Reflections on TOTEM

Welcome back to AND THE SUN, a newsletter about creative, artistic, and inventive approaches to meditation. And maybe an art studio writ large as well…

🔵

Let’s jump right in

Avery: So February 20th, we had our first AND THE SUN show, called TOTEM. I think it was pretty successful.

Iván: Yeah, besides maybe 5% of people whose breath-tracking app didn't work, everything worked really well. People seemed impressed. I was blown away that all the backend show-control systems you designed worked more or less as intended.

Avery: By me, you mean me and ChatGPT—but thanks! The main technical challenge of the show was building the system that allowed each art piece to respond to breath: iOS and Android apps for people to track their breath, a breath-tracking algorithm to process the raw data, the protocol for matching the right breath stream to the right art piece, the control system to control all the pieces from a centralized server…

Although, funny enough, one of the hardest parts technically actually had nothing to do with that – it was getting the custom calendar invite to work. I kept thinking back to Priya Parker’s "The Art of Gathering," about how the first contact with your guest is a chance for storytelling. The site had a scroll animation from the logo to the event title, and a GIF of a riverstone becoming our sky motif. Simple but effective. It conveyed the aesthetic and conceptual essence of the show.

Iván: Haha. I think it really helped that we made a custom website for the event instead of using a standard platform like Eventbrite or Luma. It showed the ambition of the show and got people more excited.

And despite the technical sophistication, the room felt playful, like a playground. There was delight and curiosity—people were helping each other navigate the space and the app. It felt social in a way most art experiences aren't.

Avery: Totally, the shared process of figuring out the breath-tracking app brought people together by necessity.

Iván: Another challenge of the show, that ended up really coming together, was coordinating the works. We had collaborators in Greece, Milwaukee, London, New York.

Avery: And, of course, we had to figure out the unified aesthetic and conceptual framework to hold it all together.

How it came to be

Iván: Let’s step back—how did this all start?

Avery: The show used a breath-tracking app I built, which started as an experiment last spring. I'd built a simple accelerometer-based tracker to analyze my sleep disturbances. One day I used it during meditation and saw that it captured breath incredibly clearly. I adapted it into a real-time breath-sensor app and linked it to lights. That was in the fall around when we started this newsletter, though the connection wasn’t clear yet. It just worked surprisingly well—better than anything I'd tried before.

We’d been talking about designing an event that featured the breath-tracking app. You’d also been playing with this “TOTEM” idea, the idea of a stone for meditation that may or may not be technological—a conceptual artwork where a stone is described in technological terms (like it can track your breath) but ultimately it might just be a rock and a framework. Concept as technology. Then I showed the team at Chemistry Creative a demo of the breath-tracking app, which we’d started calling TOTEM. The demo was just a screen going from black to warm candlelight orange, responding to breath. They proposed that we host an event, and suddenly we were figuring out what it would look like over Thanksgiving.

Meaning-making

Iván: TOTEM got me thinking about how meaning often forms after the fact. To me, TOTEM was about wayfinding through experience—guided by illuminated cairns. The meditation hut was like the conceptual capstone, non-breath-reactive but symbolizing the simplest form of contemplative experience—sitting by yourself looking up at the sky.

Avery: Right—The meditation hut emphasized our deeper interest—beyond tech—about experiences of light, space, and contemplation. It replicated the feeling of gazing out from a rooftop, seeing only sky, creating this expansive perceptual illusion.

Serendipity

Iván: There was so much serendipity in this project. Like finding the big canvas stretcher frames in the hallway outside our studio, which inspired the hut. Or the wooden shelf you found on the sidewalk.

Avery: The "stoop gods" delivered that shelf the very day after we had the idea to usie a shelf. It was the perfect size, ready for wiring, practically to spec.

Iván: The cairn sculptures ended up placed vertically on the shelf, with others in a semi-circle on the floor in front of them. Originally planned as breath-reactive, we instead ran them on a slow sine wave dimming cycle. People found that hypnotic. It emphasized something central for us: our art focuses deeply on the experience, where the effect itself becomes the subject.

Avery: Yes—this was an important realization, the entrainment itself was the real art. Our work lives in guiding perception, framing moments that resonate deeply.

Storytelling and experience

Iván: We’re still figuring out where it’s all going—the relationship between the newsletter, art studio, collaborations, and the technology itself. The tech isn't driving our art but enabling certain explorations. The impulse to create feels abstract, spiritual, and contemplative. We're still discovering what our practice will look like.

