Measuring Breath: Art or Invention?

Welcome back to AND THE SUN, a newsletter about creative, artistic, and inventive approaches to meditation. Thanks for joining us!

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This week is an exploration of “art” as it relates to “invention”. Earlier this year I came up with a way to easily measure breathing using just a phone. We’ve been exploring this at AND THE SUN, which has brought up questions about where invention ends and art begins.

Meditation

In this week’s meditation we explore the automaticity of the breath and its relationship to tension in the body.

The borderlands between art and invention are misty territories for me. They are ethereal places, inviting intrigue, but the details of their landscapes are elusive.

Several weeks ago I wrote about a simple ~clears throat~ framework for understanding what constitutes art:

creativity + craft + expression = art.

I’ve been wondering, “What is invention, in relationship to art?” Reasonably,

creativity + craft = invention

so doing some substitution,

(creativity + craft) + expression = invention + expression = art.

What’s missing from this equation, though, is the difference in intention: with invention, the goal is creating something that functions, implicitly seeking to answer a question of, “is it possible to do ___?”. With art, the goal is creating something that expresses. It’s not that art can’t have function and invention can’t express; it’s that the creator’s goal is different, and on the basis of the differing goals, a “viewer” looks at a piece of art differently from an invention.

Invention

I’m excited to tell you about an invention that is, one way or another, slowly giving way to art. But not without some struggle. 😉 

Early this summer I made a little iOS app to record my movements while I’m sleeping, using my iPhone’s accelerometer and gyroscope. Serendipitously, I discovered that if I held the phone in my lap while I was meditating, I could measure my breath with the same sensors.

Over the last couple years I’ve tried various systems for measuring breath, and this system I built works really well. It works for any type of breathing pattern, in pretty much any seated posture, and it doesn’t matter if you wiggle around or change your posture. Most importantly, when you look at the measurement, you can’t detect any delay between the measurement and your sense of your own breathing.

I wanted to make art with this system, but I also had an inventive impulse. For example, what kind of psychological impact would it have on you if your breath controlled the color or brightness of the lights in the room? I connected the breath signal to an LED strips and created, initially, two simple prototypes: one with the lights nearby and one with the lights far away.

It became clear that subtleties of the lights’ color, brightness, and arrangement would influence the psychological effect; these were parameters to tweak in pursuit of inventing a way to impact the psyche in specific, known ways. For instance, in the second prototype with the LED strip far away, it felt like I was connected to the other end of room, because I perceived the sensations of my breath simultaneously to the changing colors shining on the walls.

This was about function; it felt like invention. Could I invent a way for you to feel connected with the room? There’s an interesting egoic dimension: seeing if I can do something. Invention asks, can it be done? And ego elaborates, can I do this?

I have bigger dreams about using the breath. Imagine you are sitting in the middle of a giant, empty airplane hanger. When you breathe in, all the lights on the hanger ceiling turn to high. When you breathe out, they turn off, the room fading to black. 

Or imagine being outdoors in a large field where a giant mirror rotates with your breath, directing sunlight to race across the ground, towards you as you breathe in, and away from you as you exhale.

Yet even these grand ideas, still living in my imagination, don’t feel like art. They’re inquiries of possibility and function, with or without ego, rather than expressions.

There’s a Buddhist metaphor about every moment of experience containing the seeds of enlightenment. When nurtured, experience will reveal that which was there all along. I’ve had this feeling that hiding in the breath sensor are the seeds of art, but I’ve struggled to see how to grow them.

Art

When I ordered the LED strips shown above, I also ordered “filament LEDs”. Filament LEDs are small bendy LED tubes, with the size and texture of an undercooked noodle.

I’ve had the feeling that LED strips are “too harsh” to be art. Like their garishness screams “I’m technology” louder than their beauty sings “I’m art”. The filaments looked softer, mellower, less “about themselves” than normal LED strips.

When I played with the filaments, it finally started to feel like art. There were two breakthroughs. The first was that since the filaments were bendy, I started playing around and bending them into different forms – and for me, playing with 3D forms is expression, separate from an inventive impulse. The second breakthrough was that, because breath control wasn’t working well due to a WiFi issue, I programmed the lights with simple sine waves (there we are again with serendipity). No longer having the option to control the lights with my breath unchained me from my impulse to make things that function and to explore whether something can be done. The subtle emotional orientation changed from inquiring, “Can I get X to do Y?”, to simply expressing. Below are some GIFs showing several filament sculptures which felt more like art than invention.

Inquiry

I’m really excited for this breath-art path to develop further, in no small part because it’s part of a bigger inquiry for me about the egoic aspects of the inventive impulse, and what lies beyond. As a kid, I remember, for example, dreaming of a pen that could extend tiny little robotic tentacles out into the environment and move things around. Or a paper airplane with a motorized propeller, so it could really fly of its own accord.

When I reflect on those imaginings, I remember the feeling of those hypothetical inventions. Almost like the point of the inventions wasn’t the inventions themselves, but rather the way their imagined existence made me feel. I have a hunch the inventive impulse, back then and likely still now, actually belies a yearning to feel certain ways. A thought struck me the other day, mulling this over as I was riding the subway: am I trying to invent my way to feeling love? 

The inquiry continues!

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A teaser and an ask

Iván and I are off to Santa Fe and Taos this week to collect some rocks. 😉 🪨 And meet some cool people, and see some great art. And meditate a little. Do you know anyone there you think we’d get along with? Anything you think we need to go see? Reply or DM us directly, let us know – we’d love to hear from you.