&Now 2019 Conference

The FaaS were future-oriented. Every day, they contemplated the question: what kind of ancestor will you be?

Prose writer Teresa Carmody, new media artist Matt Roberts, 3-D animator Dengke Chen, and poet Terri Witek will repurpose computers in an existing Bothell lab to respond to human breath. Each transformation will become part of a larger story built from the computers’ individual data--every breath will both create an onscreen reaction (individual computers) and change an animated world just to one side of our own (projected on large screen/wall) . Participants will move from computer to computer and breath by breath build a world that unfolds on the room’s large screen. Simple biological actions, then, will momentarily converge human and mechanical worlds.

Their conceiving mind quit avoiding their body; their body, they realized, had already FaaD.

Donna Haraway is just one theorist who argues that as we acquire more mechanical parts, and as technology takes on increasingly human functions, we should become more actively hopeful about interspecies interactions. Breathe the Machine challenges us to think of even anonymous, institutionally controlled screens as partners in new, combinatory narratives that converge technology and the human into non-hostile, resilient allies. A computer lab, then, becomes an interactive installation, an archive, a fiction, a world and a landscape. A prompt.

This is how we morph.