The Breathing Wall (2004)

“The Breathing Wall” is a PC multimedia murder mystery and ghost story, to be read while wearing a headset with earphones and microphone, with the microphone positioned beneath the reader’s nose (these inexpensive headsets could be ordered with the work which was published on CD). “The Breathing Wall” tells the story of Michael, a young man accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend Lana. She communicates with him through the walls of his cell in prison, sending him clues about who killed her. A considerable part of the story is told in 5 so-called day-dreams, relatively non-interactive multimedia fragments created in Flash by Chris Joseph. Those are interwoven by 4 hypnotic night-dreams, using video and audio and realised with the Hyper Trance Fiction Matrix (the Breathing Book system) developed by Stefan Schemat. This technology, inspired by biofeedback systems used in psychotherapy, synchronises the readers’ physiological response (breathing) with the story – the more relaxed the reader is, the deeper they can be immersed in the story. Breathing becomes the equivalent of the act of clicking, making “The Breathing Wall” a significantly innovative hypertextual work for its time. Astrid Ensslin called it a “physio-cybertext”, a story that needs to be breathed through. In one of the interviews, Pullinger characterised “The Breathing Wall” as very “esoteric” work, which doesn’t work for almost half of its readers because “they get too tense”.

“The Breathing Wall” was funded by Arts Council London and supported by TEXTLAB at trAce. It developed further the ideas from “Branded” that Pullinger was working on when she first met Schemat during a digital storytelling seminar in Munich in 2003. In the Archive you can read “The Breathing Wall Online Journal”. You can also watch videos documenting play-throughs of fragments of “The Breathing Wall”, accompanied by comments on the project overall from Pullinger (presenting the whole work and experiencing one of the nightdreams) and Joseph (experiencing one of daydreams).