IIVA Presentation of Research Outcomes: Scott Snibbe: Blow up

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Scott Snibbe: Blow up

Blow Up by Scott Snibbe records, amplifies, and projects human breath into a room-sized field of wind. The installation comprises two devices. The first is a rectangular array of twelve small impellers, which stands on a table on one side of the gallery. This small input device is electronically linked to a large wall of twelve electric fans. The tabletop impellers are spatially and temporally synchronized to the fans in the wall. When a “sender” blows into the first device, “receivers” experience the magnified breathing patterns over their entire bodies. When he stops blowing, the wall continues to play back the most recent breathing pattern, captured in an amplified loop, until someone inspires a new pattern.

Blow Up’s simultaneous processes of recording, translation and amplification is meant to increase the breath’s salience and legibility, while detaching the breath from the body that allegedly produced it. The process of observing this translation and translocation of respiratory activity may prompt the sender to consider the connection between one’s person and the air it exchanges, and, more broadly, the existence of any self independent of the air signaling its presence.