Breath Vessels

If our exhalations were only visible, what stories about us would they tell? Is there a pattern language to breath that would reveal features of our physical and emotional terrains, if only we could see them? Breath Vessels, a project first exhibited in 2015 by artist Jenny Filipetti, gives tangible creative power to the life-sustaining ritual of breath. 

David Abrams suggests that in oral and animistic societies, air and atmosphere were “the assumed intermediary in all communication, a zone of subtle influences crossing, mingling, and metamorphosing.” This is physical truth as much as it may be cultural. Breath is the site of the physical exchange that binds us at a molecular level to people, plants, other organisms, and chemicals in the spaces and atmosphere we share. 

But breath goes beyond biology. Cultures and languages throughout time have linked varying notions of breath, wind, and spirit, soul, or life-force: the Hebrew נשמה (nephesh) and רוח (ruach), Hindu प्राण (prana), Greek πνεῦμα (pneuma), Chinese 氣 (qi), and Mayan ik, by common account. Our emotional life is often sensorially embodied in our breathing: the gasp of surprise, an exasperated sigh, a frail rasp, the audible slow release of sudden understanding. These too are cycles of exchange through which we communicate with the environment around us. 

In this interactive installation, a virtual 3D model is generated in real-time as one exhales into a handheld form. The strength and speed of the breath in each moment determine how wide the vessel is, expanding in height for as long as the exhalation continues. Stored with the time and date as both an image and an STL 3D model file, these forms are then rendered physically through 3D printing, in some examples in combination with ceramic slipcasting. Each vessel transforms the ephemeral breath into a persistent record of a moment otherwise already lost to time.

As artwork, Breath Vessels conducts several translations. The system makes the invisible breath visible and ultimately tactile. The eventual vessels transform an ephemeral process into a persistent object. They map time into the spatial dimension, visualizing a series of micro-moments as accumulating height to each form. And yet in so doing they also freeze breath, render it static, immobile, far from the constantly expanding and intermingling reality of breath and atmosphere in which we are inextricably linked.

Tim Ingolds writes in The Life of Lines: “The progressive forgetting of the air has been accompanied by a concomitant internalization of human awareness.” How we practice and understand breath matters, and this year of pandemic has shifted many of our associations. Is it a coincidence that this year of constant preoccupation with breath and air — breath choked by a virus, chokeholds, wildfires, or pollution, all discriminately — was also a year of increased attention to social inequity and systemic issues of access: finally again an externalization of our awareness? In this shifted present, what does it do and what does it undo to pull breath out of the atmosphere, rendering its latent force sensory, persistent, but sterile? 

Process has a way of teaching us new dimensions of things we are listening for. The earliest Breath Vessel prototypes were produced on a clay 3D printer and a small team of faculty and students helped build at the University of Denver through a workshop led by Suffolk-based artist potter Jonathan Keep. Here was a living process quite unlike the sterile replicability common in other additive 3D printing fabrication methods. I found myself literally breathing into the raw clay forms to help expand and inflate them — unwittingly re-enacting something that potters working on the wheel have done for generations with their breath — and using the artificial wind of a hairdryer to help dry successive layers of clay to help support more complex forms. I imagined these vessels as a kind of canopic jars, forms which are complete only when they are finally breathed into and sealed, preserving the molecules of a last or otherwise particularly meaningful breath indefinitely into the future. Or perhaps they could become instruments, brought to life and evolving with each new breath exhaled into them.

I will have to wait on exhibiting the library of emotions that I had envisioned when I first began the project: the archive that would seek a pattern language of emotion latent in our exhalations. When the work is exhibited and people start to exhale their vessels into being, most of them as soon as they see the vessel taking shape on the screen begin instead to consciously form it, varying the intensity and rate of their exhalation to create unique and unusual structures. An occasional few will challenge themselves instead to conquer their breath and create a consistent, measured column. Whatever their approach, most people whom I have watched create more than one, as they play and learn the sensory contours latent in this bodily ritual we repeat automatically on average about 20,000 times per day.