow-In, downloading an app, choosing an avatar and creating change on a collective screen. FaaS interspecies morph edition