Αναπνέοντας υποβρυχίως: ήχος, τεχνολογία και σώμα στην αυτόνομη κατάδυση

Abstract

This article attempts to answer the question how technology and body are articulated in the case of recreational scuba diving, emphasizing underwater breathing. How do technological applications mutate the experience of breathing, within a specific historical and social context, turning a “natural” function into part of a soundscape, shaping particular embodied experiences as techno-experiences? Scuba diving breathing is mediated by the regulator, which supplies the diver with air at a pressure equal to that of the environment, so as to equalize the increased and constantly changing and depth-dependent pressures exerted on the body. Pressure is not felt in breathing. However, the flow of air supplied through the pressure regulator is perceptible. Breathing is also felt and perceived through hearing, thus forming an integral part of the underwater soundscape of scuba divers. The multi-sensory embodied experience of immersion is assisted in our case by the acoustic dimension of breathing, the result of technological and historical-social processes on the one hand that institutionalize scuba diving as a leisure hobby, in recent years as a tourist practice. The acoustics of the breath enhance the sense of travel in an “other world”, at the border of the physical and the socio-cultural on the one hand and the technological and the biological on the other, contributing to an experience of transition while simultaneously functioning as a normal practice of the self in capitalist late modernity.