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- Volume 30, Issue 59, 2019
Public - Volume 30, Issue 59, 2019
Volume 30, Issue 59, 2019
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Interspecies Communication: An Introduction and a Provocation
More LessBoth an introduction to PUBLIC #59 and a rumination on the difficulty of interspecies communication, this essay argues for art and interspecies communication as means of building mental and emotional qualities useful for re-imagining culture in a time of rapid environmental change, embedding a self-reflexive example in the text.
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Creature Comforts and the Ties that Bind
More LessThis essay is a meditation on the ways in which the scientific community and the arts community alike are feeling their way through the transdisciplinary subject of interspecies communication and how, in the absence of a single systematic program, both art and science can provide their own platforms to challenge how humans habitually think about communicating with animals.Creature Comforts begins with an exploration oflaboratory animals and their relationshipswith their handlers, and ends with a probing look at the use and inclusion of lab animals in contemporary art.
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Animals that Live in the Mirror: On Colonial Bestiaries and Interspecies Architecture
More LessIn 1934 Berthold Lubetkin unveiled a new development designed for a peculiar client and located in a curious place. Lubetkin’s “The Penguin Pool” was the second building that he had built in as many years for the London Zoo and it was meant to house the zoo’s newest acquisition of Antarctic penguins. The Penguin Pool was well received amongst architectural critics and the popular press alike and, as a relatively small concrete oval sunk into the ground with two elevated paths extending from the walls (Fig. 1), it represented a particular modernist ideal of visuality. At the same time though, what’s good for viewing subjects may not necessarily be good for the subjects themselves. And what’s good for people may not necessarily be good for penguins. The pool, designed for the eyes of the human spectator, resulted in a lengthy and list of problems for the penguins. Even that most modernist choice of materials – the decision to form the entire living area out of concrete – proved harmful as many of the penguins developed aching joints from having to walk on the hard surface.
In taking this architectural episode as one that is emblematic of the broader role of the animal in modern architecture, this article explores the curious relationship between animal, human and environment. Specifically, it argues that the construction choices of Lubetkin’s pool make visible a common theme that extends across all of modern architecture: a willful ignorance of, or a concerted effort to control, biological life. Through an analysis of three related objects: the Penguin Pool, an archive of Le Corbusier’s sketches of animals, writings about his experiences in Algeria and hybridized creatures, and the artist Dan Graham’s installations, My Two-Way Mirror Pavilions, this work draws together these attempts to control biological life with colonial discourses on the animality of the colonial subject and on Neo-Darwinist ideas of natural hierarchy. By exploring these discourses as they are related to an imagined incommensurability and stratification of species, this article highlight the discursive constructs that work against shared, communal, and engaging multi species environments. And against these discursive forces, this work closes with a rereading of both interspecies communication and evolutionary agency by pushing against arguments of interspecies incommensurability and focusing on instead on a call to reconsider the environment as a totality of shared, interspecies, experiences.
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Mixing It Up: Primates, Robots, and Other Relations
Authors: Meredith Tromble, Deborah Forster and Rachel MayeriA conversation about their work and collaboration with scientist Deborah Forster and artist Rachel Mayeri, covering their meeting, Forster’s field research with baboons, Mayeri’s Primate Cinema series of video installations, and their experiences with interspecies communication, concluding with a discussion of Forster’s work in animal FACS and robotics.
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INCUBATOR Lab: Where Artists Collaborate with Life
More LessThis article presents the research philosophies, artworks, and practices of INCUBATOR Lab, a bioart research and teaching facility at the School of Creative Arts, University of Windsor, Canada. Research/creation projects produced range from microbial artworks, interspecies performances, social practice projects, and textual analysis, to artworks that can only be seen with a microscope. The facility provides innovations in public engagement through (1) making daily bioart laboratory activities visible to online and local audiences; (2) serving as a gallery where artworks that are unable to leave the BSL2 laboratory setting can be safely displayed for audiences; and (3) providing a multimedia performing arts venue where seated audiences can view theatre and performance events that integrate BSL2 biotechnologies into multimedia storytelling and performance genres. INCUBATOR Lab is an institutional space, an artwork, an ecology, and a biosphere where human and non-human organisms collaboratively and co-dependently produce bioart research and creation.
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Zone of Inhibition: Relating to the Single Cell through Speculative Performance Practice
More LessThis article presents extracts from a short film - a speculative vital materialist tale that reaches beyond a human perception of time, to document a conversation between a past-present-future sentient community-being of cells and their kin, present day humans who are always already symbiotically and parasitically involved in their generation. The conversation took place during a participatory performance workshop held at ASCUS Lab in Edinburgh, 2017, where participants genetically modified E. coli bacteria to hold a thought (DNA with no known biological meaning, only cultural meaning) within their bodies, and were then invited to enter into a speculative dialogue with their distant cellular kin.
