Breathing Room
“there are always new thresholds to cross: the threshold of summer and winter, of season or a year, of a month, of a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife — for those who believe in it.”
Arnold van Gennep
A threshold is a border between two states of being, a transitional moment. Over the course of the past year I have experienced many threshold moments. Employed to unemployed back to employed. Dating to engaged. Pet-less to dog and cat dad. Renter to homeowner. Out of school to in school. Unvaccinated to vaccinated. As I reflect on these moments, I’m aware of how a singular breath is also a threshold. Inhale to exhale. When I think about the pandemic this past year, the word breath emerges as a symbolic image that captures both my personal experience and the societal experience. Awareness of my breath and the breath of others has been reinforced continuously by events such as:
-George Floyd screaming for his life, “I can’t breath” under the weight of Derek Chauvin’s knee
-COVID-19 robbing millions of people in the ICU from the ability to breathe
-Mandated masks protecting us from COVID-19 and yet obstructing our breath
-Anxiety producing rapid and shallow breathing upon the announcement of quarantine
-Social distancing as a means of avoiding other people’s breath clouds
I find myself frequently asking, when will it be safe to breath?
To explore this question, I chose to focus on my own breath. Specifically, the breath of calm and relief that I experienced on April 20th, 2021 at 10:42 AM. This is the moment I went from unvaccinated to partially vaccinated with the first dose of the Pzifer shot. I chose the vaccine because as I write this post, I am only one week into my first dose. I am still in the threshold moment, the liminal. I am in limbo between social distancing and being able to be fully embrace my friends and family.
My intention for this project was to visualize my breath and thus memorialize this transitional moment. I want to create both a physical and digital memorial that others can experience in person, or from the safety of their own environment without the fear of being exposed to COVID. My goal is to safely share my breath with others as I, and the rest of the world, relearn how to be in close physical proximity to one another.
To accomplish this goal, I filmed myself breathing on glass and captured the resulting phenomena. I then brought the footage into Photoshop, singled out the vapor on the glass, and exported the files for laser etching and augmented reality. The physical sculpture represents three seconds of an inhale followed by three seconds of a deep exhale. A calming breath that engages the parasympathetic nervous system.
Some of my inspiration for this project includes my time spent working at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Zach Lieberman’s visualizing audio experiments, and Leandro Erlich’s Single Cloud Collection.
