Shared Habitats: A Cultural Inquiry into Living Spaces and Their Inhabitants 9783839456477

Citation preview

shared habitats Ursula Damm, Mindaugas Gapševičius (eds.) Shared Habitats

Image | Volume 191

1

shared habitats This book was made possible not only by the precious time and dedication of the authors, but also by the generous financial support of Bauhaus University, Weimar.

Ursula Damm, born in 1960, studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, followed by postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Since 2008, she has held the Chair for Media Environments at Bauhaus University, Weimar, where she established a DIY biolab and the Performance Platform at the Digital Bauhaus Lab. Ursula Damm has exhibited worldwide, including numerous installations on the relationship between nature, science, and civilization. Mindaugas Gapševičius, born in 1974, obtained his MA from Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1999, and his MPhil from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016. Since 2016, he has been conducting PhD research at Bauhaus University, Weimar, where he lectures on media art. Gapševičius has also initiated the setting up of self-organized community labs in Berlin and Vilnius. His artworks question the creativity of machines, and do not presume humans are the only creative force.

2

shared habitats Ursula Damm,Midaugas MindaugasGapševičius Gapsevicius(eds.) (eds.) Ursula Damm,

Shared Habitats Shared Habitats

A CulturalInquiry Inquiryinto into Living Living Spaces and Their Their Inhabitants A Cultural Spaces and Inhabitants

3

shared habitats

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Jay Rutherford Cover image: Ursula Damm Translation: Joy Hawley (“Technical Milieus”), Rebecca van Dyck ("Caring for Life – from Lab to Labbing") Copy editing: Elizabeth McTernan Proofreading: Elizabeth McTernan Typesetting: Jay Rutherford Typesetting assistance: Beatrice Perlato Printing: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-5647-3 PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-5647-7 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839456477 Printed on permanent acid-free paper

4

shared habitats

5

shared habitats

Contents “Introduction,” Ursula Damm and Mindaugas Gapševičius

8

“Environments, Orientation, and Liquid Foundations,” Robert Mitchell

18

Milieus and Umwelts “Shared Habitats and Uexküll’s Bubble,” Andrew Pickering 29 “Technical Milieus,” Henning Schmidgen 47 “Minds and Milieus,” Kristupas Sabolius 69 Experiencing Arts and Sciences Rhizomes, Freya Xia Probst 89 Luminograf #1, Christian Döller 96 Thoughts on Day and Night, Maike A. Effenberg 100 Interfacing for a Sixth Sense, Sebastian Kaye 104 The Pig Simulator, Stephan Isermann 109 microplastic_hyperobject, Maria Degand 113 “The 18th Camel and The Habitats of Thought. On the Paradox of Teaching Technology in the Arts,” Georg Trogemann 117 Shared Habitats “Shared Habitats,” Ursula Damm 170 “Caring for Life – from Lab to Labbing,” Yvonne Volkart 182 Karaoke Bar: Singing in the Language of Flies, Ursula Damm 214 Six Sidekicks for Free, Rico Graupner 224 Algorithm Zoo4 “Miške,” Rico Graupner 229 Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms, Theresa Schubert 232 Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics, Mindaugas Gapševičius 240 Self-Repair Lab, Mindaugas Gapševičius 247 Other Encounters Close Encounter, Jan Georg Glöckner 254 The Poetic Design: From Mimesis to Catharsis, Homero Ruiz García 259 Probing the Planthroposcene, Alexandra Toland 264 “Other Minds: Ruyer, Damasio, and Malabou,” Audrone Žukauskaitė 271 “A Shift in the Role of an Artist,” Mindaugas Gapševičius 294 6

shared habitats

7

shared habitats

Introduction Ursula Damm and Mindaugas Gapševičius One hundred years ago, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy described the so-called “primitive human” as a hunter, a craftsman, a builder, and a physician all in one person.1 According to Moholy-Nagy, these skills were lost in the modern age and the industrial revolution, when humans became specialized in separate labor branches. Artistic practices and art education have forfeited their holistic atmosphere across the disciplines. Moholy-Nagy – a representative of the Bauhaus movement – proposed a “sensual turn” by focusing on our sensory faculties regarding the inventory of our everyday life and environment to re-position the human in their civilization. A hundred years later, we feel the need for change: (we) humans are noticing and are aware of the impact of our activities and technologies over the entire planet. Experiencing environmental disasters – the ecosphere backfiring – we have lost trust in our moral authority and ourselves as creators of a sustainable civilization. As artists, we can observe that our authority as creators is diminishing, while engineers and scientists are designing another civilization with their thinking, their methods, and their products. We find ourselves in a situation where we are making use of the tools and concepts of our technological condition. For us, artists, our sensory faculties have been and are still today the most important point of reference. What has changed is, in the first place, the presence and influence of knowledge, machines, software, networks, and cultivated and engineered nature. However, the contribution of contemporary artists to our everyday life is relatively modest. Does it still make sense today to rely on the senses as the central authority of cultural practice? How can we integrate the sensual experience into the structure of technical systems? 1

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc. 1927).

8

introduction Recently, three exhibitions2 under the title Shared Habitats were carried out by a team from the Chair of Media Environments at Bauhaus University, Weimar. Referring to the environment as a concept from artistic practices of the 1950s that emphasizes the tension between life and art, the team aimed to redesign everyday situations, objects, devices, and practices. Shared Habitats has developed spheres where people from different contexts and with different living conditions, along with other organisms and machines, live together based on the constitution of their own environment. It explores how art can support socio-cultural processes via interfaces, new and old technologies, artifacts, DIY/DIWO experiments, and conferences. The focus of the exhibition is on interactions between humans and their habitats, humans with nonhuman species, and living beings with machines. In the digital and biotechnological age, countless tools and software already contain pre-formulated models of humans, acquired on the basis of stochastic processes. Shared Habitats attempts to circumvent these preconceived models of the human and instead create worlds for the human, her counterparts, and a common environment allowing direct exchange among varied beings. This approach should help to confront a world of predefined techniques and preconceived knowledge with an experience permeated by artistic research. As a working hypothesis, the exhibition proposes expanding sensory perception with the help of technical objects and adapting it to the stimulus sphere of the

2

The exhibition Shared Habitats, curated by Ursula Damm in collaboration with Mali Wu, was first installed in November 2017 at the Art Center NKNU, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where eleven artists and scientists associated with the Media Environments department at Bauhaus University, Weimar, presented their works. The second version of the exhibition, curated by Ursula Damm in collaboration with Ugnė Paberžytė, was installed between May and July 2019 at the MO Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania. The last exhibition was installed as part of the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, in September 2019.

9

shared habitats other being. Thus, it moves away from the traditional exhibition setting of an art-observer binary by setting up a sphere of a shared “environment.” What has changed in our artistic approach compared with traditional artistic formats such as drawing, installation, performance, and the like? Instead of presenting ourselves next to artifacts, we place ourselves in between other creatures and the art audience, sometimes as a moderator, sometimes as a troublemaker, sometimes as a catalyst or promoter. We try to position ourselves within the sensual statements of the whole artistic arrangement, being one voice among many. Are we just in a “dance of agency,” as Andrew Pickering would say? Are we just in a shared activity without hierarchy looking for shared pleasure? Art makes it easy to invent multifaceted forms of togetherness beyond targeted actions – actions that would limit the scope of responses to our actions and ultimately reduce our own space of possibility in a shared performance. The basis for this publication is taken from the exhibitions organized at the MO museum in Vilnius and the Ars Electronica festival in Linz. An accompanying series of conferences became a means of structuring our thoughts in one place. The texts contributed explicitly address the issue of acting and designing a habitat that, by its very nature, is to be shared. The publication aids in understanding the concept of a new artistic approach that has emerged from interactions between artistic, technical, scientific, living, and nonliving things. Essays, both based on conference contributions and other texts, either relate to theoretical discourses raised by artworks, show how young artists today approach cultural issues, or develop situations of living together with other species. Therefore, the publication is divided into the following parts: Milieus and Umwelts, Experiencing Arts and Sciences, Shared Habitats, and Other Encounters. In the first part of the book, we tried to quickly lead the reader into the philosophical context of “sharing” next to the concepts of the milieu and the umwelt. The second part of the book moves forward in defining how the proposed interaction between machines, organisms, and things 10

introduction unfolds. The third part leads the reader to the aesthetic considerations of interaction and includes the core of artworks shown in the exhibitions. Finally, the fourth part proposes related imaginary encounters. The publication starts with essays by Andrew Pickering, Henning Schmidgen, and Kristupas Sabolius. In his essay “Shared Habitats and Uexküll’s Bubble,” Andrew Pickering examines the Shared Habitats exhibition and develops the connection of the exhibits with our artistic agenda.” Andrew Pickering, an expert in cybernetics, talks about the opportunities and risks of acting in technical and biological systems. In the same way that cybernetics – which, in its time, was still a societal endeavor as a whole – addressed not only its technologies, but also the interplay of technology and civilization, Pickering offers modes of action for the living world. For Pickering, the proposed agenda is, first of all, about couplings between humans and nonhumans. Departing from Uexküll’s idea of the umwelt and its similarity to a soap-bubble, Pickering looks for alternatives to get out of these bubbles. Referring to Lovelock and Margulis’s concept of Gaia, he then examines the responses of species to their respective umwelts, and learns from interactions with other species. By bringing Ursula Damm’s artworks into the discussion, Pickering describes them as decentered co-productions of people and to insects, and concludes that the Shared Habitats exhibition is about symmetric connections and collaborations between lively partners. The essay “Technical Milieus,” by Henning Schmidgen prepares the historical ground on which artists can make use of science as material for their experimental practice. The text provides an overview from a historical perspective on a technical object as if it had its own umwelt, just like organisms have their umwelts. This idea is presented in a broader context of ecological problems caused by technology. In his contemplation of the umwelts of technical objects, Schmidgen begins with Leroi-Gourhan, for whom technology served as a key mediator between the intellectual capital and material conditions in which we live, and continues with 11

shared habitats Simondon’s interpretation of technical objects having and also developing their infrastructure. How do technical objects sound if their environmental conditions differ? Taking into account the idea of the umwelt defined by Jacob von Uexküll as the specific world of an organism, while also referring to Simondon, Schmidgen proposes that technical objects are to be seen in response to their associated milieus, and as having umwelts analogous to those of organisms. Ultimately, he proposes that ideas brought by Simondon open up an archaeology of industrialization, which, again, raises further geopolitical issues and implicates the reader in their own conflicted umwelt. Having referred to technical objects with their abilities to reflect their own umwelts, Schmidgen brings us a step further into the poietic abilities of technical objects – something that could be considered as a source of inspiration for artistic action. But how may technical and natural elements come together in an artistic agenda? In his essay “Minds and Milieus,” Kristupas Sabolius uses the term “milieu” to rethink two positions: the associated milieu of Simondon and the sympoietic systems of Dempster. On one hand, the milieu is understood as an environment being reflected by the individual, and, on the other hand, sympoietic systems transform themselves within the changing environment. If in an associated milieu we see the milieu as mediating the relation between technical and natural elements, in sympoietic systems, we see mutual development and shared creativity. In his essay, Sabolius concludes that the interaction of minds and milieus contributes to imagination and the validity of the nonhuman mind. Everything – bacteria, fungi, swamps – opens up for the processes of making-together. The second part of the publication dives directly into an artistic agenda that uses technical and natural elements. It starts with a number of artworks, including Rhizomes by Freya Xia Probst, Luminograf #1 by Christian Doeller, Thoughts on Day and Night by Maike A. Effenberg, Interfacing for a Sixth Sense by Sebastian Kaye, The Pig Simulator by Stephan Isermann, and microplastic_hyperobject by Maria Degand. All these works 12

introduction give an idea of how artists use scientific methodologies and available technologies for their purposes. The works transition into an essay by Georg Trogemann, who reports from his many years of teaching at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. In his essay, Trogemann introduces the parable of the 18th camel, referring to the “two cultures,” the historically grown gap between the humanities and arts on one hand and sciences and technologies on the other. Trogemann proposes inventing other, unconventional narratives to achieve new ways of understanding and practicing technology. The starting point for the reflections employed here is the confrontation with two different forms of thinking and the need to do justice to both. As the production of artworks is about poiesis, Trogemann is looking for new narratives about and with technology to fill the gap between technology and art. Often, Trogemann refers to stories that create meaning and that influence how we perceive the artificial environment we live in. Only if we become aware that alternative forms of our current narrative are possible can technology become an integral and natural part of our culture. In this respect, the nonfunctional use of technology in the arts is very important. The third part of the book continues with the educational perspective of the Chair of Media Environments of Bauhaus University, Weimar, and sets up the aesthetic and conceptual basis for the Shared Habitats exhibition. Referring to Moholy-Nagy’s teaching philosophy of focusing on our sensory faculties, Ursula Damm, in her essay “Shared Habitats,” introduces her concept of creating works of art at Bauhaus University today. At the same time, the essay leads the reader into an understanding of the works of the Shared Habitats exhibition. Considering the environment as an organizing concept of artistic practice in the Chair of Media Environments, Ursula Damm lays out a focus on interfaces to support various species in negotiating their habitats. Here, students develop an understanding of living beings while using tools and methodologies practiced in the sciences. Theoretically, these ideas are grounded with what Andrew Pickering 13

shared habitats describes as the “dance of agency,” an emergent world of heterogenous elements including humans and things. Damm also refers to Jakob von Uexküll and his concept of the umwelt, defining the internal “world” of a living being as a result of interactions with its environment. Finally, while proposing technology-enhanced feedback systems, Damm concludes that the Shared Habitats exhibition moves away from an art-observer dynamic to a shared environment setting. After this introduction to the practice of art, Yvonne Volkart, from the perspective of an art critic, looks at the related artistic practice of care in technological environments in “Caring for Life – From the Laboratory to Labbing.” In her essay, Volkart draws from Pinar Yoldas’ conserved fictional organisms in glassware, and proposes developing the culture of labbing as the next step in freeing artistic aesthetics from the aesthetics of a scientific laboratory. She points out that, while Pinar Yoldas creates artifacts of speculative beings that have evolved from an environmental excess of waste, the Shared Habitats exhibition executes experiments with living organisms right in the exhibition setting. Volkart then discusses works from the exhibition: Probing the Planthroposcene: Excerpts from a Dis-Service Society by Alexandra Toland, Drosophila Karaoke Bar by Ursula Damm, and Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics by Mindaugas Gapševičius. While Toland moves her labbing directly into a field where plants prosper, Damm brings the animal into the museum and proposes that the audience sing together with fruit flies within the exhibition itself. Volkart ends by highlighting the importance of maker culture as a practice of overcoming the division between artists/performers and science, but also between artists and audience. Volkart concludes that, by offering do-it-with-others practices, Gapševičius, instead of mediating and sharing knowledge, curates and takes care of a collective context. The works that follow creatively approach the theme of the exhibition: Drosophila Karaoke Bar by Ursula Damm, Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics and Self-Repair Lab by Mindaugas Gapševičius, Six Sidekicks for 14

introduction Free and Algorithm Zoo4 “Miške” by Rico Graupner, and Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms by Theresa Schubert. Finally, the last part of the book transits into imaginary states of technical and natural elements, something that goes beyond direct interaction, but still reflects the human next to the other creature. The reader is introduced to the works Close Encounter by Jan Georg Glöckner, The Poetic Design: From Mimesis to Catharsis by Homero Ruiz Garcias, and Probing the Planthroposcene by Alexandra Toland. Open imaginary positions are also presented in essays by Audronė Žukauskaitė and Mindaugas Gapševičius. To rethink our relationship with nonhuman others and their environments, philosopher Audronė Žukauskaitė, in her essay “Other Minds: Ruyer, Damasio, and Malabou,” proposes three positions regarding the relation between consciousness and organic matter. On one hand, she introduces Raymond Ruyer’s idea that organic and perceptive consciousnesses are interrelated. On the other hand, Žukauskaitė brings in Antonio Damasio’s homeostatic imperative, which he defines as a nonconscious sensing shared by all organisms, big and small. Finally, she shares Catherine Malabou’s position, which proposes that our subjective consciousness cannot access our organic consciousness and concludes that there is a need for a general theory of organic consciousness that incorporates different “kinds of minds.” Following Malabou’s line of thinking, Žukauskaitė illustrates the idea with Robertina Šebjanič’s artwork Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva sonification, which speculates on a possible communication between humans and jellyfish. The cohabitation is also explored in the essay “A Shift in the Role of an Artist,” by artist Mindaugas Gapševičius, which aims at explaining in what ways, by using tools from one of his projects, symbiosis between the humans, microorganisms, and chemical compounds could unfold. Starting from “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab,” a workshop held by Marc Dusseiller at Pixelache festival in Helsinki in 2016, Gapševičius 15

shared habitats tries to deconstruct the role of an artist in a laboratory setting as well as to define the collaborative component of a workshop. Gapševičius refers here to Volkart’s lab aesthetics, which he attempts to overcome by breaking through the rigor of the protocols of scientific experimental arrangements, such as in his installation Introduction to Microbial Therapy, which provides a strategy for experiencing the ecosystem through the consumption of fermented foods. The main focus here is on the experience of the participants, who are ultimately the producers of the (artistic) added value. Gapševičius concludes that, within the workshop settings presented, the participants, technologies, and other organisms contribute to the artworks with their input, and that there follows a shift in the role of an artist from being central to being a mediating figure. Perhaps the decentralization of the artist through their role as mediator is a nice way to frame this whole publication. Mediation could be considered a medium, or something that enables interaction among actors. And this mediation could perhaps merge into what we consider to be the contexts of individuals in new environments and the habitats of many species. Without this interaction, we would have neither Uexküll’s umwelt nor Pickering’s dance of agency. With no mediation, there would not be any Shared Habitats either. All the contributions to this publication by writers, artists, technologies, and other organisms invite the reader into new experiences and new imaginaries. The reader is also invited to rethink the role of art and the role of the artist within umwelts, milieus, and habitats.

16

introduction

17

shared habitats

Environments, Orientation, and Liquid Foundations Robert Mitchell As Ursula Damm and Mindaugas Gapševičius note in their introduction, the three Shared Habitats exhibitions that preceded this volume sought to expand “sensory perception with the help of technical objects and [by] adapting it to the stimulus sphere” of other beings, whether these latter were fruit flies, pigs, mushrooms, or other non-human denizens of our shared world. This volume documents those art projects, and connects those descriptions to analyses of theoretical and philosophical approaches that can help us to understand better the implications of these artworks. These theoretical and philosophical approaches include the Umwelt (environment) theory of theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll; philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon’s concept of the associated milieus of technologies; the theory of consciousness and self-survey of philosopher of biology Raymond Ruyer; environmental scientist M. Beth Dempster’s concept of sympoiesis; Michel Foucault’s project of mapping the history of different forms of care of the self; and philosopher Catherine Malabou’s analysis of neuronal and corporeal plasticity. For readers of this volume who have experienced in person some or all of the artworks described here, these theoretical contributions can extend and amplify the experiential reorientations enabled by the artworks themselves. For readers who have not engaged many or any of these artworks in person – and this may perhaps be a majority of the readers of this volume – the theoretical contributions and artwork descriptions can jointly help establish an openness to, and orientation toward, the lessons and learning facilitated by the exhibitions. In this introduction, I would like to make a contribution – admittedly minor – to that process by reflecting on three points that are arguably already implicit in the volume, but that can perhaps helpfully be brought even more fully into the open. 18

introduction My first point concerns one of the guiding concepts for Shared Habitats, Uexküll’s concept of the umwelt. As Andrew Pickering notes in his contribution to the volume, Uexküll’s primary emphasis is on the unbridgeable differences between the umwelts of the various species of our world. The umwelt of the tick, for example, is simply other and different than the umwelt of the human. From this perspective, each species seems to be trapped inside its own soap-bubble-like umwelt, and cannot make contact with the umwelts of other species. Yet Uexkull’s account is more complicated than this initial description might imply, and the complexity of his theory likely accounts for his appeal to many of the artists in this volume. In many of his asides and examples, Uexküll suggests that umwelts are not in fact as unbridgeable and unbreakable as other parts of his account might suggest. In the case of humans, it turns out there is not just one human umwelt, but multiple umwelts, which correspond to, among other factors, age and occupation. Uexküll contrasts, for example, an oak tree seen within the umwelt of the forester with that same tree as seen within the umwelt of a child. Because the forester focuses on turning trees into wood, he does not see those aspects of the oak prominent for the child, such as the “bulging bark which resembles a human face.”1 Uexküll also describes briefly the umwelts of the astronomer, the deep-sea researcher, the chemist, and the physicist.2 While Uexküll’s stress in these examples is still on what divides umwelts – the oak tree seen by the child is not the same as that which the forester sees, and the umwelt of the chemist is not that of the physicist – it is also the case that all foresters, chemists, and physicists were once children, and a forester can become a physicist, or vice versa.

1

Jacob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 128.

2

Ibid., 133–34.

19

shared habitats In other words, human individuals not only can move between various human umwelts, but they do so as a matter of course. Nor is such movement between umwelts necessarily restricted to humans. As Pickering notes in his essay in this volume, Uexküll suggested that a guide dog for a blind person must learn to recognize “marks” in the dog’s environment that would not normally “interest him [the dog],” such as a curb, but that “are in the blind person’s interest” 3 (see Pickering, page 34). As film theorist Inga Pollmann has noted, Uexküll’s descriptions and exemplifications of specific umwelts often relied on technologies and media, such as film, the phonograph, and experimental devices. Pollmann suggests that Uexküll’s umwelt theory in this way opened up two paths for subsequent theorists, critics, and art practitioners, depending on whether commentators neglected or embraced the importance of these mediating technologies for Uexküll. The first path, which Pollmann calls “the path of man,” was represented by authors such as Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Martin Heidegger, who were generally uninterested in the role of technologies in Uexküll’s account, and used Uexküll’s theory primarily as a means for distinguishing between the capacities of humans and those of all other animals.4 Pollmann calls the other route “the path of alienation (or the path of the animal)”; this path was represented by film theorists and artists such as Blaise Cendrars, Jean Epstein, Walter Benjamin, Adolf Behne, and Franz Marc. Rather than using umwelt theory to distinguish between humans and animals, travelers along this second path instead sought to “cross-breed human, animal, and technological perceptions.”5 For these travelers, technologies such as film were a key means by which humans could allow themselves to be opened to, and in a sense be pos3

Ibid., 100.

4

Inga Pollmann, “Invisible Worlds, Visible: Uexküll’s Umwelt, Film, and Film Theory,” Critical Inquiry 39, 4 (2013): 781.

5

Ibid., 782.

20

introduction sessed by, the umwelts of non-humans. This path also inspired the creation of the 1937 “A Dog’s World” diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in which visitors could press a button and “see” a staged room as a dog would see it.6 Stephan Isermann’s inventive The Pig Simulator (page 109) follows and extends this latter path, though the specific use of technology in Isermann’s project suggests that the purely visual engagement of a project such as “A Dog’s World” (especially when set within the context of a natural history museum) is perhaps often not enough to break out of one’s own soap bubble. Rather than allowing participants to observe comfortably the world of a pig from over its shoulder, Isermann instead forces humans into pig-like postures and movements, and situates participants in a virtual reality world based on the hybrid umwelt of industrial meat production, within which all pigs have one rather unpleasant final destination (pork). It is worth stressing that if The Pig Simulator allows participants to inhabit briefly and obliquely the umwelt of pigs who live in meat production facilities, it does so not simply because it forces human beings to crawl around on all fours and see the limited world of the meat facility from that vantage point. That physical position is, of course, pig-like – but it is also dog-like, horse-like, mouselike, alligator-like, and so on. What presumably makes this experience feel specifically pig-like are also the many cultural associations, ranging from servitude to sexuality to play, of crawling around on all fours in public in front of others. The Pig Simulator in this way suggests that catching a glimpse of the inside of another umwelt is not simply a matter of using technologies to see (or hear or feel) what that other entity sees (or hears or feels), but also, and equally, a matter of exploiting cultural aspects of our own shared umwelts that can orient us away from our human worlds and toward the worlds of others. 6

Inga Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and the Question of Life (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 103–8.

21

shared habitats My second point concerns the orienting capacity of these artworks and the theoretical pieces in this volume. It seems fair to say that, for a significant majority of humans living in Europe, North America, and Asia, our current umwelt is largely determined by what geologist Peter Haff calls the “technosphere”: that is, the global and “interlinked set of communication, transportation, bureaucratic and other systems that act to metabolize fossil fuels and other energy resources.”7 One consequence is that we devote a considerable amount of attention to technologies, especially computers and screens, and very little to plants, animals (except as pets), and what we used to call “the natural world.” Even finding opportunities to attend to non-domesticated plants and animals is not easy, for, as urban historian Chris Otter notes, many of us have in effect come to occupy enclosed tubes, rather than a landscape or globe: The technosphere allows humans progressively to abandon a largely outdoor existence, and to retreat into increasingly sealed, climatecontrolled spaces. [. . .] The technosphere is a new phase in the history of human niche-construction. It is ruthlessly cleansed, with sanitized surfaces, vacuum cleaners, disinfectants and antibacterial soaps. [. . .] Microbes and insects are largely (if imperfectly) expelled from human settlements, while congregating, thriving and evolving in infrastructural niches. Pets and plants, meanwhile, are welcomed, while livestock inhabits its own increasingly hellish, mechanized zootechnosphere.8 While we of necessity encounter the artworks of Shared Habitats within the technosphere, they nevertheless provide opportunities to develop new forms of attention (or, following Georg Trogemann’s discussion here, new 7

Peter K. Haff, “Technology as a Geological Phenomenon: Implications for Human Well-Being,” in A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene, eds. C. N. Waters, J. A. Zalasiewicz, M. Williams, M. A. Ellis, and A. M. Snelling (London: The Geological Society, Special Publications, 2014), 395.

8

Chris Otter, “The Technosphere: A New Concept for Urban Studies,” Urban History 44, 1 (2017): 151–2.

22

introduction Foucauldian practices of “care for the self ”). As Ursula Damm notes, the exhibition in one sense continues Bauhaus architect Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s commandment to the artist “to penetrate yet-unseen ranges of the biological functions, to search the new dimensions of the industrial society and to translate the new findings into emotional orientation” (page 221). Yet the artworks here also enable orientations that aim to lead us at least a partial step outside an industrial society that has become far more encompassing than Moholy-Nagy could likely have imagined. Freya Xia Probst’s Rhizomes exemplifies this capacity of these artworks to orient us away from the dominant coordinates of the technosphere. Probst describes this work as “[e]xperiments with pearls, small gears, the positioning of seeds or different mediums,” which then “lead to different plant responses,” and result in wearable articles of clothing. To view the results of this work is to reflect on Probst’s own forms of attention that made the work possible; by channeling Probst’s form of attention, we can also begin to observe in our own lives the various relations among biological media, plants, and animals (including humans) that occur at the borders of the technosphere. Ursula Damm’s Drosophila Karaoke Bar is another compelling example of such reorientation, for her work enables participants to attune themselves aurally to fruit flies. Mindaugas Gapševičius’s projects also exemplify this capacity for reorientation, in this case by focusing our attention on microorganisms: SCOBY, for example, is a “symbiotic culture with bacteria and yeast,” a “‘culture’ that is also an old fermentation technique” (Volkart’s description: pp. 197–202). My final observation, which emerges out of my first two points above, bears on how we should understand the nature of this reorientation. It is tempting, channeling Marshall McLuhan,9 to see these media projects as enabling extensions of existing human capacities (or, to draw more on

9

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994).

23

shared habitats Uexküll’s work, as enabling us to expand the number of umwelts to which we have access). That seems to me, though, the wrong way to understand these projects. Such an interpretation assumes a connection between capacity-extension and control that many, and perhaps all, of these works contest. Becoming attuned to a shared habitat is likely a matter of relinquishing at least some aspirations for control. From this perspective, Henning Schmidgen’s discussion of Simondon is especially helpful. As Schmidgen notes, [ f ]or Simondon, the human body does not solely consist of more or less clearly defined organs and limbs. It also possesses a liquid foundation (Deleuze calls it the “organless body”), and it is this splashing, inner milieu which humans draw upon when they invent technical objects that act as genuine mediators (médiateurs) between artificiality and naturalness. It is this mediation that allows the forces, potentials, and virtualities contained in life, and thus also in human beings, to be brought to the forefront. (p. 60) This is an extraordinarily helpful point, and it orients us toward images of fluidity and all of their attendant forces, such as pressure, elasticity, flows, and eddying. These latter seem like especially useful means for understanding both how earlier technologies have “act[ed] as genuine mediators (médiateurs) between artificiality and naturalness,” and how new technologies might more productively operate in our own era of climate change and rising ocean waters. This also provides us with a wonderful image for thinking further about the specifically artistic uses of technology instantiated in the works in Shared Habitats, and the ways in which they reactivate and reorient that liquid foundation.

24

introduction

Robert Mitchell’ s (*1969) research focuses on relationships between literature and the sciences in the Romantic era, as well as contemporary intersections among information technologies, genetics, and commerce, especially as these have been played out in the legal, literary, and artistic spheres. His most recent work has focused on the theory and practices of experimentation in both the arts and sciences, the history of vitalism, and the relationship between aesthetics and biological concepts of population.

25

shared habitats

26

shared habitats

Milieus and Umwelts

27

shared habitats

28

Milieus and Umwelts

Shared Habitats and Uexküll’s Bubble 1 Andrew Pickering “Shared habitats” can mean many things. In one sense, all habitats are shared. There’s one world and we’re all part of it, humans and nonhumans, people, organisms, machines, objects. But the Shared Habitats exhibition points towards something more definite. It is about links between humans and nonhumans. So I want to think about sharing in terms of constitutive and transformative connections between worlds, specific links that make a difference. And the first thing that strikes me is my lack of connection to so much of what surrounds us. I like watching birds, for example, but there’s no real connection between me and the sparrows that hop around our garden or the rooks that zoom overhead. I don’t know what they’re up to, and they hardly seem to notice me, and that is true about most of the nonhumans with whom I share a space. We are surrounded by entities that we cannot relate to or latch onto. And this lack of contact with so much of the world around us is what first struck me in thinking about this meeting. In a way, it’s a meeting about solipsism, absences, and missed connections. We can start thinking about this with Jakob von Uexküll’s famous discussion of umwelts, or lifeworlds, which he introduces with the image of a soap-bubble: “[to] glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow . . . we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world.”2 And this metaphor of the bubble works in two ways. First, it implies we live in something like Plato’s cave. We don’t perceive the world as it is; we see only those aspects that we are biologically 1

Exhibition Shared Habitats, MO Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania, 5 May 2019.