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Ways In?
By Kathy HighHigh traces her trajectory as an artist working and collaborating with living systems and companion species over several decades. Her videos, installations, and photographs explore how humans interact, consider, and grow alongside their companions in shared inhabitance of the earth, building upon interspecies relations and communications bit by bit.
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Animal Eyes: Gazing at the Animal in Video Games
More LessEncounters with animals are common in video games, where they are often included to add realism to the gameworld. Encounters with animal subjectivity, however, are not. The anthropocentric nature of video games means that animals are often environmental objects, and sometimes resources, but only occasionally characters, and rarely protagonists. As a consequence, there is no encounter with the animal presence, and often no shared gaze: The look of the animal is instead transformed into something wholly antagonistic (such as in Horizon Zero Dawn), wholly submissive (as in Far Cry Primal) or absent entirely (Red Dead Redemption). Even when video game animals are designed with the intention of “appreciating” the animals, the privileging of their panoptic human spectators just as often results in their objectification.
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“SUBVERSIVE SOMATOLOGY”: EMBODIED COMMUNICATION IN THE EARLY MODERN STAG HUNT
More LessUsing the performative and affective elements of Gilles Deleuze’s conception of “meat,” I argue that the literary representation of stag hunting in the early modern period can serve as a model for an embodied understanding of interspecies communication and interaction. The stag hunt—more than any other form of hunting during the early modern period—is frequently construed in allegorical terms, which sustain human-animal divisions and reinforce notions of human superiority. However, beginning with George Gascoigne’s treatise The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575), I explore how elements of the stag hunt like imitation blur these boundaries, posing a challenge to essentialist conceptions of the human, and opening up more fluid mediums of corporeal communication.I then turn to Jaques’ encounter with the stag in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599) to consider the potential for trans-species communication of material “passions.” My approach resonates with current work like that of Ralph Acampora, which attempts to shift the grounds of humans’ ethical consideration for animals from the psyche to the soma.
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[WHAT’S HAPPENING?] I’M FEELING EMOTIONAL
More Less[What’s Happening?] I’m feeling emotionallooks to how animated GIFS, used as emotional aides in online conversation, might be changing the ways that we relate. While the reliance on GIFs as stand-ins for emotional expressions may be a way to build the social back into online communication and a reaffirmation of the role of emotion in society as an important and even critical requirement; the essay considers how the over representation of fictional characters, animals, and cultural stereotypes selected by algorithms may be shifting culture in ways we haven’t yet realized.
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THE CONVERSATION: Feedback Structures, Ways of Knowing, and Neurodivergence
More LessThis paper discusses communication as a community of feedback systems. Arguing that meaningful communication between human and non-human species is contingent upon first reconsidering human understandings of human consciousness and cognition, the author identifies axes of communication as perceiving-sensing, adjusting-processing, and responding-exchanging, beyond language. Drawing upon theories of enactivism and her work teaching media to neurodivergent students, the author proposes experimental time-based media as a useful model for communication between humans and the not-quite-fixed world of all things that exist, with or without categorization, and between those things themselves.
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A Cacophony of Signals: Woodpecker Sexbots, Squirrel NORAD, and Other Robotic Systems
By Ian IngramThis article discusses the author’s robotic artworks, which consider the human-made body's future as a willful entity and the nature of communication. The robots use computer vision or sound signal processing to search the world for the signals of target species and then attempt to respond through similar gestural and audible signalling. The robots are trying to communicate with the animals and, in part, allow human communion with those animals in ways that human bodies and umwelts don't allow. That human narrative stamps itself heavily onto the projects is confirmed by these becoming things like a hermaphroditic sexbot for Pileated Woodpeckers and a NORAD equivalent for Grey Squirrels.
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“Inter Alia: Aliens and AI”
Authors: Rita Raley and Russell SamolskyContemporary anxiety concerning our efforts to communicate with aliens might be understood in terms of the exponential advances in neural network research (so-termed “Artificial Intelligence”) and the probability that the aliens we encounter are more likely to be alien AIs than organic beings. The premise of our paper is that the disquieting sense that AI possesses, or is possessed of, an external intelligence, one that operates autonomously, unpredictably, and, in our deepest fears, mutinously, is projectively displaced onto extra-planetary aliens. Our paper offers an analysis of Trevor Paglen’s satellite work, The Last Pictures, as well as Eduardo Kac’s Inner Telescope and Lagoogleglyph series. We conclude with a speculative imagining of an AI-archaeologist encountering in the distant future the orbital ring of dead satellites, one of which contains Paglen’s curated image archive.
