Text taken from publication ‘Uncomfortable Interactions’.
A ride inspired by Jean-Honore Fragonard’s painting The Swing, which reportedly depicts an erotic scene involving three people: a woman riding the swing, a voyeur in the bushes watching the woman’s exposed legs, and her fiancé controlling the swing via a pull rope.
Breathless, focuses on entertainment and sociality in the mainstream setting of an amusement park. At its heart is a novel interaction technology that is deliberately designed to create a new element of fear and discomfort into rides – a gas mask that is enhanced with respiration sensors and Wi-Fi so that visitors can interact with rides by breathing, requiring riders to simultaneously battle the ride and their own bodily response. Breathless extends this approach by embedding breath sensors into a gas mask which is used to drive a large powered swing. A selected respiration monitor transmitted breathing data to a ride control computer which in turn, actuated a rope swing, pulling it backwards when the rider inhaled and forwards on exhalation.
Premiere of Breathless at SPACE gallery, London.
Due to the natural pendulum nature of the swing, this required a human to breathe in harmony with the swing’s resonant frequency to make the swing go higher. The swing length was chosen to resonate at a comfortable breathing rate of 12 breaths per minute. This core idea was embedded into an overall ride experience whose design was inspired by Jean-Honore Fragonard’s painting The Swing (1767) which reportedly depicts an erotic scene involving three people: a woman riding the swing, a voyeur in the bushes watching the woman’s exposed legs, and a bishop controlling the swing via a pull rope. This was mapped onto a ride structure in which each participant moved between three distinct roles: voyeur, rider, and controller.
Ride schematics.
On arrival, each participant joined a queue, to be fitted with a gas mask when they reached the front. They were then taken to a specific viewpoint where they became the voyeur, watching a floodlit rider swinging in front of them. Once the ride stopped, this rider dismounted and was taken to a seat next to the swing to become the controller. In turn, our voyeur was now led to the swing to become the new rider. At this point the floodlight was extinguished and the controller was now spot-lit from above while they initially controlled the swing, with the rider at their whim. After a while, control of the swing passed over to the rider, which would often involve a noticeably jerky moment of transition if their breathing was out of sync with its movements. After roughly two minutes, the ride stopped, the rider was moved to assume the role of the controller and our new voyeur became the next rider.
