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.

Museum-exhibited at the Frost Science Museum (Blue Mind Life: The Seven Ages of Water, hosted by Dr. Wallace J. Nichols), Vizcaya Museum, HistoryMiami Museum, 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.