2

Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. trans. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), 5.

29

shared habitats and functionally tuned into, as if they were displayed on the inner surface of a bubble. Uexküll’s memorable first example is the tick, which registers the smell of butyric acid and the warmth of flesh – and that’s all. This single smell and the warmth are the tick’s umwelt – the world as it impinges on the tick, what the tick sees on the inside of its bubble. The simplicity of the tick’s umwelt is striking, which is no doubt why Uexküll began with it, but he intended his observations to be general. Every species, including humanity, has its own umwelt. None of us experiences the whole world just as it is. The second aspect of the metaphor is that we are trapped in our bubbles. If I could get into the umwelts of the sparrows and the rooks, I would know what they are up to, but I can’t. This, of course, explains my puzzlement about all the nonhuman beings that cross my path – our umwelts don’t connect. We can take the bubble metaphor further. We should think first about what I call bubble-centrism. In current political discourse, we talk about the “Washington-bubble” or the “Westminster-bubble” to emphasize that politicians in the centers of power can’t see what’s happening outside. As the 19th-century theologian Ludwig Feuerbach put it: if the birds had a god, it would have wings.3 Likewise, the human umwelt in general fosters what we could call human-centrism, or humanism for short – a vision of the world as centered on, and even existing for, us, with all other beings as peripheral, marginal, not very important, just like the sparrows in the garden. Human-centrism is understandable from an umwelt-perspective, but it’s very important to grasp that it fosters a perspective on the world in which there is no genuine sharing. Humanism instead paints a dualist

3

“If God were an object to the bird, he would be a winged being; the bird knows nothing higher, nothing more blissful, than the winged condition.” In Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (London: Trubner, 1881), 17.

30

Milieus and Umwelts picture in which we are the masters of all – we are in command and everything else exists for our benefit – and we can and therefore should reconfigure and exploit the nonhumans to suit ourselves. This attitude, which Martin Heidegger called “enframing,” 4 was fairly harmless a couple of centuries ago, but is increasingly stupid and perverse in these days of global warming, species extinction, and environmental disasters, when it has become obvious that we are not actually in control, and that our relations with others are rebounding to haunt us. James Lovelock, the inventor of Gaia, refers to us now as a “planetary disease.”5 That, I take it, is at least a part of what this gathering is about. One idea behind the title Shared Habitats is that we are all in it together, and that we need to see that humans genuinely share the world with all the other organic and inorganic beings, and that none of us, including humans, are in charge, at the center of the action. In that sense, humanity is on the same plane as dogs and cats, rocks and stars. So here we’re trying to challenge bubble-centrism, umwelt-centrism – possibly for the good of the planet or perhaps just for fun. One aim of the artworks in the exhibition is, I think, to focus our attention on this levelling by making new and striking connections between people and things, new channels for sharing. I call this ontological theatre, staging dramatically a vision of how the world is and our place in it. I will mention some artists and artworks as I go along, but my overall aim is to think more generally about human/nonhuman couplings, as a way to widen the context for this meeting. So, what is to be done? How can we escape from our human-centered perspective? That’s what I want to think about. If we follow the bubble 4

Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 3–35.

5

James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (London: Penguin, 2007), 13.

31

shared habitats metaphor, we have to start by thinking about bursting bubbles. If we’re trapped in an umwelt-bubble, maybe we should just pop it. Very simple, but most people would say that it can’t be done. We can’t escape from all possible umwelts and experience the world in a direct and unmediated fashion. Uexküll ended his essay on umwelts by asserting that “the One,” which he also called “Nature” (both with capital letters), “remains forever barred to all Umwelten.”6 Aldous Huxley, in his classic 1954 essay The Doors of Perception, thought otherwise. His experience of taking the psychedelic drug mescaline was that it gave him access to the awesome “suchness,” as he called it, of being, seeing everything as just itself in all its glory rather than as an instance of something else. His metaphor was one of the brain as a “reducing valve” which cuts down the richness of the world, leaving only those aspects of functional interest to us to be our umwelt. For Huxley, mescaline somehow bypassed the reducing valve in what was, importantly, a profoundly non-dualist, non-human-centric experience. He spoke of seeing the dharma-body of the Buddha in the hedge at the bottom of the garden, and of actually becoming the leg of the chair he was staring at.7 So perhaps it is possible to break out of our umwelt entirely and experience ourselves as one with all the beings around us – the subject-position that Arne Naess’s deep ecology also aims at. But not everyone agrees that psycho-active drugs simply burst through the human-umwelt. In his account of Amazonian shamanism, Davi Kopenawa described how a combination of rituals and plants gives him access to an umwelt very different from our everyday one, inaccessible in ordinary states of consciousness and populated by spirits he calls xapiri.8 Importantly, the xapiri are 6

von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” 80.

7

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper, 1954).

8

Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

32

Milieus and Umwelts genuine and fearsome agents capable of killing people who approach them wrongly. And this points to an interesting symmetry: just as the shaman opens his umwelt to the spirits, he also opens the spirits’ umwelt to him in a dynamic feedback relation of give and take – as if I could open up my world to the sparrows and vice versa. The shaman thus lives on a level ontological playing-field with the spirits, a decentered space in which neither the human nor the nonhuman is fully in control. This sort of levelling is, I think, what Shared Habitats is aiming at – putting us in our place, showing us that we are just part of a lively world that carries us along. At this point, we should let the bubble metaphor go. Kopenawa’s story suggests we need to think not so much about bursting or fusing bubbles as about making partial connections between umwelts – finite links between the worlds of different species. How might that go? We could start with language. If the sparrows could talk about their umwelt, I might finally understand what they are up to. Of course, Wittgenstein famously said that if a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand it. This is not entirely true. Chimpanzees have learned to speak in sign language; Irene Pepperberg has genuine conversations with her parrot Alex, who can count and classify objects and request specific rewards.9 So we can engineer some sorts of crossovers in language, but they are limited and not very striking. As Wittgenstein would have predicted, the chimpanzees and parrots have not told us anything interesting about what it’s like to be a monkey or a bird. As Vinciane Despret argued, an animal that can speak to us is already a strange hybrid; it speaks as a parrot that is somehow attuned to human beings, not a pure representative of parrot-ness.10 9

Irene M. Pepperberg and Jesse D. Gordon, “Number Comprehension by a Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus), Including a Zero-Like Concept,” in Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119 (2005): 197–209. 10 Vinciane Despret, “The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds,”

33

shared habitats So, at this point, I want to move from language as the medium of exchange to performance, and I want to think about shared habitats at the level of doing rather than words. This offers us many more examples to think about. Uexküll himself discussed a sort of performative (rather than verbal) attunement across species. Guide dogs for the blind, for example, learn to avoid obstacles like kerbs that don’t matter to the dogs but that blind people might trip over – the dog’s umwelt becomes tuned, we could say, to human needs. Donna Haraway talks about competing in human-canine agility trials in which she and her dog need to pay close attention to the actions and wishes of the other to get round the course – a feedback coupling at the level of action, figuring out and responding to what the other wants – a nonverbal coupling that Haraway interestingly calls love.11 Vinciane Despret talks about couplings between cows and farmers, when the cows, for example, somehow communicate to the farmer that one of their number is in trouble, such as in a difficult birth. “And they’ve taken me to the cow. They’ve all made a semi-circle around us along the fence. They’ve waited there and they’ve taken me to the cow.”12 Importantly, Despret says that this kind of communication between worlds happens in traditional farming but not in modern industrial farming. In the former, the cows are free to act and thus to relate their worlds to the farmer’s and vice versa; in industrialized farming, the cows are, so to speak, pinned down in production facilities and can tell us nothing. We can come back to this idea of pinning down in a moment, but the point to emphasize is that we are not, in fact, completely imprisoned and cut off in our human umwelt. I might not know what the sparrows are

Subjectivity, 23 (2008): 123–39. 11 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). 12 Despret, “The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds,” 123–39.

34

Milieus and Umwelts doing, but still, there are plenty of examples to be found of nondualist, decentered, posthumanist couplings between ourselves and other species, especially at the level of performance. And when we see these couplings, we also begin to see that we are just a part of a lively world, not masters of it. The spirits cooperate with the shaman; the cows help Despret’s farmers to farm; the dogs are integral to the agility trials Haraway competes in – and far more lively and agile than she is. It seems to me this is what the artists in Shared Habitats might be showing us. All the artworks in the exhibition confront us with lively and unpredictable agents – flies, insects, mushrooms, plants, software, even a random number generator, I think – and they somehow translate that liveliness into our human umwelt – as sounds, clothing, a mock-execution, or a meditation bell. The measure of their success, I suppose, is how strikingly and persuasively they display us as part of a coupled human-nonhuman assemblage. A couple of Ursula Damm’s recent works exemplify this sort of concern with shared habitats very nicely – a piece from last year called Insect Song and the Drosophila Karaoke Bar.13 In both cases, the object is to set up a creative and more or less symmetric sonic connection between the human and insect worlds – swarms of midges and flies respectively. In Insect Songs, Christina Meissner plays midge-like sounds on her cello to which the midges somehow respond, and the noise of their flight is then amplified back to Meissner, who then responds to that, and so on. The Drosophila Karaoke Bar functions similarly: human speech and songs are transformed into frequencies that flies respond to, while the sounds generated by the flies are translated back into the human world. What interests me most in both works is the symmetric and constructive interplay and engagement of the human and the nonhuman. “We 13 Ursula Damm, Insect Songs, 2018, http://ursuladamm.de/insect-songs/; Ursula Damm, Drosophila Karaoke Bar, 2018, http://ursuladamm.de/drosophila-karaoke-bar-2018/

35

shared habitats were thrilled to notice that it was so easy and obvious that humans and midges interfere. In our second concert, it was no longer necessary/voluntary to force midges into swarming, but instead to develop a kind of [question and answer], to listen and to respond to the phrases of the mosquitos.”14 This question and answer structure, which I would call a dance of agency,15 is, I think, the mark of a genuine coupling (rather than a simple overlap) of worlds – just like the shaman’s connection with the spirits. Damm’s artworks thus stage for us shared human/nonhuman habitats and umwelts; each artwork is a decentered coproduction of people and insects. At this point we can change direction again. Ursula Damm works with Birgit Brüggemeier, a neuroscientist, on her Drosophila Karaoke Bar, and it might be interesting to think about how science and a concern with shared habitats could fit together. The obvious answer is that they don’t fit together at all. Crudely speaking, the scientific method is to pin down its object (Fig. 1 and, for the same in art, Fig. 2 – note the title) and then dissect it, take it to pieces, literally or metaphorically. Science simply extinguishes the liveliness and agency of matter and just has no interest in umwelts and shared habitats. Robert Kohler refers to Drosophila, for example, as a “breeder-reactor” for genetic research.16 The scientific program is to trace out the genetic origins of the endless variety of physical forms and behavior patterns of the flies, and genetics has no language for speaking about umwelts. So science teaches us many things about the world, but it does that from a brutally human-centric perspective – it is a science of pinned down, passive objects as seen by us. And science is,

14 Damm, Insect Songs, 2018. 15 Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 16 Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

36

Milieus and Umwelts

Fig. 1. Science: Butterflies pinned to a board. V. Bacianskas collection at the Kaunas Tadas Ivanauskas Museum of Zoology, Kaunas. Photo: Kazimieras Martinaitis

therefore, one of the most important and authoritative supports for the sort of bubble-centrism we are trying to escape from. Science is the enemy if we’re interested in shared habitats. But still, Damm and Brüggemeier do manage to collaborate as artist and scientist, and the question is, how? I think the answer is that Brüggemeier’s science offers Damm a kind of foothold or opening onto the umwelt of the flies, very much like the shaman’s drugs and rituals are an opening onto the umwelt of the spirits. Brüggemeier knows a lot about the sounds that flies make and how they relate to the flies’ behavior, and Damm’s Drosophila Karaoke Bar tries to use that knowledge to draw the umwelts of flies and humans together by means of loops of sound. So the trick here in aligning science and art is to truncate and abbreviate the science, to refuse to look for behind-the-scenes genetic explanations of behavior, and to stay with the liveliness of the organism as something which we can still latch onto. Many years ago, Bruno Latour argued for

37

shared habitats

Fig. 2. Art: Painting made out of butterfly wings. Damien Hirst, I Am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds, 2006. (c) Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

what he called an “irreductionist”17 philosophy – a refusal to put universal explanations behind visible phenomena – and Damm’s artworks trade on an irreductionist stance on science – taking umwelts at face value rather than trying to reduce them further to chemistry or biology. We can also think about differing relations between art and science in terms of different kinds of technology. Brüggemeier and Damm’s microphones and video cameras preserve the flies’ liveliness and spontaneity and their umwelt as something we can connect to. The pin that attaches the fly to a board extinguishes both. Cameras and pins are thus different kinds of technological assemblages which reveal not just different worlds but different kinds of world – lively or lifeless respectively. Two different paradigms in Thomas Kuhn’s sense – of instruments, practices, and worlds, all at once – are at issue here. We can take this line of thought further by asking an odd question: do machines have umwelts? The obvious answer to this is no, as it was 17 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

38

Milieus and Umwelts for science. The classical machines that have come down to us from the Industrial Revolution are designed to be indifferent to their surroundings, not to respond to them. A drill or a car or a computer is useless if it behaves differently in different surroundings. Computers, for example, don’t care about the temperature, unless it gets too hot when they stop working completely. On the other hand, however, there are other kinds of machine – a different machinic paradigm – that monitor and respond directly to the worlds they are in. And thinking about such machines might both enrich our conception of machines and help us in thinking about umwelts and shared habitats more generally. The best examples of these umwelt-machines come from the history of the odd science of cybernetics, and I can talk about a few of them now.18 We can start with Grey Walter’s “tortoises,” built in 1948 (Fig. 3). These were small three-wheeled robots with two motors. One motor drove the rear wheels forward, while the other made the front fork slowly rotate, so that the basic motion of the tortoise was spiraling forward. But mounted on the fork was a photoelectric cell which, when it detected a light source, would turn off the rotation so that the tortoise would head for the light. The tortoise was thus phototropic, like a plant. There was also a touch-sensor mounted on the tortoise’s body, which sent the rear wheels into reverse, so that the robot would back away from obstacles and come at them from a different angle, eventually navigating round them. In this way, the tortoises would locate lights and home in on them in crowded environments. So, very much like Uexküll’s tick, the tortoise was a machine with a simple umwelt, consisting of lights and obstacles. At minimum, then, the tortoise shows us that it’s not only living organisms that have umwelts – certain kinds of machines can have them too. If we like, we could think of 18 For more on all of the following examples, see: Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

39

shared habitats the robot tortoises as little models of organisms; in fact, Walter’s first publication on the tortoises was called “An Imitation of Life.”19 One reason to build models is to learn from them, and here it is striking that Walter was surprised by the behavior of the tortoises. He designed and built them, but they behaved in unexpected ways. Individual tortoises would engage in dances of approach and retreat in front of mirrors; and pairs of tortoises would engage in “mating dances,” again alternately approaching and leaving their partners – “flickering, twittering and jogging like a clumsy

Fig. 3. Grey Walter’s tortoise. Photo: Andrew Pickering

narcissus,” as Walter put it. And when exhibited in public, they displayed a fascination with women’s legs, chasing them across the room. In retrospect,

19 W. Grey Walter, “An Imitation of Life,” Scientific American, 182 (May 1950), 42–5.

40

Milieus and Umwelts

Fig. 4. Simon Penny, Petit Mal, 1993. Photo Courtesy of Simon Penny

41

shared habitats this was explained in terms of running lights which indicated when the tortoise was in search-mode and by the reflectance of women’s stockings, but the point to grasp is that these patterns of behavior were emergent and not designed into them. So we can learn something from these machines. They tell us something about the world we live in which von Uexküll did not discuss, namely, that the behavior of machines, and no doubt organisms too, is not necessarily determined by their umwelts. Patterns of behavior are found by machines and organisms in performative experimentation. The tortoises discovered in action that they could latch onto mirror-images, other tortoises, and women’s legs. And by extension, this tells us something about sharing habitats. We cannot read off how to engage with other beings simply from a knowledge of their umwelts. If we want to engage with them, we need to experiment too, to find ways of attracting their attention and responding to their actions – letting them loose and discovering their preference for stockings rather than flannel trousers – permitting the other the sort of openness that Haraway grants her dogs and Irene Pepperberg her parrots and Ursula Damm her flies and midges. Here is another umwelt-machine, this one called Petit Mal, an artwork closely related to the tortoise and built by the artist (and engineer) Simon Penny in the early 1990s (Fig. 4). Like the tortoise, Petit Mal is a mobile robot, and, like the tortoise, it has an umwelt, with its sensors detecting movement, like many of the organisms Uexküll talked about, rather than lights. Three points about Petit Mal need to be noted. First, it was designed precisely to share a habitat with humans. It moves differently according to the motions around it, spinning and travelling around, hopefully eliciting further movements from its human partners, to which Petit Mal responds, in turn, in a dance of agency coupling the umwelts of machine and human. Second, to go back to the beginning, a key feature of these dances is that they are symmetric. The human partners are not in control. The 42

Milieus and Umwelts machine and the human are equal and co-dependent, we could say. As ontological theatre, a Petit Mal performance thus puts us in our place – on a level with the machine, not at the center of the action, calling the shots. And, third, I find it instructive that Penny’s accounts of building Petit Mal focus on the hardware of the machine rather than the software (which he describes as growing out of the hardware arrangements). Petit Mal is basically a double pendulum (one carrying the batteries, the other the sensors) mounted on two bicycle wheels – and the key point is that the oscillations of a double pendulum are chaotic and unpredictable, emergent in practice, just like the actions of the tortoise. Petit Mal thus materially embodies emergence and foregrounds it. Penny’s idea here is that an unpredictable system is more lifelike and more likely to engage a human partner than a predictable and fully reliable machine. And the converse of this is, again, that there is no prescription for how to relate to Petit Mal; there is no operating manual. Each participant has to experiment and find their own way of getting along with the robot. So sharing a habitat in this instance means much more than being in the same space. The symmetry of the sharing is a dynamic one of active, reciprocal, performative attunement. Though I will not discuss them further here, it is relevant to mention Gordon Pask’s cybernetic machines, Musicolour (from the early 1950s), and Colloquy of Mobiles and Fun Palace (from the 1960s) – a synesthetic lightshow, a dynamic sculpture, and an interactive building, respectively. In their different ways, they all staged shared habitats of people and things symmetrically mediated by performative couplings of emergent and unpredictable systems. We could also think about Pask and Stafford Beer’s biological computing project of the late 1950s, which attempted to couple factories with adaptive biological systems, like a pond ecosystem in place of human management.20 This was an amazingly imaginative project, 20 Andrew Pickering, “Beyond Design: Cybernetics, Biological Computers and Hylozoism,” Synthese, 168 (2009), 469–91.

43

shared habitats but it failed because Beer and Pask were unable to translate the state of the factory into variables that ecosystems cared about. Beer, for example, persuaded Daphnia, water fleas, to ingest iron filings so that it would be possible to signal to them with magnetic fields, but the fleas just excreted the iron, creating an impenetrable rusty-brown fluid in their tank. Even if we try, then, we have to face the fact that making partial connections between umwelts can be difficult and even impossible. Let me finish by repeating that I’ve been trying to think about connecting umwelts and sharing habitats, and especially about symmetric connections that can emphasize to us that humanity is only a part of the world, not its master. I think this is what we need to learn in these anthropocentric times. The discussion of machines towards the end actually brought home to me something I hadn’t thought about before, namely, that an experimental engagement with emergent phenomena is central to this symmetry. Real sharing implies open-ended, experimental interactions with lively partners, and we can read that observation back from machines to my earlier examples: the cows that collaborate with the farmers; the dog that collaborates with Donna Haraway, the shaman and the spirits, Ursula Damm and her flying insects. All of these examples show us that we genuinely share the world with all sorts of emergent and dynamic entities – that is what is so valuable about them. On the other side of the coin, sadly, they also remind us that most of our dealings with the world make this sharing hard to see. We are masters of pinning down the others and making the symmetry of shared habitats invisible. Like Damien Hirst and Robert Oppenheimer, and the Hindu god Vishnu before them, we have become death, the destroyers of worlds.

44

Milieus and Umwelts

Andrew Pickering (*1948) is a philosopher and historian, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Exeter, England. His main field of research is science and technology studies. He has written on topics ranging from the history of particle physics to the history of cybernetics. He is currently working on a book about our relations with nature and the environment, and planning another on cybernetic art.

45

shared habitats

46

Milieus and Umwelts

Technical Milieus1 Henning Schmidgen That the use of technology causes ecological problems is one of the critical certainties of our day. What car or plane would not harm the environment (Umwelt)? By “umwelt,” however, we generally understand our umwelt, above all, the human environment and that of animals and plants, which are precisely those spheres that Jakob von Uexküll brought to the biological concept in his Umweltlehre at the beginning of the 20th century. But what if technical objects had their own umwelt, and perhaps even needed one? Doesn’t the successful use of electric cars depend on the existence of a corresponding infrastructure with charging stations? Isn’t every smartphone rendered inoperable as soon as there is no longer a cellular network? It could be the case that the ecological problem of technology also, and perhaps even first and foremost, arises at this level. Bruno Latour, who has become increasingly interested in the question of ecology, has lamented the lack of consideration of the specific umwelt of technical objects against the background of such thinking. “Unfortunately, there is no equivalent to Jakob von Uexküll in terms of the ‘life world’ of machines.” 2 In order to remedy this, Latour recommends reconsidering the history of technology and visiting relevant museum collections: for example, the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, or the Deutsches Museum in Munich. In the city, a glance out the window suffices to see those radio masts without which smartphones and the like would not function. 1

This article is drawn from a larger project discussing the biological underpinnings of Simondon’s philosophy of technology. I warmly thank Mindaugas Gapševičius for his insistence on contributing to this volume.

2

Bruno Latour, Cogitamus, trans. Bettina Engels and Nikolaus Gramm (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 212, note 7.

47

shared habitats In certain respects, however, Latour’s diagnosis is baffling. In the French-speaking world, the relationship between technology and umwelt has been the subject of prominent debate since the 1940s. Thus, the second volume of André Leroi-Gourhan’s extensive study of evolution and technology is entitled Milieu et techniques. The concept of the umwelt remains comparatively conventional in that study, however. In the broadest sense, Leroi-Gourhan understands the term “exterior milieu” to mean the material conditions in which a social group lives: “geological, climate, animal and plant milieu”; whereas he considers the “interior umwelt” to consist of the “intellectual capital” and “spiritual traditions” of the group in question.3 In this model, technology serves as a key mediator between inside and outside, interior and exterior umwelts. Technology itself is not an umwelt. However, the environment that is characteristic of technology has been studied elsewhere. At about the same time as Leroi-Gourhan, architect Jacques Lafitte addressed the specific umwelt of machines in his Mechanology, and did so in relatively great detail. The idea that every machine “receives numerous different messages from the exterior world” was indeed an important starting point for the classification of technical objects presented by Lafitte.4 The primary ways of grouping objects in the mechanological realm are distinguished by the way they behave towards the “flows” (flux) coming from outside, which supply them with power or energy. “Reflex machines” such as the automatic torpedo even have an “organized system of sensation for certain variations in the relationship of the machine to its milieu,”

3

André Leroi-Gourhan, Evolution et techniques, II. Milieu et techniques (Paris: Albin Michel, 1973), 333–4.

4

Jacques Lafitte, “Sur la science des machines,” Revue de synthèse 4 (1933): 143–158, here: 149.

48

Milieus and Umwelts while “passive machines” such as the hut or clothing are largely independent of external influences in their functioning.5 In Simondon’s work, Latour could have likewise found detailed observations of the umwelt of machines. Like Lafitte before him, Simondon also assumes that the operation of technical objects, just like their creation and development, does not happen in a vacuum. Technical objects only exist within more or less predetermined contexts – in the countryside, in the city, in rivers, even in oceans. Geographical location plays just as much a role as the possibility of having access to supply systems, petrol stations, transport, and radio networks or other forms of infrastructure.6 In other words, if an engine is a material figure, then it must also have an equally material ground. That is why, in the next part of his treatise, Simondon goes from thing to space, from line to surface, but also: from eye to ear. Similarly to Ezra Pound in his reflections on machine art,7 in the second chapter of his book, Simondon not only considers the technical object in terms of a sculpture accessible to the gaze, but also turns to the special acoustics of these objects. What do they sound like? What kind of mood (Stimmung) do they give off ? In what kind of rhythm do they move, and according to which melody do they follow each other? In answering these questions, Simondon implicitly refers once again to the life sciences of the 19th century, this time, however, not to embryology (as in the first chapter of his book) but to physiology. In fact, the work of Jakob von Uexküll, whose environmental theory is also largely an acoustically influenced doctrine, can be assigned to general physiology. In addition to von Uexküll, it is the experimental physiologist Claude

5

Ibid.

6

See Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogrove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017).

7

Ezra Pound, Machine Art and Other Writings. The Lost Thought of the Italian Years (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

49

shared habitats Bernard who decisively shapes Simondon’s project to consider the specific milieus of the technical object. Bernard’s programmatic work on physiology, his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, was published in 1865. This work must be considered a canonical contribution to French philosophy, ever since Bergson placed this text at the center of his homage to Bernard in 1913. This includes the philosophy of technology, however. In his Introduction, Bernard often describes the animal body as a living machine whose functioning must be examined, explained, and controlled by the physiologist in the laboratory. It is part of his commitment to the potential of explaining the phenomena of life in chemical and physical terms when he writes: “now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvelous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism.”8 Consequently, Bernard recommends that the physiologist in the lab disassembles the organism “step by step ... as we take apart a machine to review and study all its works.”9 In the 19th century, he is not alone with this mechanistic-analytical view of the organism. Similar views were held by many experimental physiologists of his time, such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond, who regarded the dismantling and manipulation of the “animal machine” in the laboratory as a “spectacle for the gods.”10 At one point in his Introduction, however, Bernard reverses the dominant view and talks about the “inanimate machines created by man.”11 Thus, the physiologist briefly becomes an engineer. This role switch not 8

Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine [1865], English trans. Henry Copley Green (New York: Dover Publications, 1957), 63.

9

Bernard, Introduction, 65.

10 Sven Dierig, Wissenschaft in der Maschinenstadt. Emil Du Bois-Reymond und seine Laboratorien in Berlin (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 110. 11 Bernard, Introduction, 98.

50

Milieus and Umwelts only reflects the effective cooperation between laboratory physiologists and instrument makers, but it is also related to Bernard’s distinction between the inner and outer world of the organism, the “organ milieu,” or milieu intérieur, on the one hand, and the “outer” or “cosmic milieu” on the other.12 Referring to one of the most advanced technologies of his time, Bernard continues: “Thus, climatic changes have no influence at all on the action of a steam engine, though everyone knows that exact conditions of temperature, pressure and humidity inside the machine govern all its movements.” Similar observations of the inner workings of the steam engine motivated the undertaking particularly pursued by Helmholtz – the use of indicator diagrams in the experimental measurement of animal performance. Initially, these diagrams were only utilized to graphically record the pressure conditions inside the cylinders of steam engines. From 1860 onwards, they were also used to record and measure the blood pressure and heartbeat of the animal engine. However, Bernard is not a pioneer of the graphic method. For him, the main objective is to understand the organism in relation to its environment. This is the viewpoint that he applies to the consideration of technology in the following: “For inanimate machines we could therefore also distinguish between a macrocosmic environment and a microcosmic environment. In any case, the perfection of the machine consists in being more and more free and independent, so as to be less and less subject to the influence of the outer environment.”13 12 See Henning Schmidgen, “Nachwort: Über Maschinen und Organismen bei Canguilhem,” in Georges Canguilhem, Wissenschaft, Technik, Leben. Beiträge zur historischen Epistemologie, trans. Ronald Voullié et al. (Berlin: Merve, 2006), 157– 78; as well as Robert Mitchell, “Simondon, Bioart, and the Milieus of Biotechnology,” INFLeXions 5 (2012), http://www.inflexions.org/n5_mitchellhtml.html 13 Bernard, Introduction, 98.

51

shared habitats It is clear that Bernard is not really concerned, at this point, with an examination in physiological terms. His fleeting glance at the inner and outer environment of machines constructed by humans serves mainly to illustrate and make plausible the possibility of referring back the phenomena of life to “unchangeable physical-chemical conditions.” Bernard’s comparison, however, exhibits a surplus of rhetoric, and this surplus displays clear echoes of the philosophy of technology discussed here. In the first chapter of his book, Simondon actually disassembles the machines “in order to get to know and examine all their wheels,” and what Bernard describes as the perfection of the machine returns in Simondon’s work as the internal integration of the technical object, which leads to a corresponding increase in the autonomy of the object in relation to its environment. In Simondon, as in the suggestive passage in Bernard’s Introduction, mechanical beings more closely resemble living beings by becoming increasingly independent of the influence of the external environment. But that’s not all. Simondon takes up other basic concepts of Bernard’s physiology. On the one hand, this applies to his concept of the technical object as an “individual,” which is the starting point for the investigation into its mode of existence. This corresponds to Bernard’s concept of the organism, which is always to be understood as an individual: “Physiologists and physicians [...] must never forget that a living being is an organism with its own individuality.”14 On the other hand, and even more so, this applies to the above-mentioned distinction between the internal and the external milieu of the organism. The threefold division into inner world – individual – environment is found several times in Simondon’s work. Implicitly, this threefold structure is the basis for the view of the individual technical object, which is first examined in terms of its inner components, and then in terms of the technical reality that surrounds it.

14 Ibid., 129.

52

Milieus and Umwelts This triad explicitly confronts us with the synchronic distinction between technical elements, technical individuals, and technical ensembles, with whose help Simondon attempts to grasp decisive aspects of the overarching technical reality. It also explicitly appears in a diachronic manner when tools and instruments are presented as the typical forms of technology in the 18th century, and, in contrast, the machine is presented as the typical form of technology of the 19th century and the ensemble or network as the main form of the 20th century. One passage in Simondon’s work illustrates just how powerful Bernard’s model of the steam engine was to him. In this passage, Simondon looks at the complex relationship between the technical individual and its geographical surroundings. On the one hand, the operation of rolling steam engines, also called locomotives, requires a corresponding technical environment (railway network, stations, etc.). On the other hand, locomotives move through natural surroundings that influence the object in various ways (mountains, valleys, rivers, weather, etc.). According to Simondon, the technical and geographical umwelts interact via the locomotive: “The technical object is situated at the meeting point between two milieus, and it must be integrated to both milieus at once.”15 The alliance between artificiality and nature that is suggested here is an important motif of his philosophy. That is another reason why Simondon mobilizes biological concepts to address the vitality of the relationship between the technical object and the technical reality that surrounds it. Initially, the focus is on what is known today as “infrastructure”: A locomotive needs not only rails, but also a certain track width in order to run. An airplane needs a runway of a certain length to take off and land in order to depart from point A and reach point B. “An electrical motor requires a grid or a generator” on which to run.16 15 Simondon, On the Mode, 55. 16 Ibid., 54.

