The trick about breath is that what goes in does not come out. Alveoli, dendritic sacs in the lungs, collect oxygen and exchange it for carbon dioxide, the fuel and waste of cells respiring at microscopic scale. Breath mediates in the word’s fundamental sense. In an unfolding ecological crisis and acute respiratory pandemic, twin technobiological catastrophes, we now face the question: What do media make us?
Breath offers provisional models. In an inhale, we become storage media, collective tissue recording trace inscriptions. Take the ultrafine dust sloughed off a 3D printer, whose heady aromas testify to a technocultural vanguard. In the nozzle’s heat, thermoplastic metastasizes into vapor and particulate matter. Under a tenth of a micrometer—five times smaller than smoke—these particles pass through the lungs and into the blood. With each breath near a 3D printer, its users accrete a plastic materiality. Two decades of media materialism have taught...
