No.2 Earth’s Breath Atlas
Planetary Lung II
Special Edition: The Breath of Waves
Preface: Two Parts of One Lung
To listen is to breathe.
Every sound enters the body as air does—filling, pressing, dissolving. The Planetary Lung began with this intuition: that the act of hearing and the act of being alive are inseparable. Yet no lung breathes alone. Each inhalation asks for an exhalation, each vibration asks for light.
The work unfolds as a conversation between two halves.
The Sonic Lung moves through time, shaping the invisible pressure of air into rhythm and texture.
The Luminous Lung moves through space, translating that vibration into colour, radiance, and shadow.
Between them lies the thin membrane where sound becomes visible and light becomes audible. It is not a boundary but a field of correspondence—the place where a tone can cast light, and a shimmer can resonate like breath.
In this collaboration, each moment of the soundscape calls forth its visual counterpart: the low hum thickens into indigo, the high overtone flashes into silver, the silent pause opens a soft chamber of blue. The lungs trade elements—one inhaling light, the other exhaling sound—until the two rhythms merge.
The haiku that follow are traces of this shared respiration. They mark the turning points of each phase: prelude, inhale, hold, exhale, dissolve, return. Read them as you would breathe—slowly, without haste, letting one language flow into another. Somewhere between the English and the Japanese, between tone and hue, lies the pulse of a living world: one that listens, one that glows.
Listen once through, and let the haiku unfold as breath, not as sequence.
(very subtle, italic, perhaps smaller type — it invites listening rather than scrolling).
I. Prelude — The Silent Intake
a hum before dawn—
silver dust stirs in still air,
eyes learn how to breathe.
II. Inhale — Earth / Stillness
stone holds its heartbeat,
deep tone gathers underfoot—
the sea of lungs wakes.
Lee Ufan(2010)Relatum - A Signal
III. Hold — Air / Suspension
walls of pale horizon,
a sound suspended in blue—
light forgets its edge.
Hiroshi Sugimoto "Time Exposed" @ Benesse Art Site Naoshima
IV. Exhale — Sky / Discharg
small sparks, branching sky,
what leaves the ear enters light—
echo as lightning.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (2024) Enlightning
V. Dissolve — Sea / Absorption
beneath indigo,
wave returns to nameless depth,
silence becomes blue.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (2018/2022) Opticks 062, 163, 050, 061
VI. Inhale - Photosynthetic Roof
thin wind through green glass,
sunlight caught in your shoulder—
a sound begins leafing.
The Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain by Jean Nouvel
VII. Hold — Reflective Walls
marble corridors,
steps repeating into red—
time folds into sound.
The Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain by Jean Nouvel
VIII. Exhale — Window to Water
boats hum into dusk,
terracotta fades to foam—
light sighs back to sea.
IX. Coda — The Planetary Pulse
heartbeat of return,
one lung still listening, one
still learning to glow.
Olafur Eliasson Model Room, 2003
🌫️ Epilogue: The Last Breath
Every rhythm ends where it began—in quiet air.
The sound no longer speaks, but the space it touched still trembles.
If you listen closely, you can feel the echo folding inward,
not vanishing but returning to its source.
The Planetary Lung breathes this way:
one half shining, one half sounding,
each aware that the other exists only through exchange.
What remains after the final note is not silence,
but a delicate equilibrium—
light held in air, air held in light.
Perhaps this is how the world listens to itself:
through every wave that collides and dissolves,
through each breath shared between beings.
Even now, when the last vibration fades,
the lung still moves,
gently, unseen,
sustaining the dream.