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Preindividuation, Individuation, and Bacteria: Revisiting Gilbert Simondon’s Philosophy through the Hologenome
More LessThis essay implicitly broaches the question of how science and philosophy—microbiology and metaphysics—work together, reinforcing one another. Its explicit focus is the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, his idea of individuation, and the growing information about bacteria, our multiple microbiomes, and their manifold genomes. The argument that twenty-first century understandings of the personal self must include the microbiome as well as the mind has implications for interspecies communication. The author explores the biological facts that corroborate Simondon’s materialist metaphysics of individuation, rethinking the evolutionary individual and the fundamental place given to competition within Darwinian evolution and placing what she terms a “biotechnical evolutionary individual” at the core of Simondon’s philosophy of individuation.
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Fermenting Communications: Fermentation Praxis as Interspecies Communication
By Maya HeyMicrobes are in, on, and around us at all times, yet we cannot easily communicate with them. How do we (continue to) live with microbial life in ways that allow for our mutual thriving? Using a performative lens, this paper analyzes the material practices of fermentation as a way of connecting with different scales of life. It attempts to challenge conventional understandings of communications (e.g. encoding/decoding models put forth by Stuart Hall) by examining the layered manner in which fermentation engages with matter and meaning. The material practices of fermentation require embodied knowledge to work with microbial life, and the discursive considerations of fermentation challenge anthropocentric thought. Thus, materially and discursively, fermentation functions as a continual form of engagement. Thought of as a form of communication, fermentation helps us to consider some of the invisible relations we have with microbes and connect with micro-species we often take for granted.
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Being Other Than We Are...
More LessFor a number of years, artist Heather Barnett has challenged groups of people to test their capacity for collective action against that of a single celled organism. The experiment, Being Slime Mould, invites a group of humans to operate as a superorganism, taskedwith some fundamental ontological rules of a nonhuman intelligent life form through playful participation.
Being (or becoming) slime mould is of course an impossibility; we can no more become slime mould than we can become badger or bat. The point of the exercise, therefore, is in the trying: the endeavour to put aside human ego and individualism in order to shift perception towards other ways of sensing, knowing and being. Drawing on Barnett’s own artistic practice, and from the fields of ecology, philosophy and speculative design, this paper investigates the motivations and methods of humans to engage philosophically and experientially with the sensory subjectivities of ontological others.
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Pluripotent Selves and the Performance of Stem Cells
More LessGuy Ben-Ary’s installation cellf, utilizes induced pluripotent stem cell technologies to reverse-engineer his own skin cells into embryonic stem which are then re-differentiating down a neural pathway. In cellF Ben-Ary is regenerated as a hybrid living/non-living entity capable of interacting with other musicians in real time and space.Yet recent research into the embryonic stem cell state of pluripotency challenges us to rethink Ben-Ary’s self as not so very different from his living/non-living pluralized cellF.Pluripotency in hES cells is induced and maintained by viral DNA, inserted over time into our genome by retroviruses classified as not-quite-living. This means that the identifying marker for our ability to regenerate many times and selves is inextricably tied to the work of non-living entities. Therefore we may consider the entanglement of pluripotent stem cell and non-living catalyst as necessary for both the endless renewal of life and the distribution of life beyond itself.
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Umwelt Microbiana
Authors: Joel Ong and Mick LorussoThis essay discusses a series of collaborative artworks by Joel Ong and Mick Lorusso envisioning a "Microbial Witness," a quiet but powerful protagonist founded in the interstitial spaces of science, art, and mythology. The artists systematically catalog its umwelt--the environmental factors that affect it-- through the "Microbial Atlas." Ong and Lorusso propose that, through exposure to this artistic research process, their audience may also adopt an ecological/moral responsibility through a shared empathy with, and respect for, the microbial world. This work continues their joint artistic querying of the role and position of the artist as “witness" in the spaces and artefacts of the scientific laboratory.
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On Talking to Bees
More LessA reflection on the evolution of group and swarm communications in a multi-city, international collaborative SSHRC-funded research project in support of native pollinators, considering the communications of the bees to their keepers as well as to each other, and how the land as their artistic collaborator communicates to the human partners (the university, the city, the artists), along with human and organizational signals.
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- Exhibition Review
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Sam Vernon, Rage Wave
More LessSam Vernon, Rage Wave Curated by Olivia K. Young, Gallery 44 Center for Contemporary Photography, Toronto January 12 – February 10, 2018
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NIGHTSENSE
Authors: Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick
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