Serendipitously coalescing with my first installation of the InfoBreath was a field trip with Raphael Attias' class to Duncan Laurie's studio.

Trundling up a gravel road in Elliott's Range Rover while the sunlight glinted off the ocean, I coulda been back in Fiji - well, if the water changed color and the foliage turned green and it was 20 degrees warmer.

We round the bend and come upon... a towering glass structure atop a hill. This was Duncan Laurie's studio. A man in an australian style cowboy hat greeted us, offered tea and pretzels, and invited us in. We could listen to him show us his stuff if we liked, but probably we'd rather just walk around outside, eh.

He really is a generous and open man, and "thoughtful hair" too, no doubt!

And then he took us upstairs, past his hand-made bathroom of found wood from guatemala, up his rusty stairs through his gargantuan etched glass door, and into his glass-bottomed studio, where rocks and skulls ad plants were wired to sensors and audio equipment.

A bizarre trip through through "fringe science" ensued, as we happily booped and blipped with plants and a biofeedback bed while traipsing on the "margins of reality" - learning about radionics and subtle energy, peircian semiotics and href="http://www.ento.vt.edu/~sharov/biosem/geninfo.html">biosemiotics, princeton engineering anomalies research and rocks that turn gravity into electricity.

I'm definitely going back, as I learned that plants generate electronic impulses (leaf potentials) - this much is scientifically accepted and, more importantly, something consistently captureable - so I should be able to have the plants themselves directly generate the pulses that trigger my text flurries in the infobreath! This will be a much more elegant and appropriate method than what I now see as the false appendage that is the breath sensor. The difference is sort of like, well: rather than strapping on a microphone that plays the participants voice's back to them, I can use the plants' own "ears" - if you will - to engage the plant.