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<aside> 💡 TL;DR:
I created an interactive meditation exercise, facilitated on a livestreaming platform where participants collaborated to drive the installation’s motion with their collective breath.
Made in TouchDesigner
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2021 - Chicago, IL
Sole Creator
Ongoing
As my Twitchwonku project started to hit its stride, I started to think about how I might use the stream’s format to promote more poignant or meaningful results.
The answer came from my own mindfulness practice (in part cultivated since the beginning of Coronation (€) ). I had a vision during a meditation, of being able to connect with another person meditating somewhere else in the world, and I realized that this connection might be achieved with a shared or simultaneous breathing rhythm.
There are experiences like this that already exist - but those that do, have a central rhythm that participants simply follow. What if, instead, each participant was able to contribute their own rhythm to
Pendulum system: The primary technical aspect of this project was the pendulum system that swings back and forth to simulate the in/out breaths. Critically, this motion was made such that the more simultaneous breaths it receives, the larger the magnitude of the oscillation motion would become.
Visual: I used a custom-made representation of a metatron cube as the primary visual representation which would oscillate to represent the in and out breaths during this installation. The metatron cube has significance in sacred geometry, which I wanted to invoke when encouraging mindfulness.
Scalability: There also had to be a custom control built to set a “threshold” for the maximum motion magnitude, depending on how many simultaneous viewers there were on the Twitch stream.
Same challenges as Twitchwonku (see project): scale, interactions optional
Stream delay: Twitch has an inherent delay, that might be slightly different for each person’s local internet speed. For a breathing exercise like this, the delay presented some challenges with the visual on screen. Strangely enough, people started to sync with each other more than they were syncing to the screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4s3Xu7g47Y&ab_channel=Tiwonku