Hyun Cho
<Apnea>
Multiplayer VR, Respiration sensor, Mixed media
2023
Inside Apnea, your presence is synchronized with your breathing. If you hold your breath, you disappear and enter another world.
In this work, I express the metaphor of communication through the media characteristics of VR. Inside Apnea, two audiences wear a respiration sensor and an HMD in separate spaces. When they breathe, they see the actual space through the pass-through lens, and their avatars are visible. But if they hold their breath, their avatars disappear, and they enter a virtual space. The only moment the two players can see each other is when one player is breathing, and the other is holding their breath at the same time. Each time they succeed in seeing each other, one cloud is added to the sky, where the virtual clouds synchronize their breathing.
Through this action, the work speaks about low-resolution communication. Sometimes we are in different spaces but share the same moment, and at times we are in the same place but not together. I think of relationships as moments when you and I exist in different worlds but share the same moments. Even if you are conversing, you may not be communicating. You and I exist as separate entities in the world, and the moments that you exist in my perception of the world become only a momentary point when we communicate. After that moment, you disappear from my consciousness, but that doesn't mean your existence has disappeared. For the moment when you and I exist in the same space, it takes a lot of patience, effort, and sometimes coincidence. And when that moment of communication ends, your presence disappears, but your traces remain.