53

shared habitats Then Simondon discusses extreme manifestations of such relationships between the individual object and the reality surrounding it. He observes, for example, that some devices, apparatuses, and machines are so closely tied to infrastructural conditions that they no longer function at all without them. A cargo glider is completely dependent on a tow plane to do its job. An Allen key can only “process” hexagonal head screws; all other screw connections remain inaccessible to it. A clock that is synchronized via the power grid becomes useless if it is transported from America to France, due to the frequency difference between the power grids (60 and 50 Hz, respectively).17 In order to more precisely describe this over-adaptation of the technical object to its environment, Simondon takes up another biological concept, namely “hypertélie.” This concept was introduced to the life sciences in the 1870s by botanist Carl Brunner von Wattenwyl. Following Darwin’s remarks on the extremely splendid, decorative plumage of some animals – just think of the Argus pheasant – von Wattenwyl used the term “hypertely” in order to pinpoint similar phenomena of the biological “going beyond the target,” or “overshooting the target by far.” As examples of instances of hypertélie, he names the “luxurious forms and marvelous colors of the blossoms” and striking patterns and ornaments on insects, but also “downright repulsive and senseless shapes such as the horns of a stag beetle.”18 These phenomena could not be easily explained by referring to functional adaptations or fitness.

17 At least that was the state of the art back in 1958; nowadays, one would perhaps rather think of different cable standards for smartphones. 18 Carl Brunner von Wattenwyl, “Über die Hypertelie in der Natur,” Berliner entomologische Zeitschrift 18/1–2 (1874): 155–6. On Brunner von Wattenwyl, see also: Peter Berz, “Tier Blatt Flügel. Der Surrealismus des Biologen Paul Vignon,” in Logik des Imaginären. Diagonale Wissenschaft nach Roger Caillois, eds. Sarah Kolb and Anne von der Heiden (Cologne and Berlin: August Verlag, 2018), 115–58.

54

Milieus and Umwelts In the French context of the 1930s and 1940s, it is, among others, the geneticist and evolutionary theorist Lucien Cuénot who uses the hypertely concept to discuss the potential problems of organisms adapting to their environment. For example, Cuénot writes in 1946: “Sometimes organs are subject to such a development (hypertélie) that they must disturb the animal, even if the animal manages to still benefit from them.”19 As an example, he cites the upwardly curved canines of the deer boar, which are “curved upwards like horns,” and the long teeth of the mammoth, curved over the trunk. The literal extensions of the body, therefore, not only are useful tools, but also represent potential obstacles and impairments for the organism.20 Simondon does not read such passages in order to better grasp the connection between the body and technology. For him, the development of the technical as such is in the foreground. The question that particularly interests him in connection with Cuénot is this: Must technical objects inevitably develop in such a way that they disrupt and interfere with their own functioning – whether through their extreme specialization or their sheer size? Does technology always tend to sabotage itself, sooner or later? Simondon rejects this by pointing out another possibility of how the relationship between the technical object and technical reality is to be shaped. This option can be understood as the emergence of a “third 19 Lucien Cuénot, Invention et finalité en biologie (Paris: Flammarion, 1946), 69. 20 Ibid., 69–72. In Cuénot’s case, such considerations are related to the question of how and when certain organs and tools were formed in the animal kingdom and how the phenomenon of technical invention is to be understood from a biological perspective. In 1948, Cuénot also wrote the preface to Andrée Tetry’s biological study of animal tools, on which Simondon relies. In “Machine and Organism,” Canguilhem points out the importance of the work of Cuénot and Tétry in understanding technology as a “universal biological phenomenon.” See Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginzburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 75–97, here 96.

55

shared habitats nature” and might be illustrated by a radicalization of the railway example. As we have seen, the railway can be seen as a “mediation between the technical world and the geographical worlds.”21 The case of the so-called Guimbal turbine shows that a technical object can also be introduced into an umwelt that made it possible and created it in the first place. In a sense, then, the problem of adaptation does not arise here.22 Jean-Claude Guimbal patented the turbine in question in the early 1950s with a view towards its future use in tidal power plants. According to Simondon, the distinctive feature of the Guimbal turbine is that, in this case, the technical object no longer adapts to its surroundings, but rather creates its own technical-geographical world through a kind of recursive causality. The turbine developed by Guimbal is a tube turbine, meaning, the generator is small enough to be completely installed in a water pipe. However, this is only possible because the water passing through the pipe at high speed ensures sufficient cooling. The function of the environmental factor of water in the tube turbine is therefore “pluri-functional” – similarly to the cooling fins in a petrol engine. The water powers the turbine and cools it at the same time. An external adaptation of the technical object to its environment therefore no longer takes place. Instead, from the outset, the concrete turbine is embedded in a hybrid environment: “The technical object is thus its own condition, as a condition of existence of this mixed milieu which is simultaneously both technical and geographical.”23 As is generally known, Heidegger discusses a similar example in his considerations about the Ge-stell (framing). In The Question Concerning Technology, he devotes considerable attention to the fact that a hydroelec21 Simondon, On the Mode, 56. 22 On the “third nature,” see, e.g., Mackenzie Wark, “Third Nature,” in Cultural Studies 8/1 (1994): 115–32. 23 Simondon, On the Mode, 58 (original emphasis).

56

Milieus and Umwelts tric power station is “placed in the Rhine River.” However, the technical details hardly play a role here. For Heidegger, the decisive factor is instead the features of “Steuerung und Sicherung” (regulating and securing) that overarch the individual power plant – which can certainly be read as a translation into German of the cybernetic “command and control.”24 In his eyes, these more general characteristics are decisive in fundamentally redefining the relationship between technology and nature in the present. Thus, in the end, it is no longer the hydroelectric power plant that is “placed” in the river. Heidegger thinks, conversely, that the Rhine is “built into” the power station. Technology appears as a framework (Gestell) for nature. Simondon does not go that far in his consideration of the Guimbal turbine. For him, it is all a matter of mediation. In the special form of the Guimbal turbine, the figure of technology enters into a productive relationship with the basis of nature, a relationship of mutual enabling. Technology no longer manifests itself as an instance that nature first “frames” and then submits to, but rather as a medium that integrates itself into nature – like the human creator of a technical object who enters the liminal sphere between matter and form, and clings to it in order to let something new emerge from it... In order to emphasize this fact, Simondon introduces another concept, that of the “associated milieu”: This milieu is not fabricated [ fabriqué], or at least not fabricated in its totality; it is a certain regime of natural elements surrounding the technical being, linked to a certain regime of elements that constitute the technical being. The associated milieu mediates the relation between technical, fabricated elements and natural elements, at the heart of which the technical being functions.25 24 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 16. 25 Simondon, On the Mode, 59.

57

shared habitats These considerations also have a life science connotation. As Deleuze and Guattari have explained, Simondon’s concept of milieu associé is closely related to von Uexküll’s concept of the umwelt. Around 1900, von Uexküll defined “umwelt” as that specific world which is the product of the organism. Composed of a respective “perception world” and “effect world,” the umwelt is always specific to the organic individual: “The simple animal has a simple environment; the multiform animal has an environment just as richly articulated as it is.”26 With talk of the “associated milieu,” this biological umwelt discourse is transferred to the technical object. For Simondon, this transfer is nothing more than a logical consequence of his view of machines as individuals. From the point of view of von Uexküll, who repeatedly argued against the reduction of organisms to machines, this would have been an absurd reversal. For him, machine and umwelt are ultimately mutually exclusive. This is what his Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans programmatically says: “Whoever wants to hold on to the conviction that all living things are only machines should abandon all hope of glimpsing their environments.”27 Likewise, Georges Canguilhem, one of Simondon’s academic mentors, sees no direct connection in this sense between machine and umwelt. Canguilhem expressly attributes the technical and, at the same time, normative ability “to dominate the environment and organize it” according to specific values solely to living beings. Conversely, he considers it to be impossible, in the strict sense of the word, for a machine to become ill, that is,

26 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 50. 27 von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, 41.

58

Milieus and Umwelts to develop a pathology of its own.28 Simondon contradicts and, thus, once again, reaffirms his heuristically comparative approach to regard machine beings as living beings. This approach is supported by a further aspect; through it, the outside meets the inside. Let us reconsider the example of the Guimbal turbine. What appears in the form of water as the associated milieu of this turbine corresponds quite precisely to what, following Claude Bernard, constitutes the inner milieu of an organism. According to Bernard, the milieu intérieur does not simply consist of the organs contained within the living body. As he explains in his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, this concept refers much more to the fluid matrix that connects and animates the organs: “All the juices circulating in the organism, the blood fluid and the intra-organic juices, constitute this inner milieu.” What makes the example of the Guimbal turbine so striking is not only the fact that the co-production of nature and technology can be observed here. It is also not simply the parallel to von Uexküll’s concept of the umwelt. By focusing on water as the fluid matrix of the turbine, Simondon also succeeds in connecting the external milieu of a technical object with the internal milieu of the human organism. This is by no means an arbitrary gesture. First of all, the convergence of machine and organism, which can also be observed on this level, emphasizes the anchoring of technology in life. Then it opens a space for the inventor, the thinking human being: “The relation between thought and life is analogous to the relation between the structured technical object and the natural milieu.”29

28 Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 228–9, and “Machine and Organism,” where it is poignantly stated: “There is no mechanical pathology [...] The distinction between the normal and the pathological holds for living beings alone” (90). 29 Simondon, On the Mode, 62.

59

shared habitats According to this, humans are capable of inventing objects like the Guimbal turbine because they carry within themselves the correlation to the associated milieu necessary for their existence. For even “within a living organism all living matter cooperates in life; it is not only the most apparent, or the clearest structures that have the initiative of life in the body; blood, lymph nodes, and conjunctive tissues partake in life.”30 This recourse to Bernard’s notion of the inner milieu is an additional reason why the traditional philosophy of technology as organ projection falls short. For Simondon, the human body does not solely consist of more or less clearly defined organs and limbs. It also possesses a liquid foundation (Deleuze calls it the “organless body”), and it is this floating, inner milieu that humans draw upon when they invent technical objects that act as genuine mediators (médiateurs) between artificiality and naturalness. According to Simondon, it is this mediation that allows the forces, potentials, and virtualities contained in life, and thus also in human beings, to be brought to the forefront. The thus accentuated anchoring of technology in life is, however, only one point to be noted. Of no less importance is the fact that, at this stage, Simondon’s observation changes from the optical to the acoustic register. Of course, he is aware that the individual Guimbal turbine is also merely the still image of a filmstrip of matter, for its creation and development tie in with earlier versions of the tube turbine. However, unlike in the previous chapter of his book, now the focus does not go back to the line of origin of this object, but rather turns to its width and length, further emphasizing that this technical object cannot be separated from a specific technical-geographical environment. Shortly thereafter, seeing also transitions more explicitly into hearing – a listening to the noises that the machines produce during their operation, and a listening to the noises that become audible in the background of

30 Simondon, On the Mode, 62.

60

Milieus and Umwelts their operation: a droning, a humming, a hissing, which, as with Pound, can no longer be assigned to any individual machine organ; a quiet roar that ultimately refers to the strange duration of the technical. Simondon remains true to physiology, however. In one of the most attractive passages of his treatise, he describes a laboratory for the physiology of sensation in order to further specify the provisions made so far in the relationship between the technical individual and the technical umwelt. Once again, it becomes clear that it is not sufficient to speak of infrastructure. Of course, electricity, water supply, and heating are important factors to guarantee the functioning of a laboratory, and it is true that these factors have not been sufficiently considered in anthropological and sociological laboratory studies.31 But the laboratory as such, like the railroad, is a machine structure, a “technical ensemble,” as Simondon says, and the condensed diversity of such an ensemble is a far cry from the extensive linearity of a transport or supply network. A laboratory does not resemble a cable or pipe system alone, but rather a workshop or factory, which Simondon also refers to as “ensembles.” “A philosopher visits the laboratory.”32 However, Simondon has a different role than Latour twenty years later, and he pursues other interests. Latour is a self-declared outsider in science, seeking the maximum contrast to his philosophical preoccupation with the connection between exegesis and ontology. Simondon, on the other hand, has concrete, everyday laboratory experience as a psychologist, and when he talks about it, he also understands what it meant in terms of technology. While Latour as

31 However, see the work of Susan Leigh Starr, Grenzobjekte und Medienforschung, eds. Sebastian Gießmann and Nadine Taha (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017). 32 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life. The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979).

61

shared habitats co-author of the book Laboratory Life is mainly interested in the desks of the Salk Institute where, according to him, the effective products of scientific work, namely, publications, are created, Simondon concentrates on a single instrument that supports his passage from seeing to hearing, the audiometer. But what is an audiometer? “A device for measuring human auditory performance by electro-acoustic means,” according to relevant encyclopedias, or “an apparatus for measuring auditory acuity or the intensity of a radio signal.” In his previous chapter, Simondon showed how unhelpful such linguistic definitions are in capturing the essence of a technical object. If we were to remain in the optical register, our task would now be to understand the audiometer as the current embodiment of that functional scheme that marks the beginning of the path of development that is coming to a preliminary close in the present object. In the acoustic register, the question is different: not what, but how is the audiometer? Simondon answers by relating instrument and laboratory to one another in ways similar to relating organism and umwelt: The audiometer is defined [...] by certain requisite conditions of temperature, voltage, and noise levels, so that its frequencies and intensities may be sufficiently stable for the measurements of thresholds . The room’s coefficient of absorption, its resonance at this or that frequency must be taken into account; the room is part of the complete apparatus [...].33 It is therefore ultimately unclear where the audiometer begins and where it ends. The material limits of its casing do not coincide with its functional limits. And depending on whether the test subject is placed in front of a loudspeaker or puts on headphones, the instrument extends into the test room or ends in the test subject’s outer ear. However, as with the Guimbal 33 Simondon, On the Mode, 63.

62

Milieus and Umwelts turbine, the formation of an associated milieu seems to be apparent in the audiometer. This is because: “For fine-tuned experiments it is necessary to place the devices in another room and to operate them by remote control, or to isolate the subject in an anechoic chamber.”34 In fact, separate, anechoic chambers for test subjects have been standard elements in the architecture of physiology and psychology laboratories since the 1880s. Incidentally, it was precisely these rooms that made the milieu intérieur, the organless body, accessible to concrete experience. Test subjects exposed to the absolute silence of the soundproof chamber reported whistling and humming, which they perceived in their own interior but could not assign to any defined organ.35 In reality, however, the laboratory is not an associated milieu. A major difference between the Guimbal turbine and the audiometer is that this instrument is just one of many devices used within the laboratory. The audiometer is therefore not as individualized as the Guimbal turbine. It is not as firmly embedded in its artificial surroundings as the turbine is in its technical-geographical umwelt. In fact, the corresponding laboratory rooms are also used in conjunction with other instruments, and it is precisely this flexibility that reveals a key feature of the technical ensemble: it is modular, meaning that it can serve as a milieu for a whole range of technical individuals. Simondon does not stop there. From the exterior, he shifts to the interior. According to him, a workshop or a factory can also produce those technical elements that shape the inner life of technical individuals: springs, magnets, transformers, electron tubes... The entire constellation is thus set in motion. For when technical elements are simple tools but also individual parts of machines, when tech34 Ibid., 65. 35 See Henning Schmidgen, Hirn und Zeit. Die Geschichte eines Experiments, 1800–1950 (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014), 99–147.

63

shared habitats nical individuals are both instruments and machines, and when technical ensembles are finally the plants and equipment composed of machines (factories, laboratories, etc.), a potential transition between these levels or stages of technical reality then becomes apparent. The sound sets itself in motion, and becomes a melody. That is the real surprise of this part. Simondon’s reflections on the milieus of the technical object lead to a reflection on the reproduction process of the technical. His tendency towards Lamarckism could not be clearer. In the 1870s, following Darwin, Samuel Butler imagined this reproductive process to be comparatively complex. Just as plants depended on insects to reproduce, machines secretly used humans to reproduce and develop.36 According to Simondon, the reproduction of technical reality takes place via the technical elements, because they have the ability to store and pass on the state of the technological knowledge acquired in a society, its “technicity,” in materialized form.37 This approach converges with Lamarck’s idea of the inheritance of acquired skills, but also, to a certain extent, with the views of Leroi-Gourhan, who also traces the history of complex technologies, for example, the steam engine, back to the development of individual elements, such as the flywheel.38 Simondon agrees with Leroi-Gourhan, but goes a step further in the direction of biology when he then explains that the technical elements have “transductive” properties, “just as seeds transport the properties of a species and go on to make new individuals.”39 The reproduction of the technical thus takes place at the level of the organs: “In the domain

36 Samuel Butler, EREWHON or Over the Range (UK: Trübner and Ballantyne 1872). 37 Simondon, On the Mode, 79. 38 See Canguilhem, “Maschine und Organismus,” 227. 39 Simondon, On the Mode, 74.

64

Milieus and Umwelts of life, an organ is not detachable from the species; in the technical domain, an element is detachable from the whole that produced it, precisely because it is fabricated; and here, we see the difference between the engendered and the produced.”40 This also explains why, according to Simondon, the development of technical milieus does not take place in the sense of a steady increase, but rather in a kind of wavy line. The elements are produced in the totality (e.g., the factories); they then enter the individuals, that is, the machines, and these machines later find their way into the totality. The question of the time that is characteristic of a technical milieu, the Eigenzeit of technology, is thus answered by referring to a process that repeatedly brings with it phases of relative relaxation: from the elements (as actual carriers of technicality) via the individuals to the totality; and from there again to new elements, new individuals, and further totalities.41 The example that Simondon cites in this context reads at first like a paraphrase of the famous passage in Das Kapital (Capital) in which Marx describes how the individual tools of the age of manufacturing are combined to form the complex machines of the first factories in order to become an overarching “production organism” in the developed factory system,42 in which machines are produced by machines. In this context, Marx actually speaks of the effect of new types of “natural forces.”43

40 Ibid., 68. 41 On technology and time in Simondon, see Bruno Paradis, “Technique et temporalité,” in Gilbert Simondon. Une pensée de l’individuation et de la technique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 220–38. 42 Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band, Buch I: Der Produktionsprozess des Kapitals [1867/1890] (Berlin: Dietz, 1979), 407. 43 Marx, Das Kapital, 409.

65

shared habitats Simondon also goes into the origin of the steam engine from the handcrafted ensemble of the 18th century. At the same time, he shifts the focus from the manufacturing industry to the energy industry when he relates important elements of electrical engineering to elements that had been produced by the thermodynamic ensemble in the 19th century. In addition to copper cables and insulators, he mentions the “metallic frameworks of the pylons and the cements of the dams,”44 thus referring to technology-induced transformations of landscapes, as in the railway example. As speculative as these remarks are, it is clear that they are close to contemporary attempts not only to address the materiality of the media in terms of their “geophysical reality,” but also to understand this materiality as an implicit form of temporality.45 The decisive point in this respect is that Simondon is not simply concerned with resources and materials, for which he is far too critical of the hylomorphic scheme. He is interested in local, specific mediations of form and material. Such mediations, however, only become clear when the technical individuals are examined in terms of their elements and the origin of these elements is traced back to their production sites. The physiologist thus becomes not only an engineer, but ultimately also an archaeologist. Simondon illustrates this with the example of the Toledo blade. The special quality of this blade refers back to the functioning of a technical ensemble, which, in addition to the technical objects that allow the production of this element, also incorporates the local characteristics of coal, wood, and water.46 Similarly, it has been shown that Watt’s perfection of the steam engine could only take place in an industrial landscape in which 44 Simondon, On the Mode, 69. 45 Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 139. 46 Simondon, On the Mode, 73.

66

Milieus and Umwelts the raw materials and means of transport used were linked in very specific ways. 47 With its interest in the geographical and technical umwelts of technical objects, Simondon’s philosophy thus opens up to, at this point, a geology of media and an archaeology of industry, for which the question of production landscapes is of decisive importance. Today, this perspective can be constructively translated into the geophysical indication that workplace computers are actually “highly ordered sets of minerals.”48 What would be decisive at this point is a transition from this geophysical notion to the geopolitical insight that these minerals occur particularly in Africa and China and that their mining, processing, and sale take place under deeply questionable conditions. Only then would the technical milieus that Simondon talks about become critical objects for further research – in media studies, media art, and beyond.

Henning Schmidgen (*1965) is Professor of Media Studies at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. Straddling the boundaries between media studies and the history of science, Schmidgen has worked extensively on Guattari’s machines, Canguilhem’s concepts, and the problem of time in 19th-century physiology and psychology. His research is published by journals such as Isis, Configurations, and Grey Room. Among his recent books are The Helmholtz-Curves. Tracing Lost Time (2014) and Die Guattari-Tapes: Gespräche mit Antonio Negri, Jean Oury, Jean-Claude Polack, Élisabeth Roudinesco, Danielle Sivadon und Paul Virilio (2019).

47 See Frank Brook, “Machines, Artefacts, and Industrial Landscape in the West Midlands of England,” in Cahiers du centre culturel canadien 4 (1976): 13–32. 48 Parikka, A Geology of Media, 74.

67

shared habitats

68

Milieus and Umwelts

Minds and Milieus Kristupas Sabolius The concept of “milieu” has an interesting history that problematizes the limits of individuality and addresses the role of the living in terms of mutual creativity with its own environment. In fact, born in the context of mechanics and biology, the term “milieu” has been gradually charged with philosophical meaning that puts at the center the question of creativity: to what extent do we create the environment and are we created by it? It is not by accident that, in the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, who exercised the fundamental revalorization of this concept, we encounter the idea of a milieu as associated with the individual. This means that a milieu signalizes the network of potentialities that, formally speaking, does not belong to its individuality, while, at the same time, it constitutes the creative field of its subjectivity. Today, when the question of environment seems to offer a lot of pressing challenges, a better understanding of our creative interaction appears to be one of the gateways offering a new understanding that enters into worldly encounters.

What Is a Milieu? In The Living and Its Milieu, Georges Canguilhem reminds us that the concept of a milieu was imported from mechanics into biology. The notion itself could first be found in Newton’s writings, as well as in d’Alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which describes its mechanical meaning in the article entitled namely as ‘‘Milieu.’’1 Hereafter, one can trace its transition into a multiplicity of contexts:

1

Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 99.

69

shared habitats Lamarck, inspired by Buffon, introduced it into biology, but he used it only in the plural. This usage was established by Henri de Blainville. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (in 1831) and Auguste Comte (in 1838) used the term in the singular, as an abstract term. Honoré de Balzac introduced it into literature in 1842 (in the preface to The Human Comedy), and Hippolyte Taine established it as one of the three principles of the analytic explanation of history – the other two being race and moment. It is from Taine, rather than from Lamarck, that French neo-Lamarckian biologists after 1870 – Alfred Giard, Félix-Alexandre Le Dantec, Frédéric Houssay, Johann Costantin, Gaston Bonnier, and Louis Roule – inherited this term. The idea came from Lamarck, but the term, as universal and abstract, was transmitted to them by Taine.2 The first “biological” understanding of a milieu is linked to the specific meaning of fluids, which, for Lamarck, are light, water, and air. It is still far from our common use of the term, which broadly refers to the “ensemble of actions that act on a living being from the outside.” According to Lamarck, there is a clear separation between circumstances that change on their own and the living that is supposed to act in order “not to be ‘dropped’ by its milieu.”3 By overcoming a mechanistic understanding, Lamarck proposes an agenda of a bare vitalism: “Adaptation hence is renewed effort by life to continue to ‘stick’ to an indifferent milieu. Since it is the result of an effort, adaptation is thus neither harmonious nor providential; it is gained and never guaranteed.”4 Hence, for him, the milieu must be conceived as truly exterior, as something foreign or even unrelated to life. “Life, says Bichat, is the ensemble of functions that resist death. In Lamarck’s conception, life resists solely by deforming itself so as to outlive itself.”5 2

Ibid.

3

Ibid., 104.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid.

70

Milieus and Umwelts Darwin criticized Lamarck’s conception in his introduction to the Origin of Species, by proposing two parallel understandings of a milieu: one is a social milieu of competition or struggle for survival; the other is the geographical milieu of natural selection. Darwin broadened the relation of the living and its milieu from the external environment to social aspects, that is to say, the relation between organisms themselves.

Gilbert Simondon: Associated Milieu As is widely known, also of central importance for Gilbert Simondon is the concept of the “associated milieu,” which stems from a philosophy of individuation. In fact, an individual cannot be conceived as an isolated reality; it is “being and relation. He is the center of activity, but this activity is transductive.”6 Hence, the milieu is described as “associated,” since it accumulates the tensions and relations between the living being and the field of potentiality that they are surrounded by. In this sense, the milieu, as long as it is truly associated, is also fundamentally correlational; however, this correlation operates by including the levels of intensity, making the system of potentialities constantly present in the enactment of represented forms. A milieu is, namely, the potential of an individual that exceeds its individuality – the potential that does not belong to its essence or substance, but is constantly found “outside the individual.” As Bardin puts it, “The name ‘individual,’ according to Simondon, ‘is abusively attributed to a more complex reality, that of the subject.’ In fact, the subject is composed by an individuated and visible element plus its associated milieu, a non-individuated ‘natural’ energetic charge which determines its inclination towards further individuations, i.e. the preindividual.”7 6

Gilbert Simondon, Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d‘information (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2013), 143.

7

Andrea Bardin, Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon: .

71

shared habitats Thus, the concept of the milieu could be properly understood only by taking into consideration the moment of scale. The starting point is neither an individual separated from the world nor a world independent from the subject; neither individual nor society, neither consciousness nor its cultural context, but, namely, the milieu that incorporates the worldliness – that is, the concrete set of tensions and relations of the environment – into the living being. As the conditioning factor, the milieu must remain in the closest proximity of living beings, as it always participates in the organization of their structural setting. If it is allowed to use an outdated vocabulary, the milieu is the exterior part of every interiority. A milieu could be described as an attempt to bridge the gap between the world and the individual, by referring to the coordinates of concrete space and time that lie in between the two. It operates by pointing to the primacy of relationality, which could be scaled out as the minimal fragment of systematicity that is based on interdependency and co-creation. This is why milieu should be inscribed within a different topography of the living; although it can be formulated in terms of Euclidian space, the space of the living cannot be thought along the lines of the latter geometry. So, starting from the simplest forms, the living faces the challenge of keeping the ambiguous role of the boundaries: le vivant vit à la limite de lui-même, sur sa limite.8 It is here we encounter the problem of the milieu– existing on the limit, or even being its own limit, or, more importantly, being connected to the field of potentialities that lie outside the individual. In fact, the milieu points to the important aspect of determination that is always at stake in the process of individuation. Living beings, as long as they exist, are constantly redrawing their limits. This is their raison d’etre: not to be granted a determined essence is the essence of life. As observed by Andrea Bardin:

8

Individuation, Technics, Social Systems (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 51. Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Million, 1995), 224.

72

Milieus and Umwelts One can notice that, at each level, the more the individual is linked to its (preindividual) milieu, the more it remains ‘open’ to a non-deterministic functioning. That is because ‘after individuation being has a past and the pre-individual becomes a phase’ (I 320) and nevertheless it remains ‘preindividual,’ i.e. the ‘non-structured’ phase of a system individual-milieu. In fact, the pre-individual is named ‘phase’ here in a quite different way compared to the other ‘phases’ of the individual, since the term rather indicates the individual’s relation to his milieu, the energetic source for further phase-shift. Thus the individual ‘reflects’ ‘the development, the regime and finally the modalities’ of the operation of individuation from which it derives (I 24), and its pre-individual ‘phase,’ as an ‘associated milieu,’ maintaining the same regime and modality of functioning which characterised its ontogenesis.9 One can say that the milieu constitutes the field of relations that link the individual to its potentiality. This is why the more the individual is linked to its milieu, the less it functions deterministically. Even in considering the role of the associated milieu of technical objects, Simondon speaks of it as a self-regulating mechanism that protects the object, which is also the modulator that facilitates individuation.

Sympoiesis vs. Autopoiesis In Staying with the Trouble, among other things, Donna Haraway embarks upon the concept of sympoiesis, which was proposed by Beth Dempster, a scholar of environmental studies, who juxtaposed the latter term with autopoiesis, a term that was elaborated by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Although sympoiesis relies on both biological and neocybernetic meanings of autopoiesis, it also opens up the space for an imaginary envisioning of poesis, the Greek word that refers to the act of creation itself. Thus, the emergence of the self-regulating and 9

Bardin, Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon, 38.

73

shared habitats self-generating feedback loops of autopoiesis appears to be insufficient in describing the types of systems that operate through a distributed subjectivity and co-creative activities that constantly allow adaptation by transforming themselves within the field of a changing environment. In her contradistinctive analysis of ecosystems and, partly, s0cial sytems, Dempster argues that, in contrast to autopoietic systems, sympoietic systems are “characterized by cooperative, amorphous qualities.” They “recurringly produce a self-similar pattern of relations through continued complex interactions among their many different components.

Table 1. Comparison of poietic system characteristics10 10 Data from Beth Dempster, “Sympoietic and Autopoietic Systems: A New Distinction of Self Organizing Systems,” in Proceedings of the World Congress of the Systems Sciences and ISSS 2000, eds. J. K. Allen and J. Wilby, p. 7. [Presented at the International Society for Systems Studies Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, July 2000 (Living Systems Analysis Special Integration Group)].

74

Milieus and Umwelts Rather than delineating boundaries, interactions among components and the self-organizing capabilities of a system are recognized as the defining qualities. ‘Systemhood’ does not depend on production of boundaries, but on the continuing complex and dynamic relations among components and other influences. The concept emphasizes linkages, feedback, cooperation, and synergistic behaviour rather than boundaries.”11 As we see, the production of boundaries is the first and most important feature that helps us understand the difference between the two concepts. Philosophically, one might say that an autopoietic system is a biological articulation of the metaphysical domain of individuals that maintain their substantial equilibrium by constantly reproducing the same set of structural relations within clearly defined boundaries. The logic of self-representation remains fundamental here: the two main operative gestures of autopoiesis are still resemblance and limitation. One might say these systems tend to produce only what has the potential to become representable to themselves. However, there is a danger of falling into the illusion of polarization here. Sympoiesis must not be conceived as a radical opposition to autopoiesis. As Dempster puts it, the former systems are not totally open, but should be described as “organizationally ajar,”12 meaning that this type of organization is subjected to the rules of structural organization that incorporates both agencies – what is traditionally called the “individual” and “its milieu.” The “sym” in sympoiesis, in my view, refers namely to the creative potential of the environment where this eco-poetical exchange 11 Beth Dempster, “Sympoietic and Autopoietic Systems: A New Distinction of Self Organizing Systems,” in Proceedings of the World Congress of the Systems Sciences and ISSS 2000, eds. J. K. Allen and J. Wilby [Presented at the International Society for Systems Studies Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, July 2000 (Living Systems Analysis Special Integration Group)], 4. 12 Dempster, A Self Organizing Systems Perspective and Conceptualizing Complex Systems.

