Public - Volume 30, Issue 59, 2019

A 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.

This 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.

This 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.

High 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.

Encounters 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.

Using 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.

[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.

This 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.

This 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.

Contemporary 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.

This 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.

Microbes 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.

For 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.

Guy 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.

This 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.

A 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.