“Air to Air, a breathing screen“

Stella Kuma
Inés Benítez

April 2018
Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices,
Harvard University Graduate School of Design

The air surrounds us, both in its physical and abstract meaning. It is the invisible and constantly shared medium: a commons. In the physical sense, the air promiscuously travels inside and outside our bodies, blurring boundaries between the interior and exterior of a single entity as well as boundaries between different entities. Between the most intimate and the most public. In an abstract sense, the air contains a shared pool of affect, creating a collectively charged atmosphere that can shape the way an individual feels, thinks and acts. 

This project is inspired by our desire to materialize and isolate the atmosphere, and in doing so, raising questions about the relationship between the physical air and the affective air, and also about the materiality and immateriality of atmospheres. In this work, we impose a finite space that keeps the air from dispersing in physical space, removing the intimate atmospheric engagement of the viewers with the screen. What does it mean to exchange and share the atmosphere, in the physical sense and the abstract sense? Is it possible to contain an affective atmosphere? What is the role of media in this process? 

We are re-establishing an equilibrium between the observed and the abstract, the sensible and the intellectual. With an intermingling of subject and substance, body and world, the intelligible and the rational. Through evocative images of breathing, creating an atmosphere of connection and movement. Invisible, yet tangible.

“Consciousness belongs to those singular moments when the body is tangential to itself” 
(Michel Serres – “The Five Senses”)

 “Although there certainly are atmospheres, whose corporeal effect is scarce and anyway not easy to observe, perceiving atmospheres mostly means being touched by them in the felt-body.” 
(Tonino Griffero,” atmospheres, aesthetics of emotional spaces”)