75

shared habitats happens. Being semi-open is also a question of scale. As we see in Table 2, sympoietic systems fall under the category of what is traditionally conceived of as a group of individual species or, to be more precise, as an interdependent environment of multiple species: Due to their characteristics, autopoietic systems require specific predictable inputs from the sympoietic systems they are embedded within, yet the latter depend on uncertainty and continual change for their continued existence. This uncertainty and continual change, of course, results from the complex interactions among the increasingly complex autopoietic systems.13 .

And, namely, in this regard, the understanding of the milieu, as elaborated by Canguilhem and Simondon, can contribute to elucidating the sort of creative relations that link the individuals that constitute the sympoietic systems. By drawing the above-mentioned parallel, in this kind of system, every member is each other’s milieu, conditioning the process of mutual individualization, without a preconceived teleology of becoming.

Table 2. Examples of autopoietic and sympoietic systems 14

13 Dempster, “Sympoietic and Autopoietic Systems,” 14. 14 Data from Dempster “Sympoietic and Autopoietic Systems,” 15.

76

Milieus and Umwelts Since these communities are not predetermined, their individuals partake in mutual development, creatively redrawing each other’s boundaries. In this sense, who is an individual and who is a milieu becomes only a matter of perspective. Canguilhem proposes an assertion about the nature of this relationality of changing perspectives: From the biological point of view, one must understand that the relationship between the organism and the environment is the same as that between the parts and the whole of an organism. The individuality of the living does not stop at its ectodermic borders any more than it begins at the cell. The biological relationship between the being and its milieu is a functional relationship, and thereby a mobile one; its terms successively exchange roles. The cell is a milieu for intracellular elements; it itself lives in an interior milieu, which is sometimes on the scale of the organ and sometimes of the organism; the organism itself lives in a milieu that, in a certain fashion, is to the organism what the organism is to its components.15

Cyclic Imagination It is important to stress that the concept of sympoiesis presupposes a concept of creativity that is also found within the understanding of the milieu. Sympoietic systems could be called systems of shared creativity. However, what is meant here by the very concept of creation? How can we conceive of creativity in non-human terms? At this point, one can go back to Simondon, by bringing in his frequently overlooked theory of cyclic imagination, which aims to articulate the creativity that lies outside a living being as well as to conceive of the image beyond its status of mental content. In Imagination et invention (Imagination and Invention), we find an interesting attempt to describe and conceptualize an organism-milieu interaction as an act of creative 15 Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, 111.

77

shared habitats connectivity that relies on the field’s undetermined potentiality. In this regard, Simondon’s imagination resonates with Dempster’s idea of sympoietic co-creativity. Simondon proposes thinking of imagination in terms of a cycle of images. Different functions of imagination are not only interrelated among themselves as the phases of mental progression. The idea of the cycle proposes a model of the interaction and passage between the mind and milieu. In its quasi-organic development: (1) The image is at first a bundle of motor tendencies that functions as an anticipation of the experience of the object. Through the genetically programmed behavior and by relying on pure motor spontaneity, imagination, prior to any experience or object recognition, integrates a living being into the milieu. (2) Then, in the phase of perception, imagination produces the intra-perceptive images, the subsets of perceptions, and ensures a mode of reception of the signals and information coming from the milieu, by becoming the source of the schemes of answers to these stimulations. (3) Finally, the images are organized and systematized in a mental world (especially under the influence of affective and emotive resonance), through which the subject produces an analogue of the external milieu (i.e., memories and symbols). (4) The invention can then arise as a change in the organization of the mental image system, allowing the subject to approach the milieu with new anticipations: it marks the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new one. As we see, Simondon underlines that invention, as a material interaction within the milieu, is the part of the process that circulates from mind into milieu and back. Moreover, as he puts it, “The tendency to go beyond 78

Milieus and Umwelts the individual subject which is actualized in the invention is [...] virtually contained in the three previous stages of the cycle of the image.”16 Simondon compares the cycle of images to the life of an organism that produces invention in relation to the milieu. Moreover, he links the process of invention as the surplus that is produced by the mind, which is not contained within the limits of the mind. Imagination, for Simondon, is a decentering orientation of the mind, to overstep its own boundaries or even to exist on the limit of the mind: it is the mind that redraws its own limits to intervene in the world and to be intruded by it. Hence, imagination always produces a surplus that occurs as an opening that allows one to transcend the systematic features of mental and psychic life. “The invention differs from the images that precede it by the fact that it operates the change of the order of magnitude. It does not remain in the living being, like a part of mental equipment, but straddles the spatio-temporal limits of the living being in order to connect itself with the milieu that it organizes.”17 Simondon ascribes to the imagination the role of the bridging power – the power that allows the individual to produce, discover, and invent different orders of relationality towards the milieu and within it; or, otherwise put, imagination is the power that bridges the realm of thought and matter. Instead of considering it in terms of dissociation or escapism from reality, one must recognize in the imaginary procedures a process of potentialization that shapes interactive entanglements in creative terms and engenders new ways for a poetical and material exchange to happen. In this sense, not only humans, but all kinds of organisms, even without forming mental representations, can cultivate imagination as potentialization within their milieus. For Simondon, the potentiality of imagination 16 Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et invention (1965–1966) (Chatou: Les Éditions de la Transparence, 2008), 186. 17 Ibid., 185–6.

79

shared habitats marks the threshold between real and unreal, the boundary on which this distinction itself, if not invalid, can at least be thought outside its visual definition. It is the field of imagination that aims to transform structures and institute new fields of possibilities that do not belong to any specific individual, but rather are exercised as a relationality with an associated milieu: The reason the living being can invent is because it is an individual being that carries its associated milieu with it; this capacity for conditioning itself lies at the root of the capacity to produce objects that condition themselves. What has escaped the attention of psychologists in their analysis of the inventive imagination aren’t the schemas, forms, or operations that stand out as the spontaneously salient and striking elements, but rather the dynamic ground upon which these schemas confront each other and combine, and wherein they participate.18 In this context, images appear at the very center of the interaction between the living being and its milieu. Along the lines of gestalt psychology, Simondon further draws the analogy of form and background, regarding it as the relationship of tension between forces. If the milieu can be interpreted as a background, it acquires the role of powerful dynamism that produces the emergence of represented forms: “The relation of participation that links forms to ground is a relation that bestrides the present and diffuses an influence of the future onto the present, of the virtual onto the actual. For the ground is the system of virtualities, of potentials, forces that carve out their path, whereas forms are the system of actuality.”19 However, how is this link between living beings and their milieus exercised in the imagination? In the analysis of the third phase, Simondon claims that the emergence of the new is only possible when

18 Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. C. Malaspina and J. Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017), 60. 19 Ibid., 61.

80

Milieus and Umwelts memory-images reach the state of supersaturation, described as a metastable condition. It means that the change that is conditioned by the milieu must resonate within the realm of mental organization, by producing a specific modality of tension within the structure of the mind and by signalizing the availability for transformation. “Symbol images,” in their own right, become possible only because of the structural change they induce in re-organizing contradictory components. The process of condensation, gaining actual power from pairing incompatible elements, establishes the imagination as a form of a constantly renewable power of connectivity with the environment. This is how a symbol could be described as “the path to the object” – as a means to evoke and restore an object based on its traces, without a pretense of correspondence to its integrity. “This pair of incompatible and yet bound qualities expresses the state of supersaturation of the memory-image, a metastable state which is the necessary condition of the invention, that is to say of a change in structure, restoring compatibility in a new system.”20 Simondon’s theory of images enables one to say that the dialectics between the potentiality and the conditions of realization depend on the production of symbolic coordinates. And it is, namely, through the power to generate symbols – the fields of intensity where heterogeneities meet – that the logic of imagination surpasses the logic of representation and reproduction. Although the text of Imagination and Invention does not provide a broader elaboration of the concept of metastability, one must note that this notion – recurrent in Simondon’s philosophy – is used primarily in thermodynamics when attempting to define a state that is neither stable nor entirely unstable. The tension between these two poles essentially marks the aforementioned “supersaturated condition” in which the system is completely ready for change. Metastability points to the liminal moment in which the tension reaches its highest point – this is the condition

20 Simondon, Imagination et invention, 124.

81

shared habitats of a system under which any input coming from outside can produce both internal and external transformation. It also expresses a certain moment of intensity of exchange between an individual and its milieu. This is the state that has enough potential energy within it to cause a sudden change in the whole system. According to Simondon, this term can be used to describe “the reality of individual,” meaning neither its substantial character nor a mere field of relations. If real individuals exist, they must belong to “the system where a metastable state is produced.”21 Under metastable conditions, complex systems maintain a kind of balance that can be easily disrupted upon the appearance of a single insignificant stimulus, that is, when energy or information enters the system. As Muriel Combes states: A physical system is said to be in metastable equilibrium (or false equilibrium) when the least modification of system parameters (pressure, temperature, etc.) suffices to break its equilibrium. Thus, in super-cooled water (i.e., water remaining liquid at a temperature below its freezing point), the least impurity with a structure isomorphic to that of ice plays the role of a seed for crystallization and suffices to turn the water to ice. Before all individuation, being can be understood as a system containing potential energy. Although this energy becomes active within the system, it is called potential because it requires a transformation of the system in order to be structured, that is, to be actualized in accordance with structures. Preindividual being, and in a general way, any system in a metastable state, harbors potentials that are incompatible because they belong to heterogeneous dimensions of being.22

Along these lines, one might claim – in light of metastable conditions – that the associated milieu enacts the reality of the individual through

21 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 79–80. 22 Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, 3–4.

82

Milieus and Umwelts imagination. Image is the locus of interaction between milieu and organism that produces deviations in the systematic teleology. Conceived as the field of intensities, milieu ascribes to imagination the role of connectivity through constant re-fabrication of existing borders and not exactly complying with rules of linear development. What remains of the utmost importance here is that organism-milieu correlation implies mutual determination without the model of subordination. The associated milieu can be described not only as a self-regulating environment that belongs to an organism, but also as the factor that performs the role of the modulator that facilitates individuation. Among other things, it primarily points out an intertwining of inherited and innovative elements. On the other hand, the concept of the milieu can be properly understood only by taking into consideration the moment of scale. Here, the point of departure is not a subject separate from the world, not the world independent of a subject, not an individual, society, consciousness, or its cultural context, but a milieu that incorporates the forces of the correlated world. It is that minimal fragment of environment that integrates the worldliness – that is, the concrete set of tensions and relations of the environment – into the living being. A milieu encompasses the tensions of spatiotemporal relations that involve the exchanges between the living entity, its organic companion species, and even non-organic matter. It also implies the supremacy of correlationality, which can be understood as a minimal level of mutual engagement based on interdependency and creativity.

Non-Human Imagination Perhaps the interaction of “minds and milieus” – as equally important and mutually constitutive factors – offers a relatively plausible perspective to discover a more nuanced relationality and to avoid dangerous reductions that bear the tendency to downplay the non-human in many regards. 83

shared habitats The process of thinking is a form of relation within the world that has both a poetical and a performative aspect of producing the consciousness and its objects of cognition. Minds and milieus are to be thought of as contained in internal tensions that produce their individual articulations. The question of the milieu – which incorporates both the technical and the material, both the natural and the cultural – thus must be freed from the concept of “mere location.” Our techno-natural environments are active and productive agencies that take part in the organization of mental systems. And, vice versa, minds are never separated from their mediums. The adherent worlds participate in the performance of mental acts. We can conceive of, I believe, both minds and milieus as mutually constitutive partners in the event of imaginary thinking. What is sympoiesis if not a recognition of the strategies of nonhuman imagination as well as the recognition of the validity of the non-human mind? It could be reformulated as the study of the imaginary as the intra-action within a productive environment, liberating creativity from pre-assigned roles, without privileging human or non-human agencies. Bacteria, fungi, algae, minerals, rivers, forests, and, most certainly, swamps not only dwell poetically; they are our co-creative partners, which partake in our imaginary endeavors. The idea of making together in order to find a new ethos of co-existence stems from an act of recognition of this poetical power of ecologies around us – the power we still need to learn and understand. There are autopoietic and sympoietic regimes of imagination, playing with different types of constitutions of possibilities. If autopoiesis is the field of the individual psyche that projects its subjective visions, the imaginary of sympoiesis is the cultivation of the mind in relation to its milieu, which itself is granted generative power. Within the sympoietic regime, the common field of potentiality plays a more fundamental role in shaping its constituents than any individual input. To imagine sympoietically does not mean to indulge in your dreams, but rather to hear, to respond, 84

Milieus and Umwelts to open up creatively for an uncertainty of environment that includes us in the processes of making-together. This power can be conceived of as an alternative imaginary, an imaginary beyond the imagining human.

Kristupas Sabolius (*1979) is a professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of Vilnius University in Lithuania, and research affiliate at MIT (Climate Visions). His recent publications include Swamps and the New Imagination. On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture, and Philosophy (MIT Press and Sternberg Press, 2020), Matter and Imagination. Hybrid Creativity between Science and Art (editor, Vilnius University Press, 2018), Proteus and the Radical Imaginary (Bunkier Sztuki, CAC, 2015), and The Imaginary (Vilnius University Press, 2013).

85

shared habitats

86

shared habitats

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

87

shared habitats

88

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Rhizomes Freya Xia Probst

Fig. 1. Roots of plants. Photo: Freya Probst

Rhizomes (2017–2019), by Freya Probst, is a row of experiments involving a playful interaction with plants and the observation of their roots with photography and time-lapse. Probst’s experiments began with a fascination with observing the subterranean part of the plant and how it grows. Experiments with pearls, small gears, the positioning of seeds, and different mediums led to different plant responses and a different reaction or growth of the plant roots. The observations have inspired not only more experiments, but also questions about why the plants behaved in this way. How does, for instance, the competition between two plants become visible underground? Why is one plant’s growing roots so much denser than those of another plant? The objects presented show the more advanced stage of this experimentation. The artist recorded her experiments in video. The movement of plants and their roots in video time-lapse allows the visitor to under89

shared habitats

Fig. 2. Plants. Photo: Freya Probst

90

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

91

shared habitats

Fig. 3. Freya Xia Probst, Rhizomes, 2017–2019. Installation view at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Rytis Šeškaitis Fig. 4. Plant root dress, 2017. Photo: Freya Probst

92

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Fig. 5. Freya Xia Probst, Rhizomes, 2017–2019. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

Fig. 6. Growing root skirt as part of Freya Xia Probst, Rhizomes, 2017–2019. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Freya Probst

93

shared habitats stand them as sensing, living creatures that carefully search their paths and that sense and react to their environments. They grow according to how seeds are positioned, how they are watered, and in what kind of pot they are placed. The knowledge gained in these experiments was eventually applied to larger samples and squares of fabric, enabling Probst to further grow larger surface-areas in the shape of cutting patterns. The presentation culminates in gowns made out of naturally grown roots. With her gowns, Probst puts the plant back into the service of the human. At the same time, with her delicate, natural clothes, she proposes a vision of a more cautious approach to the use of natural resources.

Freya Probst (*1995) is a designer and artist. She is currently a PhD candidate at Loughborough University, researching social and cultural progress in the design of future financial technologies. Parallel, she continues her work with plant roots, which she began at Bauhaus University in Weimar. Her interests are in the area of root ecology, speculative design, and generative art. http://freyaxiaprobst.com

94

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

95

shared habitats

Luminograf #1 Christian Doeller

Fig. 1. Christian Doeller, Luminograf #1. Installation view at the Art Center NKNU, Kaohsiung, 2017. Photo: Christian Doeller

In his installation Luminograf #1 (2016/2018), Christian Doeller deals with the translation of invisible interference between analogue and digital processes into a sensually perceptible form. The project has its origin in the search for recyclable components inside a defective stereo system. The built-in cd player leads to a seemingly simple idea: what kinds of images would be created if the player’s laser diode were used to expose light-sensitive paper? By combining his background as a photographer with diy electronics and programming, he transforms the laser, which was formerly used to read data on music cds, into a photographic exposure machine. 96

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Fig. 2. Christian Doeller, Schleifen, HD video. Screenshot: Christian Doeller

Fig. 3. Christian Doeller, Luminograf #1. Installation view at the Art Center NKNU, Kaohsiung, 2017. Photo: Christian Doeller

97

shared habitats An extensive series of 7 cm x 14 cm light drawings on baryta paper, which resulted from different experiments in the darkroom, show an unexpected variety of gray tones and different levels of sharpness. To create these images, Doeller controls the former cd player with simple motion algorithms that allow the laser unit to move in parallel lines across the light-sensitive paper. Those parts of the machine that have been modified by hand during the transformation process of the cd player now generate mechanical friction. Depending on the motor power, the laser unit remains stuck for an undefined period of time until the motors have built up enough power to resume their linear movement. During these moments of “getting stuck,” dark dots appear on the photosensitive paper – they are the traces of the mechanical deviations caused by human intervention in the system. In Luminograf #1, random disturbances and so-called “errors” of interference between analogue and digital processes become the starting point of a creative process. The resulting light drawings are finally digitized and enlarged to an immersive format of 120 cm x 400 cm. The video work Schleifen (translated in English as “loops” or “friction”) shows Luminograf #1 in real-time during the exposure of a phosphorescent surface. Glowing dots emerge and gradually fade away whenever the mechanical friction of the machine forces the laser module to stop. The random and constantly changing arrangement of luminous lines and dots is accompanied by the irregular humming of the motors. After a while, the movement stops, all traces of light disappear, and the process begins again. Christian Doeller (*1987) is an artist who experiments at the interface of science, philosophy, and technology. With his installations, machines, hacks, and programs, he explores the characteristics of noise, randomness, and autopoiesis in the context of digitalization. His works highlight not only the perception of the individual, but also relations and dependencies in human-machine interaction and the social effects of technologically modified environments. Doeller lives and works in Leipzig. http://www.christiandoeller.de

98

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

99

shared habitats

Thoughts on Day and Night Maike A. Effenberg

Fig. 1. Maike A. Effenberg, Thoughts on Day and Night, 2019. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Maike A. Effenberg

100

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Fig. 2. Maike A. Effenberg, Thoughts on Day and Night, 2019. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

Fig. 3. Maike A. Effenberg, Thoughts on Day and Night, detail, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

101

shared habitats By extending mechanical models from the 1960s, the installation Thoughts on Day and Night (2019), by Maike A. Effenberg, demonstrates her approach to cybernetics. The work communicates the equality of the energy flow within a machine and within the ecosystem of a tree. Both are receiving their energy from the light and use it for different processes during day and night. The energy from the sun is recreated by a light source on the ceiling; a rotating pane – half opaque, half translucent – in front of the light takes 2.4 minutes to complete one rotation. Together, they imitate the lighting conditions during the full 24 hours of 21 March 2011, which was the “Day of the Forest” in the “Year of the Forest.” Placed in the light cone are two electronic circuits. They receive their energy from two integrated solar panels. As in a tree, this energy is transformed, stored, and used for various processes. One circuit releases a signal that changes according to the brightness. The second circuit releases the collected energy collected during the darkness. As a result, a kinetic object starts to rotate and creates a sound by touching a piezo element. The idea of resembling the flow of any kind of energy within an ecosystem, or even other systems, goes back to the biologists and cyberneticians Howard and Eugene Odum. Their aim was to analyze and control these systems. In the professional world, they received great criticism for their inaccurate translation from nature. Their models had no added value and were incomprehensible to laypeople. By adding kinetic and acoustic elements, Effenberg makes the energy flow perceptible to everyone. Her work creates an experience that blurs the line between construction and nature. Maike A. Effenberg (*1990) is a media artist focusing on bio-art and cybernetics. She graduated from Bauhaus University, Weimar, and now works as a freelancer based in Cologne. Her works are about the tension between analogue and digital worlds. She encounters this on a metaphysical level without losing sight of the connection to the natural sciences. Her artwork leaves the viewer with questions regarding how much life is found in a machine and how much construction is found in nature. http://www.mkffnbrg.com

102

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

103

shared habitats

Interfacing for a Sixth Sense Sebastian Kaye

Fig. 1. Sebastian Kaye, Interfacing for a Sixth Sense, 2019. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

For several decades, labs like Princeton University’s PEAR lab and the Institute of Noetic Sciences have been exploring how human minds can have an unexplained influence on chaotic systems, such as physical random number generators (RNGs). How this influence works is still a mystery, but it suggests that consciousness may be more deeply connected to the fabric of reality than previously thought. For over 15 years and counting, the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) has been collecting data from their physical network, consisting of over 70 true RNGs and correlating the occasional moments of the statisti104

Experiencing Arts and Sciences cally non-random behavior of this data with global events. They draw their hypothesis as follows: “When human consciousness becomes coherent, the behaviour of random systems may change. Random number generators (RNGs) based on quantum tunnelling produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeros and ones. But when a great event synchronises the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured.”1 The installation Interfacing for a Sixth Sense (2019) is an attempt to bring the individual closer to the idea of global consciousness, of which we, by its very definition, are all an integral part. The interface – in this project, a briefcase – is portable, allowing the user to connect themselves to the net of consciousness whenever they feel the need. By grasping one’s hand around the briefcase handle, the interface watches for two conditions to come together: first, a change in the user’s heart rate

Fig. 2. Interfacing for a Sixth Sense in action at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

1

The Global Consciousness Project. Available at http://noosphere.princeton.edu (accessed: 1 September 2020).

105

shared habitats

Fig. 3. Sebastian Kaye, Interfacing for a Sixth Sense, drawing, 2019

(LED strip-lights display the user’s pulse in real-time), and second, a significant spike in non-random behavior from the GCP network, indicating a synchronous moment in global consciousness. Only when both of these conditions are detected does the meditation handbell ring, bringing the mind’s attention out of its inner jumble of mental impressions and into the present, which is the only place where a global consciousness can exist. As “esoteric electronics,” this device mirrors a part of the tantric approach in Tibetan Buddhist meditation. By using body, speech, and mind, one’s totality is applied. Here, the body is reflected in the use of the user’s heart rate. The bell symbolizes speech, and the mind is united with itself through this interface.

106

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Sebastian Kaye (*1986) is a UK-born artist who lives in Germany. He earned a BFA at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, Kent, and an MFA in Media Art and Design at Bauhaus University, Weimar. His interest lies in how modern media can be applied to communicate alternative theories for the relationship between the mind and the brain while avoiding dualistic simplifications. https://sebastro.carbonmade.com

107

shared habitats

108

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

The Pig Simulator Stephan Isermann

Fig. 1. Stephan Isermann, The Pig Simulator, 2015–2018. Installation view at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Rytis Šeškaitis

The interactive installation Pig Simulator (2018–2019) allows visitors to live and die like a pig. The habitat of the animal is experienced through virtual embodiment, which leads the audience into the position of the animal – in a world designed by humans based on the desire for the mass consumption of meat. The goal of The Pig Simulator is not to educate or strive for higher values as much as it is to disappoint common expectations about gaming and to fight the dark irony of a just world of unequal life forms living in the shared habitat called Earth.

109

shared habitats

Fig. 2. A scene from the game The Pig Simulator. Image: Stephan Isermann

110

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Fig. 3. Stephan Isermann, The Pig Simulator, 2015–2018. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

The Pig Simulator takes place in virtual reality, but also in real space. Once inside the physical rig, users are forced not only to embody the pig in the audiovisual virtual realm, but also to take a quadruped pose in real space. The goal is then to escape slaughter in virtual reality – and, as in the real life of a real pig, this idea becomes futile. The user will suffer the fate of a pig and experience the habitat of the animal as closely as possible through virtual embodiment.

Stephan Isermann (*1982) is a VR artist and director. Since 2010, he has been refining his craft of virtual experiences and making them socially relevant and provocative. His work lies at the interface of digital topicality, psychology, game design, and a strong social reference. The Pig Simulator was awarded the Media Art Prize from Bauhaus University, Weimar, in 2017. In his work as a freelancer, he is active as a developer and technical artist in the field of 3D real-time visualization for the industry and fun. http://www.tekkler.com

111

shared habitats

112

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

microplastic_hyperobject Maria Degand

Fig. 1. Maria Degand, microplastic_hyperobject, 2019. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Courtesy of Maria Degand

The VR installation microplastic_hyperobject (2019), by Maria Degand, reconsiders microplastics that have become prevalent throughout world habitats, including arable lands and our foods. Deegand asks, what do microplastics look like? How could we use VR technology to rethink materiality? How can these particles be explored visually? And how big are they really? Microplastics are plastic pieces that are smaller than a grain of sand. Scientists find them everywhere, in the local lake, on the playground, and in arable soil. Degand offers two experiences for understanding microplastics, with a modified microscope and VR glasses. The microscope is enhanced by a device that allows the visitor a live 3D view of microplastic 113

shared habitats

Fig. 2. DIY mobile-phone holder in microplastic_hyperobject 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

samples, which can be recorded by the audience. A VR headset invites them to explore a 3D scan of a microplastic, which is placed next to information on the microplastics in the Earth. The artwork indirectly refers to Yvonne Volkart’s concept of the “Wasteocene” and the use of laboratory aesthetics, briefly mentioned in her article “Caring for Life – From the 114

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Fig. 3. A 3D scan of a microplastic. Courtesy of Maria Degand

Laboratory to Labbing.” Having made it possible for the audience to interact with the scientific tools, Degand fills the gap between laboratory aesthetics and “labbing,” which is a focus of Volkart’s article. This installation was developed in collaboration with Leon-Etienne Kühr. Maria Degand (*1991) studied art history and English at Trier University in Germany and École Pratique des Hautes Études in the Sorbonne in France. Degand also graduated with an MFA in Media Art and Design from Bauhaus University, Weimar. Her works focus on citizen science, biology, and virtual reality. Currently, Degand gives workshops on laser cutting and upcycling. She also organizes a makerspace in Leipzig.

115

shared habitats

116

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

The 18th Camel and The Habitats of Thought. On the Paradox of Teaching Technology in the Arts1 Georg Trogemann A traveling mullah was riding on his camel to Medina, when he saw several camels standing next to a group of three young men who clearly were in distress. “What befell you, my friends?” he asked, and the eldest replied, “Our father died.” “Be he blessed by Allah. I sympathize with you. But he must have left you something in his will.” “Yes,” said the young man, “these seventeen camels. That’s all he had.” “Rejoice! What then ails you?” “You see,” the eldest brother continued, “his will says I should get one-half of his possessions, my younger brother one-third, and the youngest here one-ninth. But how ever we try to distribute these camels, it never works out.” “Is this all that troubles you, my friends?” the mullah said. “Then take my camel for a moment and let’s see what we can do.” With 18 camels now the eldest brother got one-half, that is, nine camels, and nine were left. The next in line got one-third of the 18 camels, that is, six, and three were left. Since the youngest brother got one-ninth of the 18 camels, that is, two, one camel was left. It was that of the mullah, who mounted it and rode away, waving the happy brothers good-bye. – Lynn Segal2 The parable of the 18th camel exists in many variants. This version comes from a book by Lynn Segal, The Dream of Reality: Heinz von Foerster’s Constructivism. But the story is also often used in the field of coaching as an example of “out-of-the-box” thinking or in seminars on negotiation tactics. One might ask oneself why this short story is so successful. Simple school-level mathematics is all that’s needed to immediately see where the 1

This essay is based on the paper presented at the conference “100 Jahre Bauhaus: We Are Not Alone” at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, 5 September 2019.

2

Lynn Segal, The Dream of Reality: Heinz von Foerster’s Constructivism (New York and London: Norton, 1986), VI.

117

shared habitats problem lies. The father has not divided the whole inheritance, and the number 17 is cleverly selected in order to have the problem arise in the first place. So it must be something else that makes the story interesting. It doesn’t provide much to chew on as a purely mathematical problem, but as a narrative on two levels – that of what is said and that of what is meant – it describes something real and, at the same time, refers to a deeper meaning. Heinz von Foerster uses the parable of the 18th camel in this way in order to talk about the concept of reality: “Reality, like the eighteenth camel, is needed as a prop that can be discarded when everything else is clear.”3 If, on the other hand, we only look at the mathematical problem, then all ambiguity disappears, and as soon as we write out the calculation 1 /2 + 1/3 + 1/9 = 17/18 , the story disappears too. We can imagine the initial situation in the teaching of digital technologies in an artistic context in a similar way. There appear to be two fundamentally different and incompatible points of view. On one hand, there are basic technical principles, electronics, tools, methods, and algorithms that must be learnt if one wishes to realize new applications or artistic projects with digital tools. This technical knowledge is rooted in the rationalist tradition, mathematics, and purpose-driven thinking and follows a binary logic. Like mathematics, this technical level can be exciting and fascinating in its own right. But like the mathematics of the 18th camel, most of the digital tools, regarded separately, are not particularly interesting and even have a tendency to be invisible and to disappear as soon as one is proficient with them. Alongside this technical perspective, which asks, “How do computers work?” there is the other that asks, “What can we do with them?” Very different things are paramount for users, and, as a rule, computers are only a means to an end for artists and designers. Digital tools serve to aesthetically transform the initial

3

Ibid.

