Charlotte Breaths

Update: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the BOOM festival and the project development are temporarily suspended until further notice.

We understand our social identity in relation to others but we mostly perceive others implicitly, through the traces of their interactions with our surrounding space. What if our urban environments could mediate these traces allowing spatially unrelated people to experience each other’s presence remotely and collectively?

Charlotte Breaths, one of the 12 Knight Foundation winners of Celebrate Charlotte Arts, is a city-scale physical telepresence public art installation of wirelessly connected giant inflatables, placed at multiple sites in Charlotte, NC, during BOOM festival, that will enable visitors in each site to physically experience the presence of visitors in other remote sites, questioning our perception of locality, belongingness, and social identity.

Zero-Sum

Ten cubic-shaped inflatable beacons, each containing 8,000 cubic feet of air, will landmark 10 locations in the city. The beacons share collectively the same volume of air forming a city-scale closed system.

Each beacon features an emoji character and represents the genius loci of its location. Anyone can animate any beacon by sending bursts of air to it using their mobile phones. Sending, however, a burst of air to a beacon requires removing the same burst of air from another beacon.

Beacons illuminate, revealing the identity of the beacons that take their air. Each beacon has a color identity. When a beacon inflates, it illuminates with its own color. When a beacon deflates, it illuminates with the color of the beacon that takes its air.

Inflating a beacon requires a sequence of uninterrupted bursts. Depending on people’s location, point of view, and level of engagement, patterns of cooperation or competition may slowly build up across locations, reflecting the two categorical ways with which we perceive our socio-locational identity: “us versus them" and "here versus there".

Through their reciprocal transformations and monumental size, beacons signify–and actively shape–the collective identities of "transient locals” and “transient outsiders”: strangers who happen to “be there at that time” without otherwise any sense of a common identity, belonging to the place, or awareness of each other.

Each inflatable consists of a 20’x20’x20’ transparent inflated cube that contains a 17’x17’x17’ opaque cube (the emoji beacon) that changes its inflation state and color based on commands it receives from a microcontroller (exact dimensions may change based on site requirements during installation). The external cube provides a safety “glass box” for displaying and animating the internal cube. The internal cube is actuated by two heavy-duty industrial fans that move air between the internal and external compartments.