Avery: Right, one thing TOTEM clarified for me is it's not about meditation per se. The impulse feels broader—toward experience itself. There’s also a pull toward storytelling and mythology. Even subtle changes in light become narrative. I think we both feel resonance with the Light and Space movement, but there's also a pull towards storytelling and mythology.

Ivan: For me, the most impactful experiences are always those that can't fully be captured as an object. The cairns slowly changing brightness, for instance—that minimal form of storytelling subtly moves us from pure experience towards the possibility of narrative.

Avery: James Turrell does this—guiding perception so the experience itself becomes the piece. There's a dualism inherent: the difference between one state and another creates meaning. Light gains meaning through change or contrast.

Iván: Exactly, "Let there be light" only becomes a story because it follows darkness. Without that change, there’s no story.

Avery: Technology lets us precisely control these changes, enabling deeper explorations. Our inquiry feels like it's shifting: previously, we looked at art through meditation; now it feels reversed. Meditation becomes one aspect within a broader artistic inquiry into experience and perception itself. In that context, meditation functions as a tool with which we explore experience, and that process of exploration and experiencing is the art.

Iván: And the meditation angle is becoming more broadly contemplative, less about the particularities of meditative technique. There’s an emerging clarity: the art we're creating explores and designs experiences at a fundamental, perceptual level.

Context & guidance

Avery: Figuring out how much guidance to give people feels important. I used to resist guiding viewers, but TOTEM showed how important this is. There's something honest about acknowledging that people's experiences depend heavily on their expectations and frameworks. Explicitly shaping those contexts doesn't detract from the experience; it enhances it.

Iván: After the show, a friend told me she didn’t engage with some pieces because she didn’t know they were interactive. That made me realize there is value in inviting people into an experience more explicitly.

Avery: Marina Abramović’s work comes to mind here—especially the piece with two naked performers standing in a doorway. The experience arises entirely from the viewer’s internal narratives and subconscious reactions. The subtle yet powerful use of human psychology feels similar to what we want to explore. Simple forms that encapsulate complex emotional reactions, by using pre-existing context.

Iván: The challenge is identifying which minimal elements hold that depth.

Avery: Absolutely. Identifying subtle phenomena worth exploring is immensely difficult, it requires perceptiveness, subtlety, and taste. It feels like a practice of careful noticing and responding intuitively—often inspired by everyday moments that surprise or move us.

Iván: It’s about choosing platforms and vehicles for storytelling. Just like breath and light became a platform, darkness or movement could become another. It feels like we’ve been identifying these platforms intuitively, then jumping in to explore them rigorously.

Avery: That brings us back to a core question: is meaning created before, during, or after the art-making process? The answer feels like all three. We’re often drawn to ideas or materials without knowing why, then meaning emerges through the act of making and later reflection. It’s a continuous loop of intuition, exploration, and understanding.

Iván: That resonates. Often, we don’t fully grasp why something matters until we’re in the process. The making clarifies the meaning.

Avery: And some things just feel sacred—like our fascination with the sky. It holds deep symbolic and experiential weight.

Iván: Which is why the idea of exploring artworks pertaining to the clear sky excites me. It engages something vast, ever-present, and subtly shifting—perfect for exploring perception and narrative.

Avery: And that kind of subtle framing feels true to our broader interest: shaping experience gently, guiding attention without over-directing. That’s where the storytelling lives. TOTEM gave us clarity about that inclination. Now we want to deepen that inquiry, refine our language, and create standalone pieces with lasting impact. The sky is vast, and we’re just beginning to look for the edges of it…

Where to next?

Iván: What kind of storytelling do we want to pursue? More standalone pieces, maybe designed for homes or galleries, higher production values and intentionality. Something that lives and breathes more permanently.

Avery: Yeah, we’ve demonstrated we can execute a successful event; now the frontier feels like developing a rigorous, durable body of work.

Iván: One idea we've been exploring is a dynamic sky frame—a piece adapting the concept from TOTEM’s meditation hut. Imagine an outdoor structure framing the largest patch of clear sky available at any moment, dynamically adjusting to exclude clouds. It would continuously adapt throughout the day, shrinking when cloudy, expanding in clear conditions.

Avery: It captures something central to our interest—the interaction between perception, narrative, and subtle shifts in the environment. These intentional perceptual narratives are challenging to design yet deeply rewarding to explore artistically.

If you have not gotten the chance to see pictures of the show, you can check them out below. Let us know what you think.

In the next few weeks we’ll be publishing interviews with some very cool researchers. After that, probably more art. After that, well we just won’t know till we’re there.

🪨