About Breath For Sale

Breath
for
Sale

What is the value of a breath?

What does it actually mean to tokenize a breath, to speculate on the value of breathing, to buy and sell breaths?

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) have caught the attention of public discourse with record sales promising new value practices for digital artists. An NFT is a uniquely identifiable digital representation of a virtual or physical asset recorded into the transaction log of a blockchain through a so-called smart contract (a self-executing piece of code).

While artworks can be minted as NFTs, experiments with blockchain-based tokenization reach far beyond the realm of art. With the “tokenization of everything” rapidly progressing, economic value and contractual exchange are increasingly determining what matters, and what does not matter, in cryptospace (Web3).

‘Breath for Sale’ is a first of its kind NFT (non-fungible token) installation developed in a collaboration between social justice advocates, Web3 developers, legal theorists, technical engineers, and digital artists.
The project explores how breathing – a process intimately entangled with the social and physical environment – registers in a tokenized market enabled by blockchain technology.
For the NFT generation, breathing and atmospheric data (i.e. CO2, O2, ethanol temperature, humidity, time, location, etc.) is collected by an in-situ and custom engineered sensing device. Based on the measurement, a unique visualization for each breathing instance is created.

The question the project addresses is how we can enable collective contributions to a social cause as urgent as a Right to Breathe with wealth, access, and resources distributed so unequally? Moving away from the process of tokenization as a mechanism of extraction, ‘Breath for Sale’ utilizes Web3 tools to create and foster new forms of community empowerment. Far from providing all the answers, ‘Breath for Sale’ is a mechanism that generates a participatory platform for working together on some of the most pressing social, environmental, economic, and legal challenges posed by breathing injustices in complexly entangled and increasingly digitalized worlds.

The Initiative is working toward a possible registry of contributions that operates through non-tradable participation tokens. This registry will connect token holders to a treasury distributing part of the funds generated through the ‘Breath for Sale’ installation to community-driven projects advancing efforts toward a Right to Breathe.

Breathing collectively for a Right to Breathe!

By Code-X-Diagrams
Credits: Logische Phantasie Lab - Concept & Research