The Breathing Cell is the climactic moment in Marshmallow Laser Feast’s Evolver. At ACMI, this virtual reality experience has been set free from the VR headset and presented in large-scale, awe-inspiring projections, which drops audiences deep inside the landscape of the body to follow the flow of oxygen through our branching ecosystem to a single ‘breathing’ cell – seen in this work.
Breath not only sparks life but also connects us to the natural world through the cycle of respiration
How does oxygen even get into our cells for respiration to happen?
The answer is that the oxygen flows down from a place where there is a lot of it to where there is very little. The air sacs in our lungs contain tiny tubes called capillaries that blood flows through to the heart. The air we breathe has a higher concentration of oxygen than the blood in the capillaries. That means that the oxygen flows through the capillary walls. There’s just enough time for this to happen before the blood in the lung capillaries is pumped around the body by the heart.
From here, oxygen travels through large tubes (the arteries) and small tubes (arterioles) to organs and tissues that have lower concentrations of oxygen than the blood. The energy factories of each cell (the mitochondria) use oxygen up so quickly that their concentration is less than that of the tissue fluid, so oxygen continues its journey into every cell. By this point, the blood has a far lower oxygen concentration and travels back through the veins to the heart and on to the capillaries in the lungs where the cycle starts again.
There is another part of the story. As the oxygen inside the cells helps to break down food molecules it becomes attached to carbon atoms, forming carbon dioxide. This flows out of the cells and dissolves in the blood. It’s then swept off in the blood all the way back to the lungs. By the time the blood arrives, it’s picked up a lot of carbon dioxide produced in the tissues, while the air in the lungs only has traces of it. This leads to a rapid unloading of carbon dioxide into the air sacs, which is then exhaled with each breath.
This cycle maintains the constant flow of oxygen into the body and of carbon dioxide out of it. It’s this carbon dioxide that plants use so effectively, producing oxygen in return for us to breathe!
Credits
Narrated by: Cate Blanchett
Executive Producers: Edward R. Pressman & Terrence Malick
Executive Producers: Cate Blanchett, Coco Francini, Andrew Upton, Nicole Shanahan
Producers: Sam Pressman, Antoine Cayrol
Directed by Marshmallow Laser Feast
An Atlas V, Pressman Film and Marshmallow Laser Feast Production
In Association with Dirty Films
Supported by Nicole Shanahan & Bia-Echo Foundation
Made in Collaboration With Natan Sinigaglia
Key scientific collaborator: The Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS
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