breath

For twenty years I’ve wanted to make a prayer wheel that turns a spoken intention into a mantra. A Tibetan prayer wheel contains written mantras that are released through turning the wheel, this one releases your voice, your intention into the world.

The idea of keeping only vowels came from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous. Writing about the Hebrew alphabet, Abram describes how the vowels were left unwritten, supplied by the breath of whoever read the text. He connects this to ruach, the Hebrew word for breath, wind, and spirit.

I was interested in what would happen if I kept only those sounds, letting the consonants fall away.

It’s also something like an inverse sigil. In Austin Osman Spare’s method, you remove the vowels and repeated consonants from a written intention, making a mark from what’s left. Here I keep the vowels and make something to hear.

Speak slowly, for up to ten seconds. The recording is analysed on your device, and the vowels are joined into a loop. Turn the wheel to hear them. The faster it spins, the louder the mantra sounds. When it stops, the sound stops.

You can keep the mantra in your browser or download it as a WAV file.

This is still a work in progress. I’m still working on isolating the vowels, so some consonants slip through. Speaking slowly, and stretching the vowels, helps.

I built the wheel using Rust, WebAssembly, and Three.js, working with AI agents, first Claude and then my own harness (named daimon) running Qwen. The instrument uses your recorded voice, without synthesizing new sounds. There is no server or account, and your voice never leaves your device.

breath is part of Caerjar, my ongoing work with ritual technologies for more livable futures. I make instruments, objects, and software that bring together computation, spiritual practice, and the body.

Some of these works turn language into images or sound. Others make instruments for prayer, divination, or collective ritual. I’m interested in what happens when a machine becomes part of a practice, not simply a tool for producing an answer.

Like much of my work, breath performs a small transformation and leaves the rest to the person using it. It doesn’t interpret your intention or tell you what it means. It takes something from your voice, gives it back in another form, and asks you to turn the wheel.