It is through breathing that we can draw awareness back to our bodies, rediscover respect for others and for nature, and reconnect metaphysical thought with the living, breathing world, she contends.

This exploration of breath and what it signifies, along with other ideas about how breathing relates to the body, spirituality and culture are part of the inspiration for a new project by scholar Dr Meredith Jones and award-winning designer Suzanne Boccalatte.

Breath will be the third in their Trunk series of books about the stuff of the body: a collection of art, photography, fiction and essays about every aspect of breath, encased in a small, beautifully designed book.

Breath is a motif that runs through art and music. Thanks to Irish avant-garde writer Samuel Beckett we have the world's shortest known play, Breath, (25 seconds), which consists of the sound of a birth cry followed by an amplified recording of somebody inhaling and exhaling slowly.

In 1977, performance artist Marina Abramović and her husband Uwe Laysiepen used their bodies to explore their physical and emotional limits in the video Breathing In/Breathing Out. Locked in what looks like a long kiss they are, in fact, breathing the air from each other's lungs, almost to the point of suffocation.

More recently, Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk produced an entire album about breath, with the working title of Pneuma.

Breathing is also a strong component of many religious and spiritual beliefs, says Boccalatte, even though it is a process we often take for granted.

"What is breath? It is air as a life force ... I am very interested in taking some material from Eastern philosophy. Breath is all-pervasive but you can never capture it so I also like the idea of developing an art exhibition around the book," she says.

Jones, a media and cultural studies scholar at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), describes the Trunk series as a "labour of love" that the two friends funded themselves and published via Boccalatte's eponymous creative agency.

At a time when sales of traditional books are stalling and e-books are still finding their place in the market, Jones and Boccalatte want to create something that will be read more than once, dipped into at random.

"I don't think the book is dead but it is changing," says Jones. "I only buy novels on Kindle now but I still buy academic books and art books.  The Trunk books are Bible-like, printed on very high quality paper and beautiful things in themselves."

All the Trunk books deal with dualities. With the first, Hair, it was our competing feelings of disgust and admiration for body hair and what that says about our ideas about gender, as well as the thousands of different cultural meanings of head hair. With Blood, it was the dual roles of a life force which, when spilt, signals injury or death.

With Breath, the duality is more about consciousness and unconsciousness: we are always breathing but we are usually not aware of it. We tend to think about it only when we lose it or when we have to control it.

The editors are calling for contributions for Breath. The writing could be anything from a scientist writing about respiratory diseases, a free diver describing what happens to the body when the breath is held for extended periods, or a short dissertation on the spiritual connections to breath. The call for artworks is equally broad. The editors are open to any medium.

Jones and Boccalatte will consider submissions of up to 1500 words, in any genre, including fiction and poetry. They might commission a piece of writing to match a work of art or vice versa.

"With these books we think of lists of what we want and then are totally surprised by what we get, so we have to keep an open mind," says Jones.

For more information about Breath go to http://trunkbook.com/trunk/ or contact meredith.jones@uts.edu.au

Read more about the Trunk series got to http://newsroom.uts.edu.au/news/2013/06/in-a-different-vein

This story written and produced by the University of Technology, Sydney, for Brink, a publication distributed monthly in The Sydney Morning Herald