118

Experiencing Arts and Sciences material, to produce aesthetic objects and processes, and to generate new levels of meaning that are no longer describable by means of the qualities of the initial material. Although the logical and technical-rational principles of events have a say and influence the aesthetics of products, they nonetheless remain, like the mathematics of the 18th camel, in the background. How they work remains mostly hidden, not only from the viewer, but also from the producer. If one concentrates on the art, the technology disappears. If one looks at the technology, the art dissipates. This description is reminiscent of the two different cultures that C. P. Snow talked about in 1959 in his famous Rede Lecture.4 So, is it this familiar gap between the humanities and art on one hand and the natural sciences and technology on the other that unintentionally, but nevertheless inevitably, becomes a basis of the seminar? Two cultures, which touch each other, which also influence, promote, and impede each other, which speak different languages, which attach value to their different traditions, which use fundamentally different methods and pursue disparate objectives. In teaching, the diversity of the two cultures expresses itself in the following observation: in the exact sciences as well as in teaching technology, all participants, after a successful introductory course, give the same answer to a question. In the arts, on the other hand, answers are varied. Why is this? Because of the questions or the culture of their treatment? The institutional differentiation into two incompatible cultures is only the social expression of a split, whose origin is located in human thought itself. The dichotomy of thought is especially justified by the hemispheric model of neurosciences, the strict interpretation of which is seen as obsolete in the sciences. According to this, the left half of the brain is responsible for tasks such as logical-analytical skills and 4

The Rede Lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” and reactions to it continue to be reprinted to this day. See: C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, 15th edition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

119

shared habitats for language and temporal linear organization, the right for perception, spatial orientation, creative and emotional processes, and timeless holistic thinking. But psychology also differentiates between rational and emotional intelligence as well as between perception and thought. And notably, the philosophy of aesthetics divides mental capacities into rational and sensory. But at the same time, the human brain is extremely interconnected and knows no exclusive jurisdictions. All of its functions are important for the fullness of human reason. If we want to tap into our present complex reality, we cannot afford to forego one or the other side from the outset. And why shouldn’t we try to improve all skills to the best possible level of proficiency, instead of encouraging them unilaterally? Even if a division of labor between computer scientists and artists is practical and very effective in artistic praxis, a strict division is simply not possible. Those who develop software can hardly do so, unless it deals with purely mathematical functions, without knowing in which context the application will be embedded. Conversely, a knowledge of internal functional relationships is always demanded of tool users. It would be a dubious thing if artistic courses did not reflect on their tools and material. They wouldn’t be able to visualize how much the tools shape the result and how strongly the self-will of the material repeatedly demands corrections of the original idea. They would also deny the inability to plan art. It is possible to get closer to the self-will of the analogue material now and then, by being satisfied with, for example, 90% of the optimum aspired to. The non-functioning program is more unforgiving and will stubbornly continue to crash until the logical mistake is eliminated. Anyone who has searched for program errors hour upon hour knows this incorruptible self-will of logic. The different focusses – logical-analytical thought on one hand and open sensory searching and acting on the other – are not a problem in themselves, but in fact a strength of human reason. We can clearly train different types of intellectual operation, which then produce different findings and working results. The decisive question is, however, 120

Experiencing Arts and Sciences are we able to combine these divergent views in the teaching of art? The different cultures, which will be spoken about in the following, are the actual starting point of technically-oriented courses in art and signify a crucial restriction in its aims. For many years, we have tried to simultaneously do justice to the simple technical-scientific basics on one side and the demands of artistic praxis on the other in our lessons. We wanted to impart basic digital principles, the simple mathematics of the 18th camel, so to speak, and, at the same time, demonstrate the potential for artistic praxis. Ultimately, we could not create a real combination. This does not mean that artists cannot learn the practical handling of digital technologies. What we did not manage was the amalgamation of deeper layers. I have ultimately drawn the conclusion from my experiences that one must approach this problem in a different way. If one assumes differences between both traditions – the emphasis of sensory perception in art, and of rational, deductive, abstracting reason in technology – one will not be able to overcome the gap. Both extremes have their eligibility where they serve different objectives and focuses, and each face different challenges. As an attempt to build bridges, one could expect statements on inter- and trans-disciplinarity, on artistic research, on the “practice-based PhD,” or similar current debates at this point. But the essence of this isn’t about the question of research and art’s and science’s different forms of knowledge.5 Knowledge in the sense of epistemology would be the wrong approach to the artistic – and, to a large extent, to the technical – digital spaces of experience. It is not about the cognition of reality, but rather about its 5

Discussions on artistic research are, in contrast, mainly politically motivated. It is mainly about social recognition and not least resources, positions, and academic ranks. So that the mental figure of artistic research can be established as a brand, the division of both cultures must first be inflated and exaggerated. It requires a sufficient number of representatives to associate with the respective culture and defend it, so that a few others can then postulate new cooperations, connections, and overlaps. Innumerable examples show that surprising and

121

shared habitats production, about poiesis. As poietical reason, not theoretical reason, is central, the starting point for the reflections employed here cannot be artistic research either. In artistic praxis with digital technologies, we are compulsorily confronted with two different forms of thinking and are obliged to grapple with them. The following is little more than a summary of various tests in teaching and a suggestion as to a direction one could continue in. As both the visual arts and technology produce artifacts, they pertain, with poiesis (planning, designing, doing, producing, the artificial), to a common ground. In the natural sciences, it is about clear knowledge and proof; in art and technology, it is about doing and showing. If one wishes to conjecture from this common ground in teaching, we must develop other seminar content beyond the classical divisions. Conversely, introductions to digital technologies can be simply scrapped; it is enough to refer to good tutorials online. With a view on the story at the start, this means: We must start to tell other stories. It is not enough to just follow current trends. It is about giving the wealth of theories, methods, and models, which have long existed in the technological sciences, other meanings, to transform and reinterpret them. Only if we tell different stories about and with technology can it take on a new role in our culture. So the fact that the parable of the 18th camel is still so successful today and is no longer just a nice children’s story is part of the actual predicament.

fantastic things can arise if new connections between otherwise divided areas are investigated. The problem is much more that this is seen as something special and not as the normal case. If narrow science and equally narrow art are opened up again and thereby actually just normalized, all sides profit. Is not the quality of the work in the end the decisive criteria for its meaning and valuation?

122

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

The Digital as Material Making art with and through media means, as a rule, realizing an idea or a concept – so, making perceptional offerings that appeal to us emotionally, perhaps surprise us, make us contemplative, or just confuse us. Traditional material sublimation is in play from the start, as the material, being less valued compared to form and function, steps into the background.6 Through the transformation and reconfiguration of source materials, new qualities arise that are not already present in the individual components. The programming of functions is also a form of technological material sublimation. Whenever interfaces, data, software, actuators, and feedback are worked with in installations and the like and their interactions create perceptional offerings, this is material sublimation. So there is no principle division between informatics and art here. Artists can, of course, create their own databases and develop their own tools. Recently, not only in the arts, but especially in art theory, a paradigm shift has taken place that sees the material of art as an autonomous aesthetic category.7 Without our teaching approach being based on art theory or classical aesthetics, our seminars – from which a few examples will be shown in the next section – have always followed this basic approach, of enabling material sublimation with digital technologies (mathematics, electronics, algorithms) on one hand, while, at the same time, not only admitting the self-will of digital materials but also explicitly mapping it out. That digital data and algorithms have become artistic material in the first place is due to a general tendency in art: the permanent expansion of its material base in the 20th century. From this perspective, digital 6

Thomas Strässle, “Pluralis materialitatis,” in Das Zusammenspiel der Materialien in den Künsten. Theorien – Praktiken – Perspektiven, eds. Thomas Strässle, Christoph Kleinschmidt, and Johanne Mohs (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013), 9.

7

Ibid.

123

shared habitats technologies in the second half of the 20th century were just an addition of another material. But one of the idiosyncrasies of this material is that it cannot be accessed phenomenologically. If we try to leave out rationally, theoretically, and technically conditional approaches and concentrate on what our senses perceive at the interfaces of screens and devices, their essential principle escapes us. Digital data is always the result of a process of abstraction and interpretation; it never just stands for itself, but rather for something absent. “Dealing with material is closely linked with the ideas of immediacy, concreteness, and feel. The illusion that material and things are immediate and to be understood as concrete and open up direct access to the world and to the ego has consolidated with this. But dealing with material also means showing, presenting, and exposing, and is therefore always also a matter of rhetoric or staging.”8 This is particularly true for digital material. There is immediacy, concreteness, and feel in the digital, too, but these are artificial from the beginning. They are updates and instances of symbols whose materiality can always be selected differently. For something to become information requires a cognitive act, that is, the information must be inscribed in the material and read out again. The material itself, on the other hand, is not defined, and the same information can be materialized in very different ways. This principle of “multiple realizability” suggests a great freedom for digital artistic-creative praxis. This principle freedom is confronted with the factual restrictions of each current technology. Martin Warnke described the problem very aptly: “Art in the digital world is always in danger of being, so to speak, on technology’s very short leash, of being tied to what industry has to offer in terms of device performance, but then also exhausting itself in it. Consequently,

8

Sabine Autsch and Sara Hornäk, “Materialhandlungen. Greifen, Stellen, Legen, Zerstören, Zeigen, Inszenieren,” in Material und künstlerisches Handeln – Positionen und Perspektiven in der Gegenwartskunst, eds. Sabine Autsch and Sara Hornäk (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2017), 11.

124

Experiencing Arts and Sciences a typical aesthetic figure of computer art is a technical mannerism, an infatuation with technology, that actually only exhibits what is currently technically possible. If one were to undertake a historiography of art with computers, an independent aesthetic standpoint with regards to current hardware would be a decisive criterion for the quality of this chronicle.”9 Our experiences in teaching confirm this. The constant new developments in technology and science present tempting offers to students, promising surprising effects and quick production, to which they then try to attach meaning using over-loaded language. The digital, as a common basis for all perceptual phenomena, almost seduces us into bringing everything into relationship with everything.10 Our courses wanted to at least show ways one can develop an aesthetically independent standpoint in dealing with digital technologies over the course of time. The emphasis is on “over the course of time,” little by little.

Teaching examples I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles. […] I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction. – Tristan Tzara11

9

Martin Warnke, “Ästhetik des Digitalen – Das Digitale und die Berechenbarkeit,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 59, 2 (2014): 280.

10 Jim Campbell’s Formula for Computer Art, which will be mentioned again later on in the interface example, also focuses on this technical mannerism. 11 Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders, eds., Manifeste und Proklamationen der europäischen Avantgarde (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 150.

125

shared habitats So how can we usefully teach something that – if it is only about the technical handling of tools – needs no teaching at all?12 And which theoretical and practical approach should be chosen if we know there are other, just as interesting approaches? What should we assume and require, if we can think of several good reasons to assume nothing and to require the opposite? There is nothing left but to choose a halfway-plausible standpoint and begin. In the following, I will first sketch an outline of some attempts we carried out over a period of ten years at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in the foundational seminar “Code and Material.” The focus of the seminar was digital information as artistic material, in particular the mapping out of the material aspects of information. Ultimately, it is this materiality that largely determines the perceptional offerings for the recipient. The starting point was technical platforms that each represent standard tools for certain tasks and that are supported by a large community or have at least become established in art and design, including Arduino, Processing, Max/MSP, and Tensorflow. Such platforms formed the technical basis for content themes. Additionally, a circuit was developed by lab technicians as an expansion of the Arduino board that made it possible to work quickly with the standard Arduino sensors and actuators (Ill. 1 and 2).13 The flexible board was used in a lot of projects in the seminars, but also beyond this in artistic projects. It was also used in the seminar experiments discussed in the fol12 In the same way as art schools are not needed in general in order to make good art. 13 Martin Nawrath, SensorAktor-Shield, Academy of Media Arts Cologne. See: http://interface.khm.de/index.php/lab/interfaces-basics/introducing-the-board/index.html (accessed 31 March 2020). Website’s description of the shield: “The SensorAktor-Shield is an extension for the Arduino Board that allows to get quick into the world of sensors and actuators (like Motors Solenoids, Servos etc).

126

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Ill. 1: SensorAktor-Shield

Ill. 2: Wiring plan

127

shared habitats lowing (see, e.g., Ill. 4–9, 13, 15, 16). By means of a set topic, the students were then expected to realize their own small projects with the aid of the technology provided and, through this, learn how to handle the technology. Such an approach can be complemented by purely technical tutorials, in order to reach a basic understanding of tools as quickly as possible. Over the course of recent years a series of courses in different technical and personnel constellations were tested.14 The starting point is working with aspiring artists. So it is not about the development of engineering products, in which the focus is on safety, reliability, efficiency, accuracy, and so on. In the work with artists, malfunctions and errors, for example, are not seen as a problem that has to be eliminated, but rather as aesthetic phenomena, as an interesting rift that leads in a new direction. Even this simple combination – the tools of engineers in the hands of artists – has added value. In the following, dealing with digital data and algorithms as the material of art, rather than the technical tools, was the focus. This kind of material is interesting particularly because it can be connected to conventional analogue materials in diverse and new ways. Examples of this new form of materiality will be shown in the following. There is an abstract inner world of the machine made of information and symbols, The goal was to extend the Arduino’s input and output capabilities by some functional blocks like power switches and amplifiers that allows the direct connection of power consuming devices like DC-Motors, Stepper Motors, Solenoid Magnets, Halogen Lamps etc. or various sensor devices. Instead of adding those functional blocks by breadboarding additional electronic circuits this board offers those capabilities for the most common techniques. This avoids a tangle of cables and wires around the Arduino board which would discourage the beginner and might lead to the destruction of the Arduino board. So numerous experiments can be done by simply connecting these sensors or actuators to the header connectors provided on the SensorAktor-Shield.” 14 Lasse Scherffig, Andreas Muxel, Karin Lingnau, Martin Nawrath, Christian Faubel, and David Hahlbrock all participated in the seminars in different semesters. Many further examples of projects, themes, and seminar descriptions can be found on the archived lab website: http://interface.khm.de (accessed 31 March 2020).

128

Experiencing Arts and Sciences data formats, programming languages, and algorithms. We didn’t so much examine the algorithmic structures themselves, but rather their connection with the surroundings. The abstract structures within the machines do not stand for themselves; they are connected with the real world, in which they show themselves and have an effect. The work in the seminars was primarily about this exchange, about the different ways the symbols could be connected with the world. The Interface – Sensors and Actuators The link between the symbols in the machine and happenings in the world are formed by what is called in the jargon electrical transducers. These are technical units that transform physical values into electrical values, as a rule, electrical voltage, and vice versa. Depending on the direction in which the transformation takes place, one differentiates between sensors and actuators. Sensors transform physical conditions and processes into symbols, which can be further processed in the computer as information about the outside world. Physical events and conditions outside the machine are transformed into quantitative values and distinct electrical voltages. Differences in voltage can then be easily represented digitally and controlled by program variables. Actuators realize the opposite direction; they transform variables, with which programs work, into real actions in the external world. Common and yet cheap sensors are light sensors, pressure sensors, warmth sensors, but also microphones and cameras. Common actuators are, for example, LEDs, motors, piezo and bimetal actuators, shape memory alloys, and simple speakers and screens. With the help of open-source programming environments such as Arduino, anyone can now learn how to control these sensors and actuators with their own small program within a few hours (perhaps days with no prior mathematical knowledge).

129

shared habitats

Ill. 3: Input-output mappings

Illustration 4 shows a typical sensor-actuator experiment.15 With simple sensors for voltage measurement, voltage fluctuations in different fruit can be digitalized. As digital units in the computer, these quantities are then de-contextualized, that is, there is no longer reference to their origin. As digital data, they can also be easily algorithmically processed. The stream of data arising in this way can then be re-contextualized at the computer’s output, that is, the data can be used to control the most varied of actuators (sound generators, image generators, motors, light, etc.) in the computer’s surroundings. The piece by the artist Jim Campbell, Formula for Computer

15 The seminar examples discussed next are illustrated. These are snapshots from work processes or of results. Compared to the normal – in my opinion often over-staged – presentations of technical processes or results in art, the photographs used here seem unprofessional. But that is intentional! The insufficient cultural mastery of our technology already shows itself, in my opinion, in over-staged photographs, which are then accompanied by under-complex texts.

130

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Ill. 4: Paper sensor, analogue MIDI controller

Art,16 is a well-known critical commentary on this form of artistic interaction with the basic properties of digital data. Everything that can be measured and everything that can be controlled is reduced to binary values in the digital world. With this, every measurable phenomenon can be easily connected with any actuator, no matter how appropriate or inappropriate this connection may be. In the early years of digital media art, one really did see many projects that played with this principle. To demonstrate and thematize this basic principle in an introductory course serves to make clear that artistic interaction with digital material first begins beyond this basic principle. Illustration 5 shows another example of the experimental use of interfaces. Alongside paper and pencil, simple sound generators are the basic elements of the experiment. As graphite conducts electricity, simple electrical circuits can be drawn on paper and different sound elements are connected with each other in the style of an analogue MIDI

16 https://www.jimcampbell.tv/portfolio/miscellaneous_references (accessed 27 March 2020)

131

shared habitats controller and tested directly. An artificial acoustic action area in desktop size emerges, in which one’s own actions are immediately audible, and, simultaneously, the possibilities (as well as the tool) can be expanded and changed by modifying the drawings. The inexpensive and technically simple assembly of such experiments makes it easy to forget the protracted scientific and general cultural developments that culminate here in standard components that cost a few cents. Cultural history reaching far back into the beginnings of science, for example, the cultural techniques of counting and measuring, manifests itself in millionfold cheap and available components. A deeper understanding of our own action can only really be developed when one becomes aware of this historical development process. It is less the immediate technical solutions that are informative about how we construct and understand our world, and more conceptualizations that go hand in hand with technical developments. Abstract ideas, such as energy and information, but also slightly less abstract ones, such as tension, pressure, and color, first take shape in scientific discourse. They are witness to how we understand our world today and how we use this knowledge in order to adapt it. Far beyond mere technical skills, a challenge in the introduction to digital technologies is in making visible the importance that these concepts and their history have in our thought, in our idea of reality, and not least in the development of concrete artistic projects. Only with the second step do we go beyond these concepts and make them disappear again. As with every other material, handling digital material is also initially training in a proven practice. Though these do change with the continued development of technologies, they are a good reflection of knowledge about the material that is being worked with. The qualities of a material, including those of a digital material, are not abstract values, but are connected with the processing and the purpose (functions, usage, etc.) of the realized application (of the project, product, work). Just as tried and tested basic elements in architecture, such as 132

Experiencing Arts and Sciences doors, windows, pillars, roofs, and stairs, in their various realizations and material forms not only constitute basic building units, but also have a say in architectural design thinking, there are basic elements in the conception of digital works. Just as architectural design cannot be explained away as the mere combination of basic architectural units, works of media art can also not be understood purely on the basis of the technical components and the development environments used. The material sublimation addressed earlier, that is, where components and materials are elevated to a higher level through processing, is not only a characteristic of artistic projects, but in fact a general feature of poietic activities (of making). The primacy of form over material is also true for technology. This principle is perhaps best summarized by Arthur C. Clarke’s proverbial Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”17 Every sophisticated invention realizes something fundamentally new that cannot be found within the characteristics of the individual components. Simultaneously, the process of sublimation can be understood and described in retrospect; the new connections that are mostly created between elements that are already individually known are surprising, and their effect is not completely predictable. We can also describe basic conditions under which these transformations take place, but the actual magic of the emergence of something new cannot be captured by the description. Information as Material The materiality of the digital remains hidden to the normal user for two reasons. Firstly, this is because access to the hardware remains denied to the user due to the density of integration and small size of the components. Even if one knows how highly integrated circuit boards work,

17 On Clarke’s Laws, see, for example, his book Profiles of the Future (London: Pan, 1973).

133

shared habitats their direct access is denied. Secondly, material is not required for the definition of information and the editing processes, in other words, the algorithms. So, for example, the Shannon theory of information is purely a concept of form that knows no materiality. In relation to attempts to define the concept of information, one comes across, particularly in physics, the view that information is a third substance of equal rank alongside physics’ classic substance terms, material and energy. Among the multitude of approaches that stress the importance of information in the most varied of disciplines, that of the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker is probably the most wide-reaching.18 He supports the theory that material and energy are just possible manifestations of information. With this, information would be the primary factor in the universe, and the other two, which have been on the same level as each other since Einstein’s famous equivalence formula, would be secondary. This is, as it were, the theory of information’s maximum importance. The concept of information has grown in importance, not only in informatics, but also in the natural sciences, for example, in biology and the cognitive sciences as well as physics. Information is one of the mythical concepts of our time that is also omnipresent in everyday life. It is no coincidence that we talk of the age of information to highlight information’s societal importance. But even if we talk of information as a commodity in commerce, we don’t mean a substance, but rather an abstract idea that is hard to grasp. It was, of course, always clear to the microsystems technician, who designs information technology and thinks about circuit board layouts, or to the communications designer, who deals with typography, with line breaks and letter sizes, how bound their actions were to the material. Digital information, of course, not only is form, but also always means form-inmaterial. Though information is not bound to a particular material, it

18 See, for example, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Aufbau der Physik  (Munich: Hanser, 1985).

134

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Ill. 5: Distance coding

Ill. 6: Toilet paper sheet counter

135

shared habitats

Ill. 7: 4-bit sound coding

Ill. 8: Water-drop counter

136

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Ill. 9: 2-bit hairdryer coding

always needs a physical carrier on which it can be imprinted. In order to understand digital information as material, its material side must first be made accessible again. Those involved have therefore tried to develop experimental paths to the materiality of digital information in various seminars. Illustrations 5 to 9 show a series of experiments on information coding that took the art film Der Lauf der Dinge by Fischli and Weiss, from 1987, as its model. The setup by Fischli and Weiss is made up of a series of provisional devices that are combined in the form of a Rube Goldberg machine. In the apparatus, made up of individual stations, the end of each occurrence is simultaneously the start of a new one. The most varied of materials are interconnected in a chain reaction, which – once set in motion – runs automatically. Tension is built up by the variety of fast and slow occurrences. The triggering of an occurrence often hesitates to the extreme, and the viewer questions whether the whole thing is about to break down completely or somehow proceed after all. Unlike Lauf der Dinge, it is not an impulse that wanders through the apparatus in the foundational “Code and Material” seminar, but rather information. The 137

shared habitats aim is to thematize the material aspect of information, the imprint of form in material: A letter is entered into the apparatus at the beginning and moves from station to station, recoded each time in the most varied of materials (like ink on paper, the movement of a toy pig, or the wobbling of chairs). The letter appears again at the end of the chain – if it isn’t transformed into another on the way by the vagaries of the material. In the “Chinese whispers” apparatus that is created, what arrives is not always what is sent.19 Every station was to read out digital information from an occurrence in the environment and transform it into new material. Illustration 5 shows the coding of the letter as length. A cuddly toy pulls a strip of paper behind it until it corresponds to the letter’s allocated length. Illustration 6 shows the decoding of the letter. Light sensors mounted on the underside register the end of each sheet of toilet paper, as light shining through the perforations, and the number of sheets counted are decoded as a letter. Illustration 8 shows the sound coding of the letters.20 The chairs are pulled backwards with the help of strings and motors and then released. The letter can be deduced from the sound pattern, that is, the chairs that are involved in the current pattern, with simple piezo sensors that are attached to the floor plates. In Illustration 8, the coding takes place through the temporal control of water droplets and their registration when they hit the floor. Illustration 9 shows another coding based on air currents. The current of standard hairdryers is controlled in such a way that two balls float at different heights above them. Two balls with three different hairdryer strengths, and thus floating heights, are used, corresponding to a tertiary coding with two digits. The coding is read out here by image analysis. The height of the balls is detected from the camera image and 19 The individual stations were realized by Alexander Gurko, Christoph Kilian, Ilias Kyriazis, Jens Mühlhoff, and Donghee Nam. 20 The 4 chairs correspond to a 4-bit coding.

138

Experiencing Arts and Sciences mapped to the letters. In this set up, there are no receivers of the information in the conventional sense. This is exclusively the staging of the transmission of information. The sender, which is simultaneously the receiver, is, above all, an observer of the apparatus. In the end, it learns nothing new in the sense of a usual transmission of information, but rather whether the apparatus worked correctly. Illustration 10 shows another approach to the materiality of information, which was dealt with experimentally in the seminar “Soft Robotics.” Organic and therefore more flexible and adaptive soft robotics are an interesting alternative to the rigid actuators of classical robotics, but the real reason for mentioning this experiment is that it provides a good starting point for observations on the materiality of information and algorithms. In the classical view, information processing and material behavior are largely divided. The algorithms control, and the passive material is controlled. But in robotics in particular, it becomes clear that transitions and connections between algorithmic and material behavior must become much more fluid and be thought of more agilely and examined

Ill. 10: Soft robotics and the materiality of algorithms

139

shared habitats experimentally. Behaviors, which otherwise have to be explicitly programmed in robotics, can be outsourced in material behavior, and vice versa. Explicit control by information processing and functional material behavior interact to affect the overall behavior. This interaction is also clear in the experiment in 3D-printing in Illustrations 11 and 12. The objects are the result of the interaction of gravity, which effects the material, and the preprogrammed movement of the printing arm. The result can be changed by manipulation on both sides, not only by the algorithmically controlled movement of the arm, but also, for example, by using softer clay, which gravity affects differently. Algorithm and material behavior must be seen as one.

Ill. 11: 3D clay print + gravitation

Ill. 12: Clay tissue

140

Experiencing Arts and Sciences Modding The colloquial term modding describes the modification of hard- and software, or rather, all the components of a product, in order to realize functions that were not originally intended by the developer or designer. Modding in the artistic context is usually both aesthetic praxis and artistic research. Illustration 13 shows the modification of a record player.21 An additional tone arm is appended to a classic record player. A simultaneous shift in function and context is undertaken, which leads to a playback device being converted into a composition tool. The device is no longer used in the customary way, for the reproduction of recorded and stored musical material – after the modification, it is more in the tradition of the early

Ill. 13: A record player with an additional tone arm

21 Student project by Jessica Lörs, see: http://interface.khm.de/index.php/art/ projects/quattourpus/index.html (accessed 23 March 2020). It was begun within the framework of the “Code and Material” introductory course and then developed two years later into a graduate piece.

141

shared habitats experiments in musique concrète, Neue Musik, and modern turntablists, who use record players as musical instruments or devices in the studio and on stage. In the final version (see Ill. 14 and 15), the four tone arms can be operated completely via a mobile app, so that specific individual grooves of the record can be played. In addition, the playback speed and direction of the record player can be varied and remotely controlled in real time via the control buttons of the app. Sixty-four pre-produced instrumentals and speech samples, developed especially for the device’s functions and its possibilities for variation and composition, are also part of the project. It is worth taking a closer look at such forms of modding and using them as experimental role models. We can gain fundamental insights into the nature of technology and poiesis by playing with the functionality of our devices and making them into objects of our own technical acts. Technical artifacts are always designed and developed for a particular purpose. The purpose expresses itself in the functions made available by the artifact. Functions (also operations) change a certain initial situation into a target state. So the quality and usefulness of a function is apparent in its “functioning,” that is, in how “well” (effective, efficient, user-friendly, etc.) it fulfils its purpose. But the functionality of an artifact can be changed even by small interventions. We can even change the function of a thing without any interventions. The paper basket that we no longer use to collect rubbish, but instead turn upside-down to stand on and reach the top row of a bookshelf, is a simple example. Conversion and misuse are two procedures that are very closely linked to modding. The magic of technology mentioned above expresses itself in the functions made available. Software functions, that is, program units, that transform streams of input data into output data are the central building blocks in the realm of the digital. At the same time, companies continually take targeted measures to exclude the user from developments and prevent modifications. Functions are, for at least two reasons, central to understanding technology. For one, the sublimation of materials mentioned earlier concen142

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Ill. 14: Final version with four tone arms

Ill. 15: Remote control via smartphone app

143

shared habitats trates in them. We intervene in our physical environment in a targeted way, configuring and editing it so that new functions and thereby new scopes of experience and action that didn’t exist before arise. In this, we also discover that the effectiveness of new artifacts cannot be explained through their technical components, but only through being embedded in an environment in which they take effect. Misuse and conversion mostly go hand in hand with a shift in context. Secondly, we recognize through dealing experimentally with technological functions that technology is always aimed at the future. Functions must, on one hand, anticipate the future, and, on the other, they produce the future themselves and have a stabilizing effect. So that functions developed now can fulfil their function in the future, the conditions for their functioning must also remain safeguarded in the future. This goes not only for the meaningfulness of functions themselves, that is, their efficacy in a certain context, but also for all components that are involved in the realization of functions. As the user can conversely rely on the provision of functions, they simultaneously have a stabilizing effect and thereby increase the predictability of the future. Predicting the future with the help of technology (statistical models, big data, etc.) is a relatively new phenomenon; that technology counteracts spontaneous changes and thereby stabilizes the future and thus reduces uncertainty has always been a fundamental quality of technology. The Stone Age human who can produce a fire by means of technology precisely when they need it stabilizes their own future and makes it more predictable. Networks Networks represent another interesting approach to showing how technical facts and technical tools on one hand and levels of meaning beyond these physical fixations on the other interact and are simultaneously interdependent. By networks, we mean, very generally, the loose combination of different units. As soon as we talk about units and networks, and connections between these units, we are moving on an abstract level of the 144

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

Ill. 16: Walking machines with distance sensors; emergent swarm behavior

145

shared habitats observation of physical incidents. In the sciences, we use the concept of systems in order to talk about general characteristics of such demarcations and linkages. We usually understand a system as an aggregate of elements that are interrelated or connected to each other and interact in such a way that they can be considered a unit with a specific purpose. Loosely linked systems are characterized by the fact that they are made up of several elements that can all be liberated from the current network and used in another context. The individual components in loosely linked systems are independent enough to not rely on the current network, but could function completely autonomously or also join other networks. This kind of loosely linked network is particularly well suited for examining the emergence of new qualities. That which can be investigated in individual technical units by modding, namely, the shift of meaning and the creation of new meaning through minimal manipulation and context changes, can be examined systematically on the level of autonomous technical units and their interconnection with networks. Each individual walking machine22 in this example (Ill. 16) is capable of moving on its own and is not dependent on other robots. On the basis of simple rules – for example, that every robot tries to continue moving without colliding with others – complex patterns of movement arise that look to the outside viewer as if the robots were explicitly programmed. Such emergent behavior can be examined in real environments through the simple programmability of rules. This 22 A prototype of the walking machine had already been developed and programmed before the seminar (with David Hahlbrock and Christian Faubel). In the seminar itself, the machines were duplicated, the programming explained, and the experiments set up with regards to emergent behavior. The walking mechanism is driven by two motors that are controlled via an expanded Arduino board. One motor is responsible for turning the robots and thus determining the walking direction, the other for the movement and speed. The walking direction and the speed are controlled by two distance sensors, which are attached to the turning part of the robots.

