JEL

Description

JeL is an immersive installation designed to elicit a genuine feeling of connection by promoting breathing synchronization between immersants. Participants are immersed in an underwater virtual world, where their breathing is represented in a meditative movement of a jellyfish. When immersants begin to breathe together, the newly established connection fuels the growth of a coral.

These colourful corals populate an initially empty coral reef representing the collective history of interactions. JeL supports a feeling of connection to oneself, others, and nature. JeL has been exhibited at the Fun Palace festival. Currently, we are working on developing the second iteration of this installation, by engaging with somaesthetic design methods.

My role

I lead the research and conceptual aspects of this project, while my colleague John performed the majority of development and took the lead on the aesthetics.

Collaborators

John Desnoyers
Stewart (lead artist)

Patrick
Pennefather

Bernhard Riecke

Publications

Stepanova, E. R., Desnoyers-Stewart, J., Pasquier, P. & Riecke, B. E. JeL: Breathing Together to Connect with Others and Nature in In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems (ACM DIS'20) Conference (Eindhoven, Netherlands, 2020).

Desnoyers-Stewart, J., Stepanova, E. R., Pasquier, P. & Riecke, B. E. JeL: Connecting Through Breath in Virtual Reality in ACM CHI 2019 Late Breaking Work (2019), 1−6.

Pennefather, P., Rizzotti, P., Desnoyers-Stewart, J., Stepanova, K, Riecke, B., Danenkov, L., Ryzhov, V., Saroyan, J.-a., Beltran, W. & Chak, R. A Fun Palace: A Mixed Reality Event Through the Looking Glass of Cybernetics. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 27, 61−80 (2020).

Tags

Wellbeing

Somaesthetics

Virtual Reality

Intercorporeality

Connection

Art

Funding

“Can a bio-responsive gen­er­a­tive art instal­la­tion foster inter­per­sonal syn­chro­niza­tion and connection?”

Stepanova E.R

Philippe Pasquiere

Biosignals

Breath