SEAing Breath

SEAing Breath — SEAing Breath, as in an inhale or exhale of the sea — is a gamified art/science VR project that uses breath biofeedback as an interface. Developed around sea-level rise, climate change, and game-like embodied education, the work lets users experience an adaptive virtual environment that changes with their breathing techniques. Commissioned in relation to the Sea Level Rise Program by Miami-Dade County and the University of Miami.

Rather than presenting climate data as distant information, SEAing Breath turns respiration into navigation, feedback, and relation — making environmental awareness somatic, participatory, and embodied. The piece sits at the intersection of somatic art, immersive virtual reality, and what would later become Hannes Bend's somatic AI and bio-adaptive AI practice: technology that senses the body's state and adapts the environment around it, rather than extracting attention from it.

Presented at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science (Blue Mind Life: The Seven Ages of Water, hosted by Dr. Wallace J. Nichols), Pérez Art Museum Miami, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, HistoryMiami Museum and the Miami Center for Architecture & Design, and in education and public programs across Miami-Dade — used by children and adults alike to embody, through their own inhale and exhale, what changing sea levels feel like from inside the water.

The work operates as game-like, embodied climate education: a breath-biofeedback driven virtual environment in which breathing technique, rather than a controller, moves the participant through rising water.