146

Experiencing Arts and Sciences would otherwise only be taught in virtual environments or on screens on the basis of abstract games like Game of Life. Technologies of the Self In the search for possibilities of bringing the experiments sketched out thus far into a system, one possible solution is Foucault’s typology of technologies of the self. Over many years, Foucault pursued the objective of “sketching out a history of the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves.”23 He divided these into four types of “technology,” each of which he saw as a matrix of practical reason: “(1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”24 We have not examined Foucault’s third and fourth technologies, the technologies of power and the technologies of the self, in previous examples. It is clear that technology always exercises power. As soon as it is created, it not only becomes part of the prevailing system of power and order, but also always implements new power relations. Even the buttons of a TV remote control are an instrument of power – if only

23 Michel Foucault, Schriften 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005), 968. 24 Ibid.

147

shared habitats a small one. Whoever is in possession of the remote control decides what program is watched. 25 Foucault also notes that these four types of technologies cannot be clearly delineated anyway in terms of functioning. However, the methods presented thus far, to build up an understanding of digital technologies by means of a practical, experimental approach, have concentrated particularly on the first two technology types. The emphasis, though, was on making clear that new digital technologies draw their power from realizing new connections between symbolic systems and production systems, or, in other words, between code and material. From what I have presented thus far, it should now be clear that symbolic systems and production systems merge with each other in digital technologies, thus changing familiar production processes completely. What links this approach with the Foucauldian perspective is seeing technologies as a possibility for gaining knowledge about ourselves. Digital technology is not taught, as it is in engineering sciences, in order to empower participants to develop competent new technology. Technology is understood much more as a basic essential element of human action and the creation of new spaces of experience. The scrutiny of technology thereby follows the philosophical maxim “know yourself.” Deconstructing technology and technical action is a necessity if we wish to understand our present culture and its knowledge technologies. But Foucault shifts another maxim into the center of his observations: “take care of yourself.” He points out that our philosophical tradition overvalues “know yourself ” and has pushed “take care of yourself ” into the shadows. With this, another dimension of why we need to engage with technology in artistic subjects presents itself.

25 We do not wish to pursue the way in which digital technologies implement practice power any further here. This becomes particularly clear through the current discussion on artificial intelligence that we concentrate on in dedicated seminars, beyond the material approaches in focus here.

148

Experiencing Arts and Sciences “Take care of yourself,” which goes back to the Greek practices of epimeleisthai sautou, is not a technology in the sense understood here; it is permanent praxis. In previous centuries, taking care of oneself was both a maxim and a collection of practices to be repeated. However, today’s technologies of the self – and this is the essential difference to the Greco-Roman tradition of self-care – are no longer only anchored in praxis, but also anchored, to an increasing extent, in poiesis. As a second way to change and further develop ourselves, technologies of self-manipulation are increasingly developed – this is, in fact, technology in the sense understood here. The painstaking path of self-manipulation through constant and lengthy practical exercise is, so to speak, abbreviated by technical means; the self is created technically. Genetic engineering and synthetic biology are perhaps the most prominent representatives of this approach. The question arises as to how such difficult technical and theoretical themes can even be dealt with within the framework of introductory courses. Decisive in this is that the idea of expanding human possibilities with the help of technical prostheses, or by compensating purely organic defects with technology, is much older than modern biotechnical or bioelectronic approaches. In terms of expanding experience through material substances and material intervention, all forms of drugs are also strategies of self-manipulation and part of a very long tradition. But the technology-based approach also has a history that is much older than the cyborg usually associated with it. There were even cyborg fantasies long before the term was coined. The cyborg metaphor must seem trivial to us today, as the modern human is always entangled in an irresolvable symbiotic relationship with their artificial and technical environment, which makes up an ever larger part of their everyday experiential space. This, precisely, has been the subject of the observations so far. But technologies of self-manipulation mean more than that. It is not only about expanding the space of perception and experience, but also about seeing the ability 149

shared habitats

Ill. 17: Cyborgs Simplified

Ill. 18: Game with viewer perspective

150

Experiencing Arts and Sciences to perceive and understand as an apparatus itself that one can understand, manipulate technically, and produce. Simple technical experiments on this can, in fact, be carried out and even realized within the framework of introductory courses in the art context. Though we might not be able to expand the capacity for cognition, we can still lay bare the construction of our own perception and make it experienceable with relatively simple technical setups. Illustration 17 shows a self-built helmet26 that links hearing and seeing. The ambient volume controls two polarization filters, which are set up in such a way that as volume increases, the surroundings become less visible. Loud ambient noise blocks off the field of vision completely. In the setup in Illustration 18, the camera image is transposed into the VR headset. The wearer of the VR headset sees the table football game from the perspective of the camera and must reconnect what they see with their own action.

Interim Result We know two elaborate cultures that design and produce artifacts. On one side, there are the purpose-driven rational, industrial production systems and the related technical sciences, to which themes such as rational conclusion, abstract modelling, mathematical and algorithmic problem-solving, natural science theories, statistical forecasting processes, and so on also belong. On the other side are the aesthetic artifacts of art. Here other qualities are emphasized, for example, empathy, staging, symbolism, and ambiguities, but also provocation, revelation, and disruption. Both approaches have long traditions, certainly also intersections, but are taught and practiced in largely divided worlds. The seminar content introduced thus far was developed for students of artistic/creative subjects. 26 Student project in the foundational seminar Cyborgs Simplified, with Karin Lingnau.

151

shared habitats Project-oriented work – this is definitely a commonality with engineering disciplines – has a series of advantages here. By “project-oriented” we mean that seminar content does not concentrate on theory nor on the mere learning of technology, but rather, learning to use digital tools is combined with concrete projects and objectives beyond technical-practical practices – in short: the focus is the design and realization of something new. Experience shows that success in learning is greatest if students formulate their own projects for which the necessary skills for its realization can be acquired within a reasonable period. The individual project also increases the motivation to invest time beyond course dates. In this way, students not only make rapid progress in technical skills (programming, interfaces, electronics), but also develop an understanding of the qualities of the material and generally achieve results quickly. Ideally, they experience that technical skills, that is, understanding something to such an extent that one can produce it oneself, not only is very satisfying, but also equates to a measure of freedom. In this respect, the teaching concepts tested were quite successful. There are a variety of different reasons for artists to be interested in digital technologies from the practical perspective.27 A very banal, although not uncommon, reason is that they simply do not have the financial means to pay engineers and programmers to realize their project ideas. On the other hand, why should students learn complicated and short-lived technology that they never need again for a single project? But there is also a large number of young media artists who are very curious and also find mastering the necessary tools for the realization of their projects immense fun. These are people who do not want to let their projects out of their hands and who want to 27 By “digital technologies,” we do not mean the mere operation of applications, but rather proficiency with key digital tools. This also includes a basic knowledge of electronics, knowledge about interface technologies such as sensors and actuators, skills in problem-oriented higher programming languages, and mastery of development environments in general.

152

Experiencing Arts and Sciences be involved in every detail of the realization – who experience, through this, how signs change their meaning in processes, both within the operational system and in their connection to the world. Furthermore, everyone experiences daily how digital technologies shape our society nowadays, and it is therefore advisable to take an active part in its design or at least to be capable of criticism at a technical level. The aim of the courses was to achieve a balance between technical praxis and theoretical reflection. But, in fact, it was ultimately the traditional material sublimation of art that was central and was practiced. This means artists learned, while pursuing their ideas, how to transform the initial material into something new using the tools. The basic structure of material sublimation, the condition of its possibility, was not reflected on, however. The chosen approach was not suitable for this, but the students also had other expectations. The fascination in their own project, the conviction of their own idea, however small it might be, the prospect of the next exhibition, or even plain disinterest in the problem inhibited a deeper engagement with the digital as much as financial constraints (or available time). At the same time, within the framework of such introductory courses, basic technical principles must also be understood and new tools learned. Taken together, the challenges are clearly too large, so it is not possible to simultaneously produce something and reflect on it more deeply philosophically, socially, and culturally. In the end, the impression grew that the students learned tools and also realized small projects, but their view of the digital was not permanently changed. After a number of iterations, one could eventually even see patterns in the ideas. For many, the adoption of the medium remained superficial. In fact, this summary of long-standing attempts to teach technology in artistic contexts is not a document of success, but rather a protocol of various experiments and their partial failure.28 The compelling

28 Failure in Samuel Beckett’s sense: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again.

153

shared habitats pieces that arose from the seminar contexts and the themes discussed took years of serious work and interaction. So is it the individual search and uncompromising engagement that lead to success in art after all, no matter whether it has to do with technology or other areas of interest? Yes, but not only. Individual interest and the individual quest are indeed indispensable, but the institutions, in other words, the art schools and universities, also have an important role to play. Not only in making available technology that artists can barely afford, but especially in offering a framework for intellectual analysis and access to the theoretical discourses that artists are unlikely to master alone in their studios. As becomes clear with the concept of information, technology is about abstraction, about conceptual thinking that abandons the fullness of phenomena and dispenses with them and their vividness. Compared with rational reasoning and logical knowledge, art emphasizes sensory perception. In our experiments, we have tried, for example, to make the bare, abstract concept of information experienceable by the senses again. Since the pivotal works of Alexander G. Baumgarten29 in the 18th century, philosophical aesthetics has known the concept of sensory knowledge, which raises its own claim to truth and epistemological value compared to simple sensory perception. The aim of aesthetics is, according to Baumgarten, the perfection of sensory knowledge, to which the imagination and the faculty of judgement also belong. The judgement of the senses is taste, which presumes a wealth and diversity of perception and can determine features such as harmony, balance, and coherence. Two completely different forms of reason also stand face to face in this classical view of art and its aesthetics. The structural problems faced by introductions to Fail better." So, it is a failure understood positively, but one that dwells in a sad certainty and promises nothing more than failing better at the next attempt. 29 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ästhetik, ed. Dagmar Mirbach (Hamburg: 2 Bände Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007).

154

Experiencing Arts and Sciences technology in the art context can certainly be grasped from this perspective. For Baumgarten, however, both forms of reason are in the rationalist tradition, where the mind should cognize in a logically correct manner, to which sensory reason also contributes. The justified question arises as to whether this division into lower and upper is still a contemporary view of cognitive faculty, both with regards to the mind and to art. As opposed to harmony and beauty in the classical sense, which are still central for Baumgarten, other goals have moved into the foreground in today’s understanding of art. What art still refers back to today, however, in artistic research, for example, is sensory knowledge. Insights are promised that rational reason cannot deliver. From this perspective, cybernetic technical systems, as addressed in the examples above, are interesting for art. By becoming part of a cybernetic control loop, new forms of self-awareness and of sensory experience open up to me. It is not about harmony, coherence, or beauty, but about technically expanding the scope of possibility of human experience. In my opinion, the essence of art as well as technology is not sensory or rational knowledge, but rather the generation and expansion of artistic spaces of experience, the expansion of experiencing and experiences itself. A quick glance at current curricula of art and informatics faculties makes it clear in any case that the distinction between sensory and rational reason is still practiced. In introductions to artistic praxis, one can, for example, read the following behavioral recommendations for students: use awareness in dealing with material, have the courage to take risks, cultivate mistakes, enjoy ambiguity and search for varied interpretability, play with changes in intensity and distance, sharpen perception, endure contradictions, practice openness. The first semester of an informatics course is, on the other hand, filled with mathematics (analysis, stochastics, linear algebra), algorithms, data structures, formal languages, object orientation, and the basics of electronics. Here, it is competence in abstraction, logical thinking, and dealing with formal structures that 155

shared habitats is mostly practiced. On one hand, the professional field of computer science does, of course, expect these skills; on the other, a certain culture of thought is thus created, duplicated, and passed on to the next generation. The same goes for the approaches in art. So it is no surprise that it is problematic to want to unravel these two completely different practices in one introductory course. There is absolutely no doubt that the respective teaching contents make sense for each subject. But it becomes clear that building bridges between these disciplines requires greater efforts than can be afforded in an introductory course, and a common basis may also have to be sought completely outside these teaching contents. The code of conduct recommended for artistic praxis, when applied to engagement with technology, means that artists focus on completely different things than computer scientists. The search for and experimentation with open questions that come from sensory perception stands in opposition to the logical-formal thinking of informatics. The phenomenological approach to art can definitely accompany the learning of technical skills; observations can, of course, also be made while learning. However, structured teaching is not needed for the learning of purely technical skills. The tutorials available online are of good quality nowadays and completely sufficient for most matters. Most things must be acquired through personal practice anyway, that is, through making mistakes and their often arduous correction. But the tutorials only impart how something can be made, not why. With regard to digital technologies, becoming discerning requires lots of time, particularly sitting at a computer. This relatively strenuous time is necessary in order, on one hand, to see through the play of signs within the machine and their lack of referentiality there, and, on the other, and more important still, to grasp how the signs can reconnect with the world and, in so doing, generate meaning. This time must, therefore, be invested individually. Of course, assistance from tutors and structured courses are still helpful in order to find a way in and overcome certain hurdles that one would perhaps not manage alone. Groups with 156

Experiencing Arts and Sciences kindred interests and group structures in which individuals support and exchange ideas with each other play a particularly important role in this. Developing technical teaching concepts for artistic praxis that go beyond what has been sketched out so far, which allow, for example, not only for the principle of material sublimation to be practiced, but also for its structure to be scrutinized, is a task that still lies ahead of us. From the short statements on material sublimation already laid out above, it should have become clear that the concept is not restricted to art, but rather addresses a very general principle. Every form of material (and symbolic) interaction that causes something new to arise that is no longer explainable through the characteristics of the materials used, where new qualities are created that require new descriptive levels and new concepts, is material sublimation.30 The simple sundial, in which a pole and a few marks on the ground are configured in such a way that it is possible to read the time, is material sublimation in the sense understood here. But machines and tools, computer programs and their functions, films, musical instruments, as well as the totem pole, are also, in essence, outcomes of material sublimations.31 They enable actions, experiences, and reflections that were not possible before. From this point of view, material sublimation is the basic form of poiesis. This large field was divided into two areas, one called art, the other technology. The following sections attempt to map out a direction. New offerings from teachers are only one side of the coin. It also requires the willingness on the part of students and 30 Insofar as the process does not stem from a deliberate act, but rather runs automatically as in physics, one also calls this principle phase transition, or emergence. 31 There is a discussion to be had here as to whether material changes are necessary in order to talk of material sublimation, or whether context change is enough. For art, it seems clear that, for example, “readymades” are a form of material sublimation. For technology, function misuse and the attribution of new functions by the user could perhaps be special forms of material sublimation. Modding, but without interfering with the technology.

157

shared habitats artists to break away from quick results and risk losing themselves in the quickly changing surfaces of the technical while searching for the meaning that the technological-scientific apparatus has for our society.

A Renewed Search for a Standpoint “Those hobnailed boots from beyond the mountain Where walking, by God, all over the fine Lawns of elocution.” – Seamus Heaney32 What could a different engagement with digital technology in the arts look like? Even a little knowledge of philosophy is enough to stop us searching for the last plot of land on which to build a permanently valid structure. A swimming platform, viable for a while, is what seems achievable – something that helps to cover a short distance without sinking. As our considerations and questions about the foundations of artistic praxis are in the tradition of aesthetics, and as art, particularly in artistic research, claims to provide other insights, perhaps it is worth taking another look at this area. The problem here is that a brief engagement is dissatisfying and is simply not enough to provide structure or even scratch the surface. However, after reviewing a few works, the realization already grows that aesthetics hardly helps if one wishes to teach artistic praxis. Two or three works further and I am completely convinced that no artist could ever make art if they had the crazy idea of working their way through all the books on aesthetics and then basing their art on it. Of course, aesthetic theory can give artists deep insights. As became clear in the brief mention of Baumgarten’s work, aesthetics is occupied with very fundamental and general questions of sensory knowledge. Of course, aesthetics can, con-

32 Seamus Heaney, The Ministry of Fear (London: North, Faber & Faber, 1975), 57.

158

Experiencing Arts and Sciences versely, be very enlightening in the analysis of individual works of art, too. However, aesthetic theories are less suited as a starting point for artistic praxis, as brainstorming, process, and experimentation are still central here. Even the question of which theory one should choose is not an easy one. The multitude of publications in this area is overwhelming; the fields of investigation expand in all directions. There is always the area that aesthetics originally got its name from, the area of feeling, that is, the area of sensibility, of affectivity and emotion. But at the same time, the scope of aesthetics has expanded into all areas of life. Aesthetics is confronted with the big problems of individual and collective life, it questioned the meaning of life, it promoted challenging social utopias, it was involved in the questions of everyday life and also discovered subtle cognitive differences. It also dealt with philosophical and theological themes and questions of historic transcendence in-depth, examined their affinities and divergences to morals and economy, produced relationships to the other philosophical disciplines, to the human sciences and even to the natural sciences such as physics and mathematics. […] Those who have provided the most important contributions to this field of study this century are not seen as aesthetes, rather as psychologists, psychoanalysts, ontologists, language or literary theorists, religious or sexual philosophers, court philosophers; and sometimes not even as philosophers, but simply as thinkers or authors. Why?33 For the Italian philosopher Mario Perniola, aesthetics is currently dissolving and can no longer be traced back to a coherent image. At any rate, the broad field of philosophic aesthetics cannot offer guidelines for teaching technology in art either. The hope that a closer look at digital aesthetics could deliver something concrete remains. Here we must refer especially to the works of 33 Mario Perniola, Estetica Contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011). From the foreword, translated here from the Spanish edition: La estética comtemporánea, Kindle version, 2011.

159

shared habitats Frieder Nake, who presented “aesthetics as information processing” back in 1974, when informatics was first being established as a subject at German colleges.34 And even he could refer to forerunners such as Max Bense and George D. Birkhoff. I do not want to discuss terms such as “analytical aesthetics,” “generative aesthetics,” or “information aesthetics,” or the importance of chance in the early days of computer art here. The mathematization of aesthetic phenomena is of historical importance, but is no longer a source of power for media art. However, the links that Frieder Nake forges between the disciplines as an excellent teacher go far beyond information aesthetics and even semiotics. He is the most important representative of the combination of art and informatics in Germany. The idea we are talking about here has taken human form in him. He is, so to speak, our chief witness and living proof that it is possible to pursue both art and a formal science such as informatics at a high level simultaneously, and to place them in a playful reciprocal relationship with each other. In the last sentence of his book,35 Nake points out that information aestheticians, who include not only artists but also and especially information scientists, bear social responsibility. Presumably, this was heeded just as little then as it is today. Martin Warnke brings to the point the challenge of present algorithmic conditions to aesthetics with striking simplicity. “The question of the aesthetics of the digital is posed because, with the computer, there is a technology in our world that has yielded new perceptional opportunities to an extraordinary degree.”36 34 Note “as,” not “of ” information processing. Frieder Nake, Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung: Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informatik im Bereich ästhetischer Produktion und Kritik (Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 1974). 35 Ibid., 339. 36 Martin Warnke, “Ästhetik des Digitalen,” in Kultur digital, eds. Hedy Graber, Dominik Landwehr, and Veronika Sellier (Basel: Christoph Merian Verlag, 2011), 147.

160

Experiencing Arts and Sciences New perceptional opportunities also need new explanations. So aesthetics cannot finalize itself as theory; it must always react to new circumstances. As aesthetics is downstream from the appearance of perceptional opportunities, it actually has little to offer artistic praxis, or any situation where perceptional opportunities are produced. Claudia Giannetti in her Ästhetik des Digitalen37 no longer wishes to defend universal concepts or emphasize aesthetics as a singular discipline, but rather focuses from the start on the wide-ranging links between art, science, and technology. She does, however, still give the aesthetic theories of interactive media art a special significance, stressing the dialogue of recipients with the open structure of the work. This mirrors the focus of media art in the 1990s especially. In the meantime, the topic of interactivity has shifted to other areas such as DIY, hacking, DIWO, and new workshop formats, as well as interactivity as a form of reinvigorated performativity. What links works on the aesthetics of the digital is that they build bridges and try to bring different positions from science, art, philosophy, and media into a productive interrelationship and not place them in opposition. If the Ästhetik des Digitalen examines the conditions under which the objects and perceptional opportunities of art arise, then the foundations of informatics become inevitable prerequisites of aesthetics. A glance at the quoted works (Nake, Giannetti, Warnke) confirms this. Here we find observations on paradigms of predictability, on cybernetics, digitality as a grid, theoretical models of information and communication, interactivity, networking, and many more. How could it be any different? Computers and digital technologies, with which the products of art are produced, are themselves artifacts. The theories on which the artifacts are based automatically become the conditions of an aesthetic analysis. But 37 Claudia Giannetti, Ästhetik des Digitalen – Ein intermediärer Beitrag zu Wissenschaft, Medien- und Kunstsystemen (Vienna and New York: Springer-Verlag, 2004).

161

shared habitats the generalizing view reaches its limits where individual artifacts, in other words, singularities, are produced that each require a specific analysis. This consideration legitimizes a posteriori the experimental approaches of our courses. The experiments carried out within the framework of the seminars were always aesthetic investigations, as they looked at precisely these basic theoretical conditions of production, but at the same time produced singularities. From this perspective, the objective, at least in terms of aesthetics, was the right one; the task was perhaps just too large. I have found a remark worthy of consideration that could also be an important aspect of the selection of topics for teaching artistic praxis, in Martin Warnke’s Ästhetik des Digitalen. He writes: “Art enables sensory knowledge, which cannot be gained through science or technology, but has very much to do with the fundamental questions of human existence.”38 This statement can barely be surpassed in its generalization. Here we encounter once again the sensory knowledge already characterized in brief that goes back to Baumgarten’s philosophy of aesthetics. It is the second clause that is interesting, where an expansion takes place that is quite remarkable compared to the more harmless examination of perceptional opportunities. According to this, artistic praxis tries to represent fundamental questions of human existence. So the question arises: what can we find out about the fundamental questions of human existence through engaging with technology? And what questions would be important enough to be called fundamental? Some of these questions have already been named in the text. With self-knowledge and self-manipulation, in relation to technologies of the self, we have already called on two terms that are aimed at the whole. Today, technology is the driving force for social change. We modify our world by technical means. Climate change is currently the most visible sign that industrial societies have not mentally mastered their

38 Martin Warnke, “Ästhetik des Digitalen,” 146.

162

Experiencing Arts and Sciences technologies and that we must also reconsider how we teach technology.39 It would seem as though we have only just begun to think about what it means to create our own living conditions by technological means and to make ourselves at home in this technically created reality. We recognize that technology (poiesis) runs ahead of knowledge, that what we can cognize changes to the same extent as the technical modifications we make to our world. Technology first produces many of the things we can perceive and cognize; the objects of perception and cognition change and, with them, the forms of perception and cognition, too. With the technologies of self-manipulation, this feedback becomes short circuited: as soon as the cognizer itself is technically manipulated, it is no longer only what we perceive and cognize that changes, but also how. We all have good reason to tread the path of biological self-manipulation (gene manipulation and synthetic biology) very carefully, as is also reflected in ethical discussions. Nevertheless, social valuation is structurally subordinate to technical and scientific knowledge. Only if the new spaces of possibility are already manifest in the technical can we sound it out intellectually or, through simulation, socially. The question of digital aesthetics only became acute long after digital technologies first made new perceptional opportunities available. The technologies of social manipulation develop in parallel and at least to the same extent as the technologies of individual self-manipulation, into power. New statistical prediction and simulation tools, which deliver prognoses for the development of the economy, the climate, or the spread of the coronavirus, are simultaneously tools of political guidance. They do not predict the future; they produce it. Simulation tools deliver 39 Technical training naturally takes place mainly in the technical sciences. The problem raised can therefore hardly be solved by art, but rather must also be addressed in the technical sciences. The fact that we still have to refer to Herbert A. Simon’s classic The Sciences of the Artificial, from 1969, for alternative teaching concepts, shows the plight. Even fifty years after the book was published, the approach has not been seriously taken on or developed further.

163

shared habitats the decisive data for political decisions as well as the arguments for their justification. The predictions, as we currently experience in the case of coronavirus, even lead to freedom and democracy being partially suspended.40 At the same time, they prevent deadly catastrophe. In contrast to these statistical tools, design methods, for example, speculative design, take other paths of prediction. More artistic strategies are needed, especially in dealing with the future and the fictive spaces of digital possibility and its reconnection to reality.

The Need for Deinstitutionalized Thinking We can clearly train our skills of perception and reflection towards various goals and activities. We can practice acting with versatility and openness and also allow contradictions; we can sharpen perception and play with distance and proximity. On the other hand, we can put the capacity for abstraction and logical thinking center stage and learn to deal with formal structures and functions that allow no ambiguities. Both are forms of thinking that have, when viewed in isolation, their justification. However, these historical practices of reason have become institutionalized. With this, what is still connected in the head of the individual is socially divided. I see no sound reason why this institutional distinction cannot be more permeable and why we cannot learn to deal playfully with the possibilities of our reason and its modes of operation. A science that is only for scientists is just as unconvincing as an art that is only for artists. So how should artists deal with the unambiguous, strictly rational, and formal knowledge of technology and natural sciences? Anarchically and in a relaxed manner would be my first recommendation, without fear of misunderstanding, 40 At the moment, in Spain, I am not allowed to go out for a walk. If I had a dog, I would be. A bending of rights of this kind, where one first gains the basic right of the freedom of movement through the ownership of a dog, would be unthinkable in a democracy in normal times.

164

Experiencing Arts and Sciences misinterpreting, or even misusing something. Many artists do not actually know this fear anyway. So that would be my second recommendation: take it seriously. Shallow reflections quickly expose themselves in the works that emerge from them. Moreover, in the narrow field of technology and information technologies, there is common ground in poiesis. Both are about production and presentation, about the creation of new spaces of experience and action, not about the demonstrative division and clear judgement of rational knowledge. Technology and art do not flourish in language the same way scientific theory does. In fact, the products of technology and art open up new fields of work for understanding and linguistic description. Interesting new interrelationships are currently taking place there, where art lets in technology and science, advanced not least by PhD programs. So social appreciation seems important. Although, at the same time, as already outlined, new fronts open up and strange justification pressures arise. A more unbiased and impartial exploitation of the huge fictional and poietic potential that digital technologies indubitably hold would, of course, be desirable. This, which anyway is a very small counterweight to the superiority of purely purpose-driven, rational, techno-functional developments in terms of the numbers of people involved, cannot be socially valued highly enough. Artistic courses that understand themselves as mere introductions to digital tools are simply superfluous! The courses available online are of good quality and can be complemented by technical tutorials if needed. The technical praxis imparted here is already a very important step. Only those who can handle technology themselves can understand it. However, these technical courses completely blank out the meaning of technology for society as well as the principles through which technology has its effect. Any deeper dealing with the foundations of the digital is always also an individual quest that requires personal dedication over many years. But then art can be combined with technical-scientific theory to form an unmistakable aesthetic style. Teaching can also support this process. But 165

shared habitats for this, scientific theories and technical methods must be reevaluated and made readable in their meaning for human life and our cultures. Let us conclude our peregrination and turn full circle to the opening image. If we present the start of the story of the 18th camel to artificial intelligence and let it develop the story a few sentences further, we receive the following suggestion.41 A traveling mullah was riding on his camel to Medina, when he saw several camels standing next to a group of three young men who clearly were in distress. “What befell you, my friends?” he asked, and the eldest replied, “Our father died.” “Be he blessed by Allah. I sympathize with you. But he must have left you something in his will.” “Yes,” said the young man, “these seventeen camels. That’s all he had.” “Now what shall we do with them?” asked the second. “I think we shall sell them,” said the first. “Yes,” said the second, “we shall sell them. But how shall we go about that?” “I think you have …” Georg Trogemann (*1959) has been a professor of experimental informatics at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne since 1994. In 1977, he completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter. He studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where he received his doctorate in 1990. From 1997 to 1999, and then later, from 2004 to 2006, he was the prorector for research and infrastructure at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. His research topics include experimental algorithms, philosophy of technology, and the theory of artifacts. http://www.georgtrogemann.de

41 The GPT-2 Language Model can be tested at: https://talktotransformer.com (accessed 9 April 2020). Description by the developer: “Better Language Models and Their Implications. We’ve trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization – all without task-specific training.”

166

Experiencing Arts and Sciences

167

shared habitats

Shared Habitats

168

shared habitats

169

shared habitats

Shared Habitats Ursula Damm

Acting in a Shared Habitat As scholars and students from the Chair of Media Environments (GMU) at Bauhaus University, Weimar, we refer to environment as a concept of artistic practice established in the early 1960s. Alan Kaprow defined environment as “as a large assemblage, usually to be physically entered, like a forest or a junk-yard. Those entering an environment may be encouraged to move its material about, thus changing its composition.”1 An environment allows an audience to become an author of a setting proposed by an artist. It includes performance as a constitutional element and thus forms a bridge to contemporary media practices. Through artists leaving traditional art spaces, the environment revises the relation of everyday life and art. We aim to redesign everyday situations, objects, devices, and practices. Following Bauhaus tradition, we see the necessity of repositioning artistic practices within society and its technologies. In our artistic work, we reinvent the design of everyday practices and artifacts, encompassing contemporary digital and technological concepts. Our working methodology is not to represent reality in the way that was common in the time before the Bauhaus. Moholy-Nagy’s students documented their aesthetic experiences with artifacts that had to be deciphered by the viewer. Just like Allan Kaprow, we are directly interfering with our environment, but now we can extend our perception through the use of sensors. And our activities can be enhanced or even replaced through the 1

Allan Kaprow in Allan Kaprow: Art as Life, ed. Eva Myer-Herrmann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008).

170

shared habitats operations of machines, directly altering our environment. Therefore, a main task in contemporary art practice is to connect ourselves and our doing with operations found in our surroundings. Aesthetic control is then effectuated by channeling interaction – decisions have to be made by the artist in which operators are favored or excluded. During the last twenty years of practice in media art, we have experienced that interactive processes soon become overwhelmingly complex. As long as we – as authors – communicate with a machine, we can limit complexity with its design or minimize external influences to be able to master the aesthetics of our system. But when it comes to natural environments and possibly other beings, we can no longer oversee the reaction of our interlocutor. We have learned from machines with limited autonomy to understand principles of interaction. And we have discovered that evolution has developed through countless rounds of feedback processes, between creatures and environment, and creatures among themselves. This is why we have turned our gaze towards the living: to learn about the constitution/becoming of a world of beings through self-organized processes. How do creatures of different species communicate, and how do we encounter this communication? How can we bring these experiences to art? Inspired by our participation at the IGEM Competition 20102 and following the lead of the “Art Science Bangalore Team”3 (a group of students from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology), we

2

IGEM Team Weimar-Heidelberg Arts, IGEM 2010, November 2010, http://2010.igem.org/Team:Weimar-Heidelberg_Arts, Website of Media Environments, Bauhaus University, Weimar, https://www.uni-weimar.de/en/artand-design/chairs/media-environments/projects/super-cell-igem/ (accessed 21 August 2020).

3

Art Science Bangalore, website for the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology, https://artscienceblr.org (accessed 21 August 2020).

