Breathing Machines: A Sonic Exploration of Labor, Desire, and Technology

Bec: “Hold for Three” is an evolving visual tableau and soundscape. Two bodies generate sounds with a range of objects and machines: there is the slap and puff of bellows being compressed, the squeaking of pulleys with every heave of a steel cable, the bright clang of a ceramic tile dropping onto a concrete floor. These amplified sounds increase in pace and urgency until human breath takes over. There are groans, deep growls, and eventually, screams of exertion. The soundscape traverses peaks and troughs across 40 minutes of body-machine collaboration.

Can you talk about how you came to this relationship between object, breath, body, and voice?

Lottie: One of the reasons that we chose to work with these objects is because they create an analogy with the body. Bellows have a dual meaning: a machine that pumps air, typically to stoke a fire, and the sound of bellowing—a scream. Both stem etymologically from the idea of a "bag of air," whether a mechanical pump or the belly producing a guttural sound. That was my starting point—how can the breath of the machine create a relationship between a fleshy body and this mechanical analogy? How can air become breath, and breath become voice?

Kayla: With our sound designer Aleksander Filipaik, we shaped this mechanical breath—the air blowing into the microphone—into something else. It didn’t need a clear pitch to become vocal. We also amplified the bellows’ mechanisms—the creaking hinges, the leather moving in a repetitive rhythm. Sometimes, that repetition makes you think you’re hearing words. So, breath itself starts to turn into voice.

Lottie: And then there’s the idea of voice as identity, as subjecthood. So, in paying attention to the individual sonic characteristics of each of these objects, we give space to the idea that this object could have a voice.

Bec: This relationship between voice and identity is interesting, particularly when you think about the way contemporary technologies identify us through our voices. To merge human and object voices is to move away from that very individualised understanding of voice and identity. I wonder, do you see these things in opposition to one another?

Lottie: One of the ways you can see that opposition is to think about the aspect of embodiment or disembodiment. A common misunderstanding about contemporary voice technologies is that there is no connection to human bodies. But these technologies still encode and contain social relations. There are always human bodies and labour hidden behind any sleek digital interface. Kayla and I were thinking about what other kind of voice a machine could have that would actually reveal those relations.

Bec: There is an intense physicality to the relations you build between yourselves and the machines. You're not speaking, yet your communication is visual, sonic, and bodily. Some objects are stepped on, sat on, or carried—and, in turn, weigh you down and dominate you. There’s an undeniable eroticism in this work. Can you talk about the role of eroticism here?

Kayla: I think that the erotic nature comes partly from working with acting coach ONYX, who focuses on desire as a primary motivation for the performative body. Now, what is desire other than energy driving us to survive? In society, this erotic energy is capitalized, diverted towards productivity. We show in this piece how this sublimation actually aggravates the erotic energy, producing a vulgar sexuality. It spurs competition between neighbouring bodies, but at its core, it’s all tied to survival. In the piece, we go into a physical state of desperation by holding our breath when we’re already exhausted, and that taps into something deeply existential—what drives us, what are we working toward?

Lottie: At times, this is explicitly expressed as sexually charged gestures of dominance and submission. The piece feels primal, tied to survival, labour, and frustration. There’s an abstracted narrative we hold in our minds, even if the audience doesn’t fully grasp it. We imagine ourselves in a factory where we have to produce the very oxygen we breathe. The suspended bellows is both a tool and an overseer in this and we’re negotiating whether to cooperate or compete. The rhythmic pumping of the bellows also connects to the origins of music in collective labour—singing in the fields to keep time, maintaining a collective clock of production.

Bec: I wonder if, within the performance, there is a desire to succumb to a kind of obsolescence. If we became obsolete, we could stop working so hard and turn our attention to things beyond labour. It’s like a death drive, pushing bodies and objects to their limits, knowing that failure is inevitable.

Lottie: That’s a great point. Kayla and I have talked about the bellows as a kind of anti-prosthesis. We worked with designer Anna Cingi to transform the bellows into instruments, sets and costumes. Some are strapped to our bodies, so they feel like extensions, but dysfunctional ones, which reinforce the idea of welcomed obsolescence. Failure or limitation—both human and mechanical—becomes a kind of shared condition, a point of connection between us and the objects.

Kayla: And failure feels more inevitable with physical things. A digital object can be preserved indefinitely, but something exposed to time and space will eventually break down. That decay, that fragility, is part of what makes the bellows so compelling.

Bec: I want to go back to ask you about the sounds. Could you say more about how they were captured and processed?

Lottie: Our sound designer, Aleksander Filipiak, created custom convolution reverbs by recording how the objects themselves resonate. He wanted to explore the objects’ physicality by using them as a kind of sonic filter. He placed a speaker and a microphone on the bellows’ body, sent a signal through, and recorded what came out the other side—basically mapping their internal resonance and reverberation.

Kayla: Then, he applied this reverb to both the mechanical and human breath, blurring the lines between human and machine.

Lottie: Aleksander also worked closely with our dramaturgy and our cues. There were moments when he would intensify the energy with convolution reverb and distortion and others when he would leave the sounds amplified but unmodified. This could still be quite harsh as you’re dealing with air being blown into a microphone. The driest moments weren’t necessarily gentle—in fact they were the most tense and raw. It felt quite exposed.

Kayla: This shift from harsh noise to dry sound feels almost awkward—it snaps you back to reality. The fantasy hellscape dissolves, and suddenly, you’re just a body watching bodies writhing on the floor quite close to you, hearing every breath and squeak. There’s drooling, shaking, accidental vocalizations from pressure on the chest. The same unexpected sounds emerge from both our bodies and the machines. These sounds tie us together, showing that while we can control things to a degree, there will always be unpredictable artifacts that slip through.

Lottie: Yeah, we really wanted to lean into those uncontrolled, almost gross moments, also because we were trying to counter the sleek laptop performance trope. I guess our piece also has a completely different kind of tech-fetishism. It's exploring the desire for control but also confronting the impossibility of that. Rather than the performers being experts, it’s much more of a struggle—one the audience gets pulled into. That intensity keeps us all in it together.