"The Breathing Wall": Control Yourself! With Fiction!



Novelist Kate Pullinger, Stefan Schemat, and Chris Joseph ("babel") have created an electronic book called "The Breathing Wall" that has a unique gimmick: you read it while wearing a microphone, and the book's software only allows you to penetrate deeper into the story as a result of your controlled breathing rhythms.The book measures how relaxed you stay during the course of the story, and the more slowly and carefully that you breathe, the deeper you go into story's animated dream sequences that contain mysterious clues to exchanges in the written and spoken segments.From the book's website , where you can read a free sample:"The Breathing Wall" is the story of a man named Michael who is sent to prison for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Lana. Lana was killed the day after they broke up, and in her pocket was an angry note from him which the police used to build a case against him. However, while staring at the walls of his prison cell, Michael begins to have conversations with Lana's ghost, who puts him touch with her sister, Florence. Together, Florence and Michael discover clues to help find the real killer and get Michael out of prison.Pullinger's other works include "When the Monster Dies," "Where Does Kissing End?," "Weird Sister," "The Last Time I Saw Jane," and "Inanimate Alice," a series of online, animated stories about a girl growing up in Northern China."The Breathing Wall" sounds like a promising story, but the development of the Hyper Trance Fiction Matrix biofeedback system makes me wonder what other stories could be told using the same technology. Like...Or maybe...Or what about...And for kids...Who's that breathing on the other end of my telephone line? Is that you, genius?