171

shared habitats started to merge traditional tools from an artist’s studio with the practices of a biotech laboratory. Conceptual art might call it “appropriation” – introducing a sensual approach to the world of modern technoscience. As a consequence of our IGEM experience, we felt the need to establish our own working environment, partly appropriating cheap and used lab equipment as well as tools for artistic interventions with living organisms. We found monetary support for those undertakings by participating in the EU research project PhyChip,4 which helped us to familiarize ourselves with basic lab technologies and amoebas (Physarum polycephalum). Today, science is practiced predominantly in laboratories through standardized experiments. In our DIY lab, we aim to extend the sphere of the laboratory into the world we live in: our everyday life is a complex world that is a shared habitat of numerous species. While science uses primarily quantitative methods to handle complex situations, we want to act within these situations by inventing performative practices. To attain an understanding of how to shape a livable future, not only for humans but for all creatures, we want to investigate how habitats are shared by species and how inhabitants negotiate those habitats. We will transfer knowledge from science to culture and close the feedback loop between citizens, their situatedness, and science. We propose setups familiar to both humans and non-human organisms, meaning that each can easily be perceived as a “counter structure” (in German, Gegengefüge, according to Uexküll)5 in the umwelt of the respective other. With these experiences, we hope to gain an understanding of how to design environments suitable for many of those umwelts. 4

PhyChip, “Physarum Chip: Growing Computers from Slime Mould,” https://www.uni-weimar.de/en/art-and-design/chairs/media-environments/ projects/phychip/ (accessed 21 August 2020).

5

Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretische Biologie (Berlin: Verlag von Gebrüder Paetel, 1920).

172

shared habitats In our lab, we are not able to follow the strict rules of bio-safety, which restricts our experimentation to specific, well-described, and safe experiments. However, we regard these limitations as having a surplus value: our DIY biolab works like a kitchen, where we invent artifacts, setting up cultures of bacteria and other creatures, and conduct experiments on the basis of recipes and protocols. Everything we work with requires a safe place in a “habitat” – not only the habitat of our experimental objects, but also our own sphere of living. It has become obvious that we can easily observe behavior and occurrences beyond the scientific canon as soon as we surpass the limitations of scientific experimental arrangements. We do not want to follow or compete with biotechnology, but instead to develop an understanding of living beings (be them bacteria or protozoa) with the help of art practices. We are using both the artistic and scientific traditions of observing and describing visual and auditory events in their temporality. We want to examine how other living beings have been creating systems of communication, collaboration, symbiosis, and world-making during their evolution. With these methods, can we discover blueprints or prototypes for the setup of alternative technical networks of communication? The most obvious challenge while working with living matter is coordinating with the timeframe of the respective creature. We recall Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), a Baltic biologist and philosopher who once told us about a tick that may wait up to twelve years on a perch until it can smell butyric acid from the perspiration of a passing mammal.6 Each animal, be it a bacterium or a mammal, has its “proper time,” cycles defined by its lifespan, generation, circadian rhythm, and metabolism. If 6

Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), 5–80.

173

shared habitats you start to “work” with a creature, the first practical hurdle is always how to adapt your own daily rhythm to the circadian rhythm of the creature and to establish a permanent culture for the other being. Professional laboratories have their lab technicians. Artists do not. This might not be a disadvantage if you enjoy sharing time with your creatures as roommates. But it might force you to adapt your daily routines to those of your ward. In the case of Drosophila melanogaster – the common fruit fly – you first have to acknowledge that fruit flies are not pests, but comrades.7 You need to share some space in the kitchen with them, accepting that cleaning means reducing their presence. While conducting your experiments, you might discover that your recordings are full of events and occurrences never described in any scientific paper: a scientific experiment builds on minimal settings to control cause and effect in its explanations,8 but an artist may expand the scope of observation in our common human habitat. As artists, we value experiments from an aesthetic point of view. Thus, we hope to contribute to a public knowledge base through observations beyond laboratory settings. In a more banal environment (my kitchen), I was able to observe poetic emanations, like the occurrence of harmonic proportions in the choral singing of Drosophila. In scientific laboratory settings, Drosophila are isolated from each other in order to identify their voices and how they match specific behavior. Such an approach makes it unlikely that interrelationships such as harmonics can be observed. I do not know if my observation came from mechanisms of my human perception or if I observed a physical property of fly song. In addition, I 7

Please be aware that Drosophila not only is present in our kitchens as a pest, but is also a model organism for scientists. Its role in relation to the human should be considered ambivalent.

8

Even in the case of fieldwork, the human moves into the habitat of the animal to learn about the sphere of the animal – which is why we cannot speak of a shared habitat here.

174

shared habitats filmed unexpected group-mating behavior during male Drosophila dances (so-called “chaining”9). Both phenomena may have otherwise been oppressed by the rules of scientific experimentation or lack of apparent evolutionary benefit.10

Our Guides on the Way As an artist, I was educated at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, the institution where, in the early 1980s, Joseph Beuys was still present with his Free International University. What held me back from joining was the apparent hierarchy of the group around its teacher. Perhaps here the most significant difference between media art and traditional art practice becomes obvious: we cannot have only one reference point (be it a person, a technological aim, or a cultural aim). We are mediating between different positions/perspectives, and that is inherently our duty/aim: to create a fabric in between people and other people, matter and animals. Yes, we can still learn something from Moholy-Nagy or Beuys, but the technologies we apply have grown tremendously since then. And, differently from what was considered true at the time of Moholy-Nagy, one person alone is likely to fail in mastering them. While we are able to use our available tools, we can no longer fully understand the way they are operating or foresee the impact they may have on our surroundings. But how can an artist make a relevant statement when she does not fully “master” the tools or the object of her production? And here, Beuys might encourage us: Do not always just jump on board. Do not use every

9

Male fruit flies sing to females by vibrating one of their wings, and, interestingly, when other males hear the courtship song, they start to chase and court one another, which is a social phenomenon without apparent ethological benefit.

10 Ursula Damm, Drosophila Recordings, 2016, https://vimeo.com/181528073

175

shared habitats accessible technology (that was our attitude in the IGEM Competition in 201011). You might want to talk about a dead hare,12 a drop-out – and let the dead hare play piano instead of presenting virtuous compositions.13 14 But unlike traditional art, we are not excluding foreign patterns of activity. And, other than the artists in Ulrich Obrist’s do it exhibition in 2013,15 we not only give instructions to an audience, but also set up systems to explore their emergent manifestations. We propose open, performative processes, inspired by Andrew Pickering’s 16 “dance of agency.”17 He uses the concept of agency to refer directly to action, doing things that are consequential in the world. He sees the scientific practices of today as having the character of a dance of agency between people and things, the human and the non-human. His considerations of how we involve artifacts, humans, and non-humans in

11 IGEM Team Weimar-Heidelberg Arts, IGEM 2010, November 2010, http://2010.igem.org/Team:Weimar-Heidelberg_Arts 12 Joseph Beuys, Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt, 1965, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Explain_Pictures_to_a_Dead_Hare (accessed 21 August 2020). 13 Andreas Veiel, Beuys, (Berlin: Piffl Medien, 2017). 14 Joseph Beuys was one of the early artists who included animals in his performances. While his performances with the dead hare aimed for a shamanistic understanding of animals, for his performance I Like America and America Likes Me, he spent three days with a wild coyote in a gallery space. 15 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Do It: The Compendium, (New York: Independent Curators International, 2013). 16 Andrew Pickering is a leading figure in science and technology studies, focusing especially on transformative couplings of the human and the nonhuman. His recent work explores the history of cybernetics. 17 Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).

176

shared habitats a system of production lead to a pessimistic conclusion: he has claimed that “unsituated universalising, modern scientific knowledge […] is prone to lead to disaster when implemented in practice.” Instead of referring to preconceived knowledge in their experiments, the contemporary artist needs to stay “close to the performative world as found.”18 Taking his advice seriously, we – artists working with contemporary technologies – are tinkering with immediate feedback processes (establishing a chain of cause and effect that forms a circuit or loop) for the expansion of seeing, thinking, and acting.19 What Pickering calls the “dance of agency” has been described by science historian and media scientist Henning Schmidgen as an openended, performative experimentation that brings together science and art.20 Schmidgen introduced the notion of “Forschungsmaschinen” (in English, “research machines”), which can be seen as a heterogeneous fabric of materialistic and semiotic components used with temporal interplay to create epistemic and/or aesthetic effects. His explanations apply not only to science, but to artistic practices as well. Many contemporary artists working with media regard the experiment as an “instance of the incalculable.” We believe that artistic experimentation allows one to conduct undirected research 18 Andrew Pickering, “Finding Out: Unknowability/Situated Knowledge” (international conference, Weak Knowledge: Forms, Functions, and Dynamics, 2017). 19 “Cybernetics placed the inexhaustible powers of nature at its centre, where modern technoscience has representation instead. Modernity is thus characterisable by its enormous detours through knowledge and industry, while cybernetics stays close to the performative world as found, abstaining from the attempt to unwrap Black Boxes. And if Modernity is defined by projects of domination, then cybernetics is marked by a symmetric accommodation to the ultimately uncontrollable.” In Andrew Pickering, “Beyond Design: Cybernetics, Biological Computers and Hylozoism,” Synthese 168 (2009): 469–91. 20 Henning Schmidgen, Forschungsmaschinen – Experimente zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2017).

177

shared habitats

Fig. 1. Uexküll’s concept of the umwelt 22

in situations whose complexity and novelty transcend comprehensibility, although demanding positioning. Where calculability ends and situations become indeterminable, art can take a path without failing the artist’s own standards. Along the way, we also meet Jakob von Uexküll. Through the concept of the umwelt,21 he laid the foundation for understanding the construction of the internal “world” of a living being through its interaction with its environment. The identification of an objective region of the “world as sensed” (the stimulus sphere of a being) allowed for the description of a model of memory and action between the individual and its environment. While the individual develops self-awareness, the outer world is perceived as a “counter structure,” shaped by the individual’s own sensory system. While the living being is not capable of leaving its own umwelt, no external body is capable of fully grasping its inner perspective. “Counter structures” in the perception of the umwelt of a living being are just the deformations of objects of a shared environment. 21 Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretische Biologie. 22 Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company Inc., 1926), 157.

178

shared habitats The human in the ‘Umwelt‘ of the fly

Fig. 1. Uexküll’s concept of the umwelt1 as sensed ld r Wo

Sensor

new circuit

perceived as indicator, marked by actions

Effector The human The humanasascounter counter structure structure of the the flyfly the inner innerworld worldofof the

Mark organ

Wo rld o f

Action organ

actio n

The fly in the ‘Umwelt‘ of the human The human in the “umwelt” of the fly.

as rld Wo

sensed

Sensor

new circuit

perceived as indicator, marked by actions

Effector The fly as counter structure of the inner world of the human

Mark organ

Wo rld o f

Action organ

actio n

The fly in the “umwelt” of the human. Fig. 2 and 3. Humans and Drosophila in a biosemiotic feedback loop according to Uexküll 23: From the perspective of the fly, a human is recognized as a “counter structure” to its senses in its own world. It only perceives what is relevant for its life. For a human, the relevance of a fly depends on its interference with her everyday life and respective activities (e.g., food, being a nuisance, following the vector of yeasts from wine).

23 Ibid.

179

shared habitats Using such a construct, Shared Habitats takes up Uexküll’s respect for the completeness of the individual world (umwelt) as well as his understanding of the effects of stimuli in the self-understanding of a being. At the same time, the exhibition proposes the development of aesthetics of exchange and communication: the devices we are building are made not only for humans, but also for animals, and will allow beings to experience the umwelt of the mutual other. By doing so, we are establishing new forms of technology-enhanced feedback systems. Thus, we hope to overcome our own, human-centered umwelt to establish shared environments. We take into account that other beings and machines have their own agencies, and we want to become familiar with them. Our own agenda should be an activity that we share: a process of doing, sensing, reacting, answering, and expressing. Setting up open-ended, performative experimentation allows us to discover the cultural impact of our tools, settings, and technologies. We also hope to influence our environment with our artifacts. By relying on our own experiences, generating our own data, documenting, and setting up exchange, we hope to establish credibility beyond scientific standards and offer not only knowledge, but also sensual experiences. Even if we use tools and methods provided by and borrowed from science, we want to elicit (auto-)poietic sounds, language, and imagery from our environments. The sensual valuation stays with the visitors of our events.

180

Shared Habitats

181

shared habitats

Caring for Life – From the Laboratory to Labbing 1, 2 Yvonne Volkart Social morphogenesis has to be re-thought from the point of view of the biological metaphor of recombination ... not from the point of view of the metaphor of astronomical revolution. Mutating cells may arise from the rotting organism of capitalism … — Bifo-Franco Berardi.3 Why is it that so many exhibitions and artistic projects that specialize in media, ecology, and artistic research look like museums of natural history or laboratories? I asked myself this question many times over when I viewed exhibitions such as Exo-Evolution at the ZKM Karlsruhe (2015– 2016) or the competition submissions for Ars Electronica. There were also projects that reflected on the laboratory aesthetic in the group exhibition Eco-Visionaries, which I co-curated. Shared Habitats operates and in fact largely acts as a laboratory. I would like to take this coincidence as an op1

These results are based on my research project Ecodata–Ecomedia– Ecoaesthetics, which is being conducted at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Basel (2017–2020) and funded by the Swiss National Foundation. https://www.fhnw.ch/de/die-fhnw/hochschulen/hgk/institute/institut-asthetische-praxis-und-theorie/forschung/ecodata-ecomedia-ecoaesthetics (accessed 15 July 2020).

2

Translator’s note: The term “Laborieren” as used by the author cannot be adequately expressed in English. It makes reference to the laboratory and means doing or performing laboratory work, and is therefore associated with experimenting and probing. In a wider sense and with reference to its etymology from the Latin verb laborare, it can also mean “to take pains,” “to labor away,” which, in this case – as suggested by the verb “to elaborate” – is positively connoted. For the purpose of stressing its active, independent quality, it is therefore translated here as “labbing.”

3

Bifo-Franco Berardi, “transverse/transversal,” in The Book of Books: 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, no. 94 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 611.

182

Shared Habitats portunity to pursue this question and expand on it by taking five artistic projects as examples. Three of them were presented within the scope of the exhibition Shared Habitats. What makes “the lab” so attractive in current ecomedia-related research and exhibition practice? What opens up its aesthetic staging, and what kind of experiences does it facilitate? What discourses and dispositives do they make reference to? And what possibilities or even limitations cause their scenographies to become virulent? Over the course of my research, I have gained the impression that it was as if essentially two antagonistic forces at work in the concept of the laboratory fascinated many artists: On the one hand, there is the laboratory as an innovative institution of technoscientific research, the manufacturing of knowledge, and its (powerful) engendering of the world,4 and, on the other hand, there is the laboratory as a space for experimentation that is occupied temporarily and in which certain things – precisely because this site is so deserving of posing questions – can be retested in different ways.5 A large number of social and aesthetic norms as well as particular artistic interests slide into these two forces, to which, besides the requirements of socially and collectively arranged movements, also belong formalist baubles or hidden flirtation with scientism. I cannot cover the entire spectrum within the scope of this paper. Instead, the projects presented here reveal that, in the context of art, the lab has to measure up to specific aesthetic

4

Karin Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981); Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” in Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, eds. Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (London: Sage, 1983), 142–70, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/ sites/default/files/12-GIVE-ME-A-LAB-GB.pdf; Henning Schmidgen, “Labor,” EGO Europäische Geschichte Online, 2011, http://ieg-ego.eu/de/threads/crossroads/wissensraeume/henning-schmidgenlabor (accessed 15 July 2020).

5

On this, see the essay by Mindaugas Gapševičius in this volume, pp. 294–317.

183

shared habitats and functional aspects so that it does not become a new white cube for artists interested in scientific discourse. In the best cases, where ideas of “shared habitats” take hold, the laboratory becomes the site of playful laboratory work, of the development of other forms of relationships, and, indeed, even where care for more-than-human beings is rearticulated. I suggest that under certain aesthetic conditions, the lab can become a model that tests practices of self-forgetfulness, sharing and participation, and the construction and rendering of the sharing of experienceable worlds. At the same time, this exploration of other forms of relation to our fellow beings is always overlain by the historically institutionalized power of the laboratory to generate forms “of observation,” of the “extraction” and the construction of knowledge about “the others,” in order, in the ideal case, to leave it up to exploitation – economic, militaristic, and so on.

Lab-Aesthetic Representation Machines I would like to begin my investigation with Pinar Yoldas’ highly regarded project Ecosystem of Excess (2014) (Fig. 1.), because, among other reasons, it uses “the laboratory” in its most general, metonymic sense6 and, at the same time, comes within a whisker of what I would more precisely declare to be a “lab-aesthetic representation machine”: hence the various large jars placed on white cubes, full of strange mutations, seem to suggest that not only has the artist’s studio become a laboratory, but the entire world has become a field for experimentation with an uncertain outcome. Ecosystem of Excess makes reference to the geological immutability of plastic and prompts the speculative questions: What would we look like if the primeval soup out of which life on planet Earth evolved had been full of plastic like that which has accumulated in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? 6

Metonymic means that parts stand for the whole (pars pro toto), that the jars and prepared specimens say “laboratory.”

184

Shared Habitats What kind of sensoria and organs would we have developed?7 Various exhibits and patterns of order stage this fiction of an alternative evolution: the works’ labels point out that these seemingly organic, varicolored formations are the organs of new types of marine creatures that have completely adapted to their plastic-littered habitat. The “organs for sensing & metabolizing plastics,” such as the “e-pasticeptor,” is a “sensory organ for the perception of the plastisphere,” specifically for polyethylene, while the “petrogestastive system” is capable of digesting plastic. A wall with drawings and a lexicon provide a detailed explanation of how they function. The exhibits on display, which are illuminated by a single light source, are reminiscent of specimens preserved in formaldehyde at museums of natural history or in cabinets of curiosities. At the same time, the interconnected cords or tubes suggest that they are living organisms in a nutrient solution. The arrangement with the small test tubes indicates that experiments are performed using the preserved specimens (Fig. 2). On the occasion of my first encounter with parts of this extensive installation, I spontaneously assumed that it dealt with preserved specimens of mutated organs from unknown marine creatures. On closer inspection, the artifacticity of the plastic caught my eye, resulting in my reading them as models of bacteria and marine creatures. It was only gradually that I recognized the project’s fictive and material-based, metonymic approach: the material selected for the exhibits – plastic – performs its excess by presenting itself. In view of the fact that the additional information refers to previous marine-biological research that detected bacterial mutations and the adaption of their metabolism to the sea of plastic, my initial confusion was surely no accident. The primary strategies of this work are the initiation of speculation or “narration,”8 the confusion of fact and fiction, 7

https://www.pinaryoldas.info/work (accessed 15 July 2020).

8

Léa Perraudin, “Tales from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Speculative Encounters with Plastic,” in Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf das Übrig-Gebliebene, eds. Christiane Lewe et al. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016), 143–65.

185

shared habitats

Fig. 1. Pinar Yoldas, “Organs for Sensing & Metabolizing plastics” from Ecosystem of Excess, 2014. Courtesy of Pinar Yoldas

Fig. 2. Pinar Yoldas, Ecosystem of Excess, detail, 2014. Courtesy of Pinar Yoldas

186

Shared Habitats playing with our lack of knowledge with respect to biological processes and their investigation, as well as with the creation of a non-transparent laboratory atmosphere. Yet as soon as visitors recognize the fiction, all one sees are “merely” representations of speculative thought experiments. I do not mean “merely” in a derogatory way. In the exhibition space, art normally has a presentation character and attempts to affect visitors by appealing to them visually or auditorily. However, this work gradually appropriates and mystifies the representative scenario of scientific presentation and viewing. And yet in terms of content, the museum of natural history or the laboratory does not seem to play a compelling role at first. For if we follow Pina Yoldas’ narrative, then the fabricated mutants are not the products of a biotechnological laboratory, but of evolution, of the world outside. They are adaptions to the world in the Wasteocene, our age, in which the entire planet is being transformed into a garbage dump and a quasi-lethal trap.9

9

“Wasteocene” plays not only on the term Anthropocene, but also on all the other geological “-cenes.” We adopted this wordplay in our research project Times of Waste (2015–2018). Documentation: http://times-of-waste.ch/en/home-en; object biography of a smartphone: https://www.objektbiografie.times-of-waste. ch/en/ (accessed 15 July 2020). Environmental historian Marco Armiero coined the term “Wasteocene” for similar reasons. In his lecture “Welcome to the Wasteocene: Sabotaging the Anthropocene through Guerilla Narrative,” Armiero writes: “Waste can be considered the essence of the Anthropocene, embodying humans’ ability to affect the environment to the point of transforming it into a gigantic dump. For this reason I have argued that this new epoch might be called the Wasteocene (Armiero and De Angelis 2017). However, the Wasteocene frames waste not as an object – ‘waste’ – but as a relation – ‘wasting.’ My hypothesis is that while wasting relationships are based on consuming and ‘othering,’ that is, on sorting out what and who is waste, commoning practices are based on reproducing resources and communities.” Announcement Fumogeni no. 2, space 4235, 28 February 2018, https://www.space4235.com/archives/fumogeni-2-marco-armiero (accessed 28 January 2019).

187

shared habitats The entire world has become a laboratory10 of human and capitalist exploitation that consumes bodies and matter and turns them into waste. The world inside is also the world outside, and vice versa, regardless of whether the ocean (of plastic), laboratory, or museum of natural history. The world is trapped everywhere and at all times and turned into garbage that is accumulated, extracted, and relocated. Whereas specific entities and objects are collected, selected, and presented in a museum of natural history, in the laboratory they are bred, isolated, observed, and quantified. After their use (interpretation/quantification), they are disposed of. Human beings invent apparatuses and procedures in both institutions for the purpose of investigating or exploiting more-than-human beings and objects. In Ecosystem of Excess, these powerful dispositives are not particularly reflected on or radically undermined. Neither does the extensive activity of polluting, that is, producing waste, make reference to laboratory techniques. Instead, it makes reference solely to the flooding of the oceans with plastic. The narrative provokes a certain irony or amusement, namely since the garbage of one turns into a breeding ground for the other. This brings to mind the fact that the subject-object hierarchies will have turned around in the future, as the preserved objects of today are what people will be tomorrow or what they were yesterday: strange marine creatures, in a state of permanent transformation. However, with the scenography of the laboratory as a cabinet of curiosities, Pinar Yoldas also uses the anachronistic and limiting atmosphere of knowledge production to generate elements of truth and magic, nobility and scurrility, and to lend particular credence to its fiction. In other words: she appropriates and ennobles institutionalized representations of research and knowledge without per-

10 Editor’s note, “Of a World Becoming Alien,” in The Laboratory Planet No. 5. Alien Capitalism, eds. Ewen Chadronnet and Bureau d’études (Paris, 2016), 1, https:// laboratoryplanet.org (accessed 15 July 2020).

188

Shared Habitats forming institutional criticism. This is especially true if we bear in mind that the project was produced for the Schering Foundation, an institution that supports science and the arts and is funded by the pharmaceutical giant Schering, against whom actions were underway at the time of the exhibition because of a hormone compound that had led to fetal deformities in the past.11 Today, a noncritical or naïve approach to institutional power dispositives – in this specific case, in the laboratory – and hence to a lab aesthetic that can almost be called formalistic, can frequently be found in the context of art-and-science or artistic research, in bioart in particular. It often results from a certain limitation, naïvety, or a metonymic understanding in dealing with artistic means: it is essentially scientistic or opportunistically rests on the tendency to view interdisciplinarity or hybridizations of art with technosciences as pioneering by definition. Numerous artists have developed relationships with scientists in laboratories and keep track of what is done there, or experiment with lab practices themselves. Hence it seems natural to represent the laboratory in a museum, even if, as in Yoldas’ case, it is not at all negotiated or specified. Preference is often given to the use of these “lab-aesthetic representation machines,” as I like to refer to this formalistic laboratory aesthetic and art in an exhibition context. In order to expand one’s “own” artistic language instead of to destruct its episteme, their consolidation is renewed time and again. I would not criticize Pinar Yoldas for the latter, since it is with this fiction that she succeeds in going beyond the familiar and narrating an allegory. The strength of her aesthetic fiction of monstrous subjects resides not least in the fact that our excessive production of waste and its immutability can be recognized as performing laboratory work on the world – a world of evolving actants that reacts to various inputs and manipulation

11 Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, “Primodos Was a Revolutionary Oral Pregnancy Test. But Was It Safe?” The Guardian, International Edition (13 October 2016).

189

shared habitats with feedback and “excess,” and demonstrates that there is no control. In the final analysis, Yoldas’ laboratory art could itself be read as working on and with objects in the laboratory. Hence her preserved specimens are in a position to trigger a broad discourse on survival and responsibility as well as the role of art in the Wasteocene, even if the aesthetic potential of excess and transgression, with its noncritical reproduction of the clean laboratory, is not entirely used.

“Alliances of Active Care” A tracking shot against a blurred, flesh-colored background; before it, white, clotted strands full of black particles (fine dust particles) that become increasingly discernible. The camera scans the tiny hairs along the surfaces before we hear the voiceover pose the question: “Can humans hire plants?” The video essay Botanomics: Towards a Plant-Based Economy for the Common Good (2019) (pp. 264–269), presented as an installation, is the tentative final chapter of Dust Blooms by Alexandra Toland, which is an interdisciplinary and transmedia-arranged artistic research project that has been ongoing since 2015. Its results have found expression in various media and exhibition formats – the artist speaks of “narrations.”12 The video essay begins in a quasi-material, semiotic no-man’s-land where everything is matter, body, regardless of whether human being, plant, or filth. In the next shot, we see a field of grain, the air heavy with dust that is being swirled up by heavy agricultural machines. We hear reference made to the concept of Ecosystem Services (ESS), which provide services such as air purification or temperature reduction by means of plants, pollination 12 To me, this transmedia-based handling in various (exhibition) chapters seems typical for artistic research and its current presentations of research results. More on this project can be found on p. 264 in this volume or at Alexandra Toland’s website, https://artoland.wordpress.com (accessed 15 July 2020).

190

Shared Habitats by insects, aesthetic pleasure, and so on. Out of political considerations, they are appraised and monetarily quantified as capital for the purpose of being able to demonstrate the use of biodiversity, functioning ecosystems, and so on, in the context of a green economy and climate change. The ESS counter the economization of the world with the strategic economization of nature. Two such services are presented in the video: Biofiltration Services, the dust-filtering function using blooms; and Bioextraction Services, a form of heavy-metal extraction using plants that still seems to be in the laboratory stage. The potential of agromining is being researched in a similar laboratory in France: so-called hyperaccumulators – plants that grow in soil contaminated with heavy metals and sequester them – are dried, burned, and subjected to further processes in order to reclaim these heavy metals from the ash. As Marie-Odile Simmonot (University of Lorraine, ECONICK Laboratory), the head of the project, acknowledges, for many of the retrieved materials, such as, for instance, arsenic or lead, there is no market. Even sought-after nickel is currently still cheaper to obtain by means of conventional mining methods – that is, environmentally damaging methods that remove vast quantities of rocks – than by “recycling” by means of agromining. Hence while the “biofiltration purification service” using plants has already worked for millions of years – even though it has not yet been scientifically investigated down to the last detail – agromining seems to still be in the experimental stage. It may also be that it is not industrially applied at a large scale, because it cannot currently keep up with the low price of raw materials acquired by conventional extraction methods, a situation that could change. The laboratory, which has shifted into the picture, therefore becomes a site of innovation and of a potentiality that, for economic reasons, is not exploited. At this point, the video essay leaves the question of whether this is good or bad unanswered. It will not be until afterwards that the thought crystallizes that agromining is also a method of extraction and that nothing can be had for free: instead of ruining the lands of indigenous peoples, plants are now being “sacri191

shared habitats ficed” – plants that evidently flourish well in such soil. But does that mean, one begins to quietly ask oneself, that one is therefore permitted to downgrade them twofold, to being the disposers and the providers of human needs? Does this not also point out that the Homo oeconomicus not only wastes everything but would also be given license with these “green” methods to carry on as one always has ad infinitum: namely, to accumulate, to extract, and to displace; in short, to waste the world? As the video essay progresses, it becomes clear that the ESS are anthropocentric and that the limitation of their potential also resides therein. The next plant is Ambrosia artemisiifolia, introduced as a negative example because it performs a “dis-service” to humans: the camera zooms in on the plant; every tiny hair, every crevice, every recess becomes visible and indicates morphological (surface) characteristics that, as one has heard based on the example of other plants, perform biofiltration services. Yet, in this case, these characteristics apparently do not count, since ambrosia is an invasive plant that was introduced by humans from North American and distributed over wide areas of Europe via bird feed. Ambrosia is also a common allergen and for that reason is being decimated. Ecologist Birgit Seitz from the Technical University of Berlin, who was interviewed for the video, sums it up in a nutshell: “It is of no use to us, hence it’s not supposed to be.” The common name for artemisia is ragweed: what is of no use is waste, and at most it is there acting as a “rag,” cleaning up after people. That is the logic of the Wasteoscene, an epoch that has to end and be replaced by one that places priority on forms of equality and cooperation with more-than-human beings. Toland’s video cites the anthropologist Natasha Meyers: “The Planthroposcene is a call to change the terms of encounter, to make allies with these green beings. These alliances could be framed as active care, involving labor and multiple science. It is a shift from exploitation to reciprocity, a shift from Ecosystem Services to a multispecies economy.” Hence the video essay takes a stance and answers 192

Shared Habitats the question raised at the beginning, of whether humans can hire plants, with “no”: “Botanomics proposes that humans can hire plants, but only when you repay them for their services.” With this last sentence, an aspect of dependency, blame, and care comes into play that has gained increasing importance in recent years: not only economic affluence, as put forth by capitalism as the principle of the exploitation of others, but also the existence of the human species in general is based on the existence of other living things, particularly plants, which produce oxygen and nourishment. Philosopher Emmanuele Coccia writes: “To live is essentially to live the life of another: to live in and through the life that others have been able to construct or invent. There is a sort of universal parasitism, a universal cannibalism, that belongs to the domain of the living: it feeds off itself, without realizing that it needs other forms and modes of existence.”13 Unlike animals (a category to which humans also belong), plants do not eat other plants: “They require nothing but the world, nothing but reality in its most basic components: rocks, water, air, light.”14 The video essay Botanomics: Towards a Plant-Based Economy for the Common Good raises awareness of the fact that human beings are not the autonomous beings that they have constructed themselves as since Enlightenment. At the same time, the video essay calls for a way of thinking and acting that takes into account this dependence on others and the guilt that comes with it. If we take this piece seriously, then from now on we have to always consider how we behave toward or even show our gratitude toward what is simple and what we are given. The video does not address how that might look in concrete terms. The move undertaken in the video, and in its title, from the concept of “service” to that of “common good” and to the neologism “Botanomics” (a combination of 13 Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 7. 14 Ibid., 8.

193

shared habitats “botanics” and the suffix “-omic” as the study of the multiple interplays between all plants and their companion species)15 puts forward that forms of co-existence, sharing, and caring have to be re-articulated. These forms have, not lastly, had their models in the practices of the commons as well as the subsistence economies of indigenous peoples who have been suppressed by the industrialization of agriculture. This conclusion suggests itself based on the mode of the presentation of the work, in which old and new forms of knowledge generation come together. In the exhibition Shared Habitats, two “digital etchings” frame the video in an installation entitled Probing the Planthroposcene: Excerpts from a Dis-Service Society (pp. 267–268). The etchings present an Alyssum murale (a nickel hyperaccumulator) and an Ambrosia artemisiifolia. They synthesize scientific ways of representing these and similar plants over the past five hundred years. In doing so, they evoke conventions of scientific representation at a single glance, yet also associate old knowledge about (healing) plants. Hence they assemble old and new ways of displaying knowledge about plants, both in terms of representational, media-related (graphical), and material techniques – the pigment is a mixture created by the artist out of fine particles (dirt) and gold. This, in turn, combines alchemistic, scientific, and artistic practices. The installation is basically reminiscent of a simple museum staging, which has scarcity value in the context of the Ars Electronica. The aesthetics of its representation are also unusual within the scope of Shared Habitats, which assembles projects with ecomedia-related test arrangements. However, as part of

15 “The branches of science known informally as omics are various disciplines in biology ... . Omics aims at the collective characterization and quantification of pools of biological molecules that translate into the structure, function, and dynamics of an organism or organisms.” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omics (accessed 30 June 2020). Crucial for botanomics, as opposed to botanics, is that botanomics have an eye on collectives and their relations and not on single organisms.

194

Shared Habitats the overall project Dust Blooms, it is fundamentally based on processual test arrangements. In collaboration with various scientific institutes and laboratories, the artist examined the dust-filter function of blooms. In the course of Alexandra Toland’s fieldwork, she collected blooms and, with the aid of a grid, counted how many grains of fine dust a bloom captured under a microscope. She referred to the ESS from the very start and initially concurred with them. In 2017, she received an honorary mention for Dust Blooms at Ars Electronica in the category of Hybrid Arts, and she presented an installation of it at the OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz. During its presentation there, the museum of natural history as a venue for presenting specimens as well as the laboratory as a site of innovative research and field-based methods of measurement, observation, and interpretation played an important role. Hence along with a wall that presented dust etchings and photographs of the habitats of the plants addressed, two microscopes as well as a meadow sample were on display. However, the microscopes were not only meant to be narrative elements, but visitors themselves could also use them to look at and count the dust particles on blooms and therefore apply scientific vision. The meadow sample contained a mixture of real and artifactual plants – on the one hand, plants the artist found on the roadside and examined, and, on the other hand, their morphological replicas made out of (cleaning) materials such as brushes and microfiber cloths. In addition, the installation also included a sensor-based measuring station operated by an Arduino board that measured the dust content in the air and translated it into a readable diagram by means of software made available by the open source database luftdaten.info.16 Alexandra Toland also combines various methods of examining “objects,” specifically measurement, representation, and perception/dis-

16 Luftdaten selber messen mit Citizen Science, Stuttgart. https://luftdaten.info (accessed 15 July 2020).

195

shared habitats tinction. This reveals that the “truth” about dust deposition and dealing with it is always coupled with specific techniques, technologies, and the respective time-based mode of perception. Moreover, it oversteps the partialization of science, technology, and “nature.” The installation Dust Blooms basically turns the exhibition space into a DIY laboratory – at least to the extent that it renders it possible for the public to appreciate the process of labbing and media-related differentiation. By contrast, in the exhibition Probing the Planthroposcene, labbing, or “probing,” as the title suggests, is no longer linked with the functionality and aesthetic of the laboratory in terms of its scenography. Rather, it seems as if the artist is placing new trust in aesthetic vision and combination as provided by the museum setting. The laboratory becomes perception and reflection; it changes from the institution and hands-on practice into the theoretical practice of reflecting/rethinking. However, the laboratory as an institution of experimentation and innovation has not disappeared. A high-tech version of the lab is now dealt with in this video, yet it seems distinctly more ambivalent – it remains obscure whether the “agromining” performed in the laboratory is a blessing or a curse, since the suspicion grows that the centuries-old activity of the pollution and extraction of the world simply continues by way of plants.17 What is clear is that those operating the university laboratory do not reflect on the question posed by the video of how plants should be paid for their “services.” I wrote earlier in the text that the laboratory manifests as a site of potentiality (for environmentally friendly mining) that, for economic reasons, is not exploited; one can now add that it also leaves the potential for thinking differently, for “probing the Planthroposcene,” unexploited. The exhibition setting could suggest that it occurs elsewhere – outside of the laboratory – and that scientific

17 See Myra Hird on the “sacrifice” of the Russian thistle in nuclear-contaminated areas. Myra Hird, “The Phenomenon of Waste World Making,” in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emergent Knowledge, 30 (2016), 18.

196

Shared Habitats

Fig. 3. Mindaugas Gapševičius, Julian Chollet, and Juan Pablo Diaz: Presentation of the workshop “SCOBY, Shit, and Humus” at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Brigita Kasperaitė

practices other than laboratory work have to be invented when it comes to developing possibilities for feedback (“repaying them”) and care.

Caring for Collective Laboratory Work There are other works in the exhibition Shared Habitats in which the “probing” of a special attentiveness plays an essential role in the development of care for our fellow beings. Whereas, in this respect, emphasis should be placed on The Pig Simulator (2015–2018) by Stephan Isermann,18 for our context, Mindaugas Gapševičius’s laboratory adds a 18 In the case of The Pig Simulator, virtual reality allows us to slip into the role of a pig being led to the slaughter block and to directly experience the threatening

197

shared habitats new aspect: his Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics (2016–2019) toolkits occupy the art space and turn it into a laboratory and, in this case, into a site of trans-species experimentation (Fig. 3). Access occurs on two levels: On the one hand, Gapševičius presents toolkits complete with video tutorials and manuals (pp.240–245); more precisely, he makes them available for instruction, imitation, and use. On the other hand, he invites additional artists to conduct workshops. This arrangement results in a disseminating, open, and, in terms of its impact, incalculable hands-on atmosphere in the space of the museum. A broad public made active use of it in Vilnius. How can this laboratory setting be interpreted?19 Mindaugas Gapševičius attempts to generate and communicate knowledge about the life of microorganisms and their coexistence with human beings. He thematically ties in with the insight gained by the sciences, permacultural practices, and bio-art, which have recognized the fundamental importance of microorganisms for organic life and their symbiosis with human beings, and are currently enhancing and using them.20 Besides forms of care, this is naturally also a question of new possibilities of exploitation. As in the case of agromining by means of plants discussed above, in the microbial field, it has also been suggested that the service of bacteria feelings and fears involved with impending death and that we share with animals. The experience one has in the course of this is pioneering, existential, and frightening; one wants to constantly escape from the reality of “being a pig” and to discontinue the game. I would not care to go into more detail about this work, as it has little to do with the laboratory. However, it seems important to me that it utilizes the much-discussed concept of empathy in a uniquely shocking and merciless way, and gives cause for alarm, which results from the experience being made possible technically and aesthetically. 19 Mindaugas Gapševičius goes into his intentions in his essay in this volume (pp. 294–317), which is why I will not describe them here. 20 “The importance of microbial life to soils is driving a shift in conceptions of soils from inert media to living ecosystems which demand respect form their

198

Shared Habitats could solve numerous problems (caused by the Homo oeconomicus) in the context of the impending shortage of resources, from the purifying of contaminated soil and the reclamation of e-waste to the manufacturing of bioplastic and bio-leather. Bacteria could become our new robots and slaves. Yet many experiments are still in the laboratory stage, as the control of microorganisms for economic purposes is complex and also more cost-intensive than conventional industrial processes.21 Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics intervenes in this controversial field and reveals the complexity and entanglement of this conflict based on the example of everyday products and phenomena. By occupying the art space, the installation of simple laboratory tools, and the inclusion of a nonscientific public by means of do-it-with-others practices, Gapševičius’s project enables fundamental experiences with the unfamiliar-familiar. Moreover, it recommends possibilities for action; they do not necessarily aim to solve the problem of pollution and global sustenance, but instead attempt to intersect the re-installed dispositive of the subject-object, human-non-human hierarchy with each laboratory and open up a field of action that goes beyond extractivist thinking. Even without dispensing with certain techniques and (laboratory) technologies, Introduction to Posthuman

intrinsic value and an ethic of care, a sentiment now articulated even by the European Commission (EU Horizon 2020 Mission for Soil Health and Food Mission Statement),” writes Anna Krzywoszynska and Sam Outhwaite in “Unsettling Soils: Soil Microbiome, Farmer Knowledge Anxieties, and the Search for a Gaian Agriculture,” unpublished paper, given by Krzywoszynska at the workshop Techniques Matter as part of the research project Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoaesthetics (2017–2020, led by Yvonne Volkart), Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Basel, 7 May 2020. 21 With this assessment, I make reference, as in the discussion of agromining in the previous chapter, to the insight within the scope of our research project Times of Waste (2015–2018). Documentation can be found at: http://times-of-waste.ch/en/home-en; object biography of a smartphone: https://www.objektbiografie.times-of-waste.ch/en (accessed 15 July 2020).

199

shared habitats Aesthetics makes palpable how fundamental microbial life and hence the exchange and cooperation with more-than-human beings is for life on Earth. These are relationships and experiences that not only go unaddressed in technoscientific laboratories, but are also contrary to the “narrative” that microorganisms threaten humans. In My Collaboration with Bacteria for Paper Production, one of the chapters from the overall project Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics, Mindaugas Gapševičius works with SCOBY, a so-called “symbiotic culture with bacteria and yeast,” a “culture” that is also an old fermentation technique, related to cooking. In his video tutorial, which is in no way inferior to the popular tutorials on YouTube and sounds like the algorithm of a recipe, he presents a step-by-step introduction into the mimetic possibility of imitation. In doing so, Gapševičius quite generally refers to developmental psychology (where the young learn from the old and vice versa – a form of knowledge exchange that is being consciously eliminated in the neoliberal labor market), and activity-oriented and aesthetic conditions of existence, with which are also associated old and new techniques of relationally controlled and physically experienced instruction, sharing of knowledge, and learning from one another. In addition, its collective character and easily recreated setting also make for just plain fun. It is therefore a question of creating knowledge that is parascientific and that arouses palpable and manifest joy and excess – transgressing human boundaries. It is relational, embodied knowledge; it is posthuman, as it is simultaneously human and nonhuman. This new old knowledge about things that are consumed on a day-to-day basis (such as kombucha or yoghurt) can only be generated by means of a hybrid, techno-aesthetically operating laboratory setting, as it is not a question of the production of kombucha or yoghurt, but rather of the reproduction of and learning about with the living conditions of the organisms co-responsible for them. This takes place as processual test arrangements under laboratory conditions, since specific relationships have to be systematically disabled and 200

shared habitats

Fig. 4. Julian Chollet, Humus Sapiens: Open Soil Research, Centre culturel Suisse, Paris, 2019. Photo: Ewen Chardronnet

observed. However, as the tools demonstrate, these structured processes can be carried out with very ordinary things. The toolkits created by Gapševičius and the guests he invites to his workshops do not directly intervene in molecular structures or modify DNA. Instead, they remain on the level of “kitchen philosophy.” In an etymological sense of the word, they allow the household (oikos) to be experienced as a vibrant, relational ecosystem and open it up for the more-than-familial. Molecular biologist Julian Chollet, who works in artistic contexts, proceeds in a similar way. In collaboration with Chollet and Juan Pablo Diaz, Gapševičius conducted the workshop “SCOBY, Shit, and Humus” in 201

shared habitats Vilnius as part of the self-repair labs that were installed at Shared Habitats. Among other things, participants took various soil samples, investigated and mapped them, and attempted to develop a non-anthropocentric view in subsequent experiments.22 Because I only briefly attended this lengthy workshop, in the following, I make reference to another, shorter workshop conducted by Julian Chollet in Paris and that likewise dealt with soil (humus) (Fig. 4).23 It can generally be said that the experiments carried out with him did not render soil experienceable as an inert mass, but rather as a biotope consisting of co-existing beings, and that, as is the case with Gapševičius, they are about creating awareness of human beings as implicit.24 Whereas many of Gapševičius’s experiments include participating “humans” by means of cooking and eating, hence by means of material “incorporation” in addition to the element of activity, in Paris, Chollet joined the participants to produce ecomedia-based aesthetic image settings. He captured humus life under the microscope on video and projected it onto the wall to enable people to perceive it themselves as a media-based part of the image machine. The resulting images were not only beautiful, but also affected one through the knowledge that they were living beings of which one is a part. Hence being together with microbial life while performing laboratory work can elicit aesthetic sensations that burst the functional arrangement of microscopes (these are necessary so that people can see the different microorganisms in the soil), jars, petri dishes, and so on, and open up the

22 http://triple-double-u.com/case-1-scoby-shit-and-humus (accessed 17 July 2020). 23 I make reference to the workshop I co-organized, “Open Soil Research,” which Julian Chollet conducted on the occasion of the conference Seeds & Soil at the Swiss Cultural Centre, Paris, 7–9 March 2019: Review: http://www.makery.info/en/2019/03/11/vous-aussi-devenez-humus-sapiens 24 On this, see the essay in this volume, p. 294.

202

shared habitats

Fig. 5 and 6. Screenshots of video documentation of the performance Insect Songs, 2017

notion of life as an experimental coming-into-being. At the same time, however, one important point is that these experiences of shared life are not situated outside of discursive practices; in fact, two-way discussion and theorizing are a fundamental part of it. This rearticulation and visualization of practices and discourses is also one reason why the workshops continue to take place in an exhibition context and perfect Gapševičius’s toolkits. And so the artist operates not only as a “mediator,” as proposed

203

shared habitats by Gapševičius,25 but as a “curator” (from the Latin cura, care) – as that being who tends to the constitution and continuation of a collective elaborated context.

Caring as an Event I would like to conclude my considerations with Ursula Damm’s Drosophila Karaoke Bar (2019). I read this installation as a machinic assemblage for the establishment of an embodied relation with fruit flies (drosophila); as a machine for the development of an ecology of sensing and caring, and its celebration (pp.214–222). For many, the installation with the fly habitat under a muffling pile of sand and the various technological apparatuses initially comes across as a classic laboratory situation in which humans observe nonhuman beings, incite them to react, and capture them in various manners of representation. Those who expect the usual stimulus-reaction scheme that many interactive, laboratory-based works reproduce are inevitably disappointed, since the reaction of the fruit flies does not unequivocally conform to this pattern. While visitors are encouraged to sing along with or simply for the flies, software transcodes the human sounds into ones that can be perceived by the flies, and conversely amplifies the song of the flies so that it is perceptible to the human ear. One nevertheless has to engage intensely with this process in order to enter a form of communality. And even after one has listened to the comments by the neuroscientist Birgit Brüggemeier on the function of fly songs in the corresponding video, before one seeks to apply what one has learned, it still requires a great deal of patience, calmness, and joy in playing. For if all one does is speak into the microphone, the fruit flies are frightened and do not do anything at first – even though a vocoder adapts the human voice to the 25

See p. 294.

204

shared habitats sound sequences and auditory pattern recognition in flies. (Visitors also hear themselves speaking fly language, as it were.) One has to tune into their temporality so that they calm down and become active.26 One has to “become a fly.”27 As the title of the Drosophila Karaoke Bar indicates, the installation is a stage, a machine for an event where people, machines, and flies can enter a shared space-time concatenation.28 The term “event” stems from the Latin evenire and means “to come out,” “to happen.” The event is the coming-into-being of things, their opening-up to transversal movements beyond the logic of teleological progress, as well as the sense of accomplishment that can result from coming-into-being with others. It is presubjective coming-into-being in a relational process and corresponds with that logic that Félix Guattari called “eco-logic”: “The logic of intensities, or eco-logic, is concerned only with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes. Process, which I oppose here to system or to structure, strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution, definition and deterritorialization.”29 Eco-logic is a different, non-discursive logic of affects and, in its vitality and transformation, brings forth life. In Insect Songs (2018) (Fig. 5 and 6), a preliminary version of Drosophila Karaoke Bar, an essential factor for the success of the work was the stage-like machinic assemblage, collective playing, listening

26 It was especially difficult at Ars Electronica, where streetcars rumbled past at regular intervals, but it worked well at the museum in Vilnius. 27 Ursula Damm on the cellist Christina Meißner performing with flies, e-mail to Yvonne Volkart, May 2018. 28 With the term “event,” I make reference to Isabelle Stengers (2015) and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2015), both of whom use it in its etymological meaning of the evolving becoming-into-being. 29 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 2000), 44.

205

shared habitats to one another, and forgetting oneself in a trans-species, relational occurrence.30 In a demanding process of making music, the cellist Christina Meißner took up a dialogue with the midges, over the course of which she reduced her human dominance: “Christina Meißner did not want to force the midges to react; rather, she wanted to ‘become a midge’ herself and ‘sing with them.’”31 “Becoming a midge” as a music event hence means an aesthetically supported form of environment-related subjectivity: human and non-human beings and technologies come together in an ecological event, create a machine, and see to it that they grow together, thrive together. The event is a process of sensing, probing, seeking in the here and now and is produced by means of various aesthetic and technological elements, such as an independent temporality of listening through the unpredictable “interactively” arranged timing of the sound, the foreignness of the tones, the self-imposed concentration, and the various images. As Christoph Brunner has shown, aesthetic timing, as the experienced and shared time in the here and now, provides the condition for what he, in connection with Brian Massumi, calls an “ecology of relation.”32 What is meant by this is a specific form of temporality that touches those present on an affective level and “calls on” them in their physicality and relationship to

30 Parts of this section regarding Ursula Damm’s Insect Songs were published in Yvonne Volkart, “Techno-Ecofeminism: Nonhuman Sensations in Technoplanetary Layers,” in The Beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century, in ed. Cornelia Sollfrank (Colchester: Minor Compositions, 2019), 117–35, https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ BeautifulWarriors-web.pdf (accessed 15 July 2020). 31 Ursula Damm, email to Yvonne Volkart, May 2018. 32 Christoph Brunner, “Affective Politics of Timing: On Emergent Collectivity in Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors,” in Timing of Affect: Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics, eds. Marie-Luise Angerer et al. (Berlin and Zurich: diaphanes, 2014), 245–62.

206

shared habitats others in the room as a plurality of pre-individual entities in embryo, in this case: faces, flies, sounds, movements, technologies, signals, traces, and so on. The abandon experienced by each individual in this event, which extends over a long period of time without a specifically announced beginning or end, becomes a consciously perceived experience of shared participation; Ursula Damm speaks of “shared experience,” or “shared habitats.” This is based on communication that initially appears to be completely meaningless because it is situated outside of human linguistic codes and serves no apparent purpose. However, the communication becomes meaningful if it can involve a different kind of “understanding,” of empathy, of collectively created and shared collective (temporary) temporality. In this sense, it provides an aesthetic excess of pure becoming and goes beyond any purposive rationality – as mentioned, for example, in the “ecosystem services” cited in the previous chapter. On the contrary: in this case, a great deal is demanded from human beings in order to facilitate a successful encounter. Ursula Damm writes: “The actual media-related aspect is that we humans have to become quiet in order to hear the flies. Admittedly, we use technology to enable ourselves to hear them, and we in turn use technology to examine the impact our music has on the flies.”33 But they are simple arrangements, not sensors: “For me, it is an aesthetic decision not to employ any additional technology, but to work on my attentiveness (being quiet, watching at length) or to simulate the habitat of the flies (a fly box). … One senses and develops meaning for each other.”34 Here, Ursula Damm introduces what I have elsewhere

33 Ursula Damm, email to Yvonne Volkart, May 2018. 34 Ibid.

207

shared habitats referred to as “techniques of life, techniques of sensing.”35 36 Pleading that their respective transversal potential – particularly in the arts – is to be sought in experiences of co-existence with our fellow beings, and not in the perpetual deployment of innovative technologies. Sensing techniques are therefore not so much technologies but methods, or aesthetics of sensation.37 They are undoubtedly “technical” sensing technologies conditioned by their material configurations and their possibilities afforded by such assemblies. But, beyond that limited view, techniques of sensing also afford “non-technical” methods for carefully forging relations with unfamiliar entities; sensing is tactile, physical, material, and thus, also indelibly involves building relationships. Hence, upon closer inspection, the Drosophila Karaoke Bar proves to be a laboratory of a different kind, namely, with respect to the etymological meaning of “laboratory” used in the Middle Ages, as work or a task (the Latin labor: exertion, effort, work).38 It becomes a model for how human beings, fruit flies, and machines can join forces to “co-laborate,” how 35 Birgit Schneider, Evi Zemanek, and Desiree Förster translated the concept of “sensing technologies” into German as “Spürtechniken,” which more or less means “techniques of sensing,” during the conference Spürtechniken: Von der Wahrnehmung der Natur zur Natur als Medium, University of Potsdam (24–25 May 2018). 36 Yvonne Volkart, “Near Gale: Forming a Future Organ,” in The Work of Wind: Sea, eds. Christine Shaw and Etienne Turpin (Berlin and Mississauga: K. Verlag and The Blackwood Gallery, forthcoming). 37 Regarding the notion of technology, see Jean-Luc Nancy: “Thus ‘technology’ itself is not only limited to the order of ‘technologies’ in the sense that one speaks of them today. Technology is a structuration of ends – it is a thought, a culture, or a civilization, however one wants to word it – of the indefinite construction of complexes of ends that are always more ramified, intertwined, and combined, but above all of ends that are characterized by the constant redevelopment of their own constructions.” Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Struction,” trans. Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain, Parrhesia, 17 (2013), 2. 38 Henning Schmidgen, “Labor,” EGO Europäische Geschichte Online, 2011, 5.

208

Shared Habitats they can learn from one another and collectively ensure that this event is not interrupted before it has been accomplished. This artistic-aesthetic form of generating knowledge and realization, almost ritual in its song-like quality, bursts the scientific format of the laboratory. Ursula Damm prefers to situate the setting of the installation in the studio and an exhibition context rather than in the laboratory. This reference therefore seems possible, since, on some days, her studio, in which she also lives, seems like the laboratory of a compulsive hoarder and clutterer: namely, when she breeds drosophila in her kitchen and leaves fruit lying around, stretching the tolerance of many of her human visitors to its limits. In contrast, the studio is that historically sanctioned site of artistic experimentation that, over the course of the modern era, has become detached from scientific experimentation and devalued in terms of its potential for gaining insight. Hence it seems as if the Insect Songs and the Drosophila Karaoke Bar have taken it upon themselves to suggest a search for knowledge that the sciences have not provided in this form. And indeed, Ursula Damm points out multiple times that her “singalong” integrative form of fly experiments also brought to light insights into fly research.39 For instance, she and Brüggemeier created a habitat unlike those common in laboratories and did not isolate the flies for the sound recording. Instead, they recorded the sound of a fly flying by. This subsequently led to different results, for example, merging the individual sounds of the flies generates harmonies, such as octaves, fifths, and fourths – a remarkable aesthetic phenomenon that is not documented in the sciences. Damm and Brüggemeier use special microphones so that exhibition visitors can discern the difference and the harmony in the voices of the flies. Technology also comes into play again as a possible http://ieg-ego.eu/de/threads/crossroads/wissensraeume/henning-schmidgenlabor (accessed 15 July 2020). 39 This and the following information stems from a telephone conversation between Yvonne Volkart and Ursula Damm in June 2020.

209

shared habitats media-based element of precision within a more broadly defined machinic assemblage of evolving processes. Other elements, such as, for example, extraneous or incidental noise, is not automatically filtered out but integrated. For Ursula Damm, this manner of dealing integratively with what is normally perceived or treated as waste – not only the noise but also the flies themselves, which, outside of Damm’s context, are considered undesirable and controlled – is the eco-logic needed to overcome the Wasteoscene.

The Art of Labbing If we sum everything up, then it becomes apparent that the most promising aspects in the context of laboratory art or the art of labbing are those evolving, relational, trans-species, and trans-material processes between the entities that are neglected or excluded by the sciences. As the examples clearly demonstrate, merely referring to or metaphorizing the laboratory as an innovative, transboundary site is pointless: like the artist’s studio or museum space, the laboratory is also overloaded with dispositives and norms that one cannot invalidate by means of a simple substitution. On the contrary, they continue to secretly smolder. Added to that is the fact that, since the modern era, art has defined its power of innovation through the expansion and transgression of its zones. That artists are increasingly conducting artistic research and applying methods such as fieldwork and setting up test arrangements can also simply be the timeand context-related artistic language of our day and age of transforming the world into a laboratory. Such practices are timely, but not automatically critical. What Alexandra Toland says with reference to artists who work with soil also applies to those who work with the kitchen: they never actually define themselves in the context of laboratory-friendly bio-art, because, I would add, they keep their eye on the bigger picture, the Shared Habitats. Instead of lab-oriented dividing, dissecting, and recombining, 210

shared habitats they attempt to carve out and reinforce what is already there – that is, of course, the ecological method in the discourse on trans-species coexistence, for example, when gardens or fields seem to be “inundated” by “weeds” or “snails.” As Anna Krzywoszynska and Sam Outhwaite recorded with respect to the research project they carried out in the context of agriculture, the “laboratorization of agriculture” leads to frequently invoked local actors as a possibility for the more careful cultivation of agriculture not automatically immune to the “productivist and exploitative logics of human-nature relations.”40 In the course of their fieldwork, it became apparent that farmers are increasingly insecure and lend more substance to the laboratory techniques developed by academics than to their own observations, even though those observations have resulted from years and years of working with soil on a daily basis. Interestingly enough, in their field, Krzywoszynska and Outhwaite come to the same conclusion as I have in the field of art: the dispositives have to be changed and sensing technologies used. In Krzywoszynska and Outhwaite’s words: “It demands of the locals that they cultivate a new regime of sensitivity which acknowledges and responds to the material world ... Gaian apparatuses”41 have to be developed, “apparatuses for cultivating the art of paying attention to Gaia”42 have to be tested. And they realize: “The Gaian response demands more than a democratization of science through public participation or citizen science efforts. ... In Gaian apparatuses, local knowledge actors need not only to be included, but to be furnished with a capacity to pay attention to the material world in ways which would lead to a composing with it ... .”43 What Krzywoszynska and Outhwaite say here can be transferred 40 Krzywoszynska and Outhwaite, Unsettling Soils, 5. 41 Ibid., 6. 42 Ibid., 1. 43 Ibid., 6.

211

shared habitats to the arts: only in those places where techniques take hold as sensing technologies, as techniques of learning from one another and ensuring the continuation of collective “playing” and “probing,” will the powerful dispositive of the laboratory as a site of control and wasting the world be burst open. Life can open up only in those places where, utilizing time and energy, an evolving and responding event, instead of evolution in the biotechnological or bio-art laboratory, is elaborated. And then noise will turn into sound, filth into gold, and garbage into compost. And vice versa. To frame it using the words of Marco Armiero: “[W]hile wasting relationships are based on consuming and ‘othering,’ that is, on sorting out what and who is waste, commoning practices are based on reproducing resources and communities.”44

Dr. Yvonne Volkart (*1963) lectures in art and media theory at FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, where she has led the Swiss National Science Foundation research project “Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoesthetics. The Role and Significance of New Media, Technologies and Technoscientific Methods in the Arts for the Perception and Awareness of the Ecological” (2017–2020). Her concerns lie in the modes of how aesthetics, ecology, technology, and feminism come together and bring us in relation to the world. https://www.fhnw.ch/de/personen/yvonne-volkart

44 Marco Armiero: “Welcome to the Wasteocene: Sabotaging the Anthropocene through Guerilla Narrative,” announcement Fumogeni no. 2, space 4235, 28 February 2018.

212

Shared Habitats

213

shared habitats

Drosophila Karaoke Bar Ursula Damm & Birgit Brüggemeier

Fig. 1. Birgit Brüggemeier and Andrew Pickering in front of Drosophila Karaoke Bar. Photo: Rytis Šešekaitis

The installation invites visitors to establish a direct exchange with fruit flies through a microphone of a custom-built karaoke setting. Software translates human speech and singing into the perceptual range of flies, allowing auditory feedback between the audience and the flies that live in the installation. To blend the human and fly songs, a special signal-processing vocoder was used, which was provided by the Fraunhofer Institute for integrated circuits. Neuroscientist and fly researcher Birgit Brüggemeier explains in an accompanying video the meaning of the constituent parts of a fly song. She informs listeners about the syntax and semantics of Drosophila songs, in order to give the visitors a better understanding of fly communication. The video encourages the visitors to sing and speak to the flies. A sound 214

shared habitats visualization in 3D enhances the auditory perception of the sphere of the flies with visual monitoring of fly songs on a screen: the location, amplitude, and pattern of the sound sources will help the visitors-cum-performers identify their effect on the fly behavior. A large pile of sand covers the fly habitat, its weight insulating their buzzing from the noise of humans. The massive sand pile represents the sensual and semantic gap between fly and human. Another set of headphones offers an anthropocentric view of the flies: we track the live pitch (frequencies) of our fly community, constituting courtship songs and flight sounds (differing by about one octave). Specially designed software highlights the real-time sounds by modulating them with chords. This software raises the question of whether there are more hidden patterns of communication within the fly songs than described by science thus far. The installation Drosophila Karaoke Bar tries to demonstrate the opportunities and conflicts of a shared habitat through direct interaction between two species. As a consequence, we learn to become silent and careful in order to be able to hear the voice of the Drosophila in Drosophila Karaoke Bar. The installation establishes an uncommon encounter with the creature we know from our everyday lives, but it builds on a tradition of co-habitation: fruit flies (Drosophila) are so-called “hemerophiles” (in German, Kulturfolger), meaning animals and plants that profit from the changes humans have made to their environment.1 In addition, flies are regarded as “synanthropic,” a term describing a species lingering most of its lifetime in direct proximity to humans and their immediate environments (e.g., the food industry, agriculture, treatment plants). Thus, we can say that Drosophila has established a “shared habitat” with us on its own. Many artworks translate the signals of other beings into sound 1

The concept of animals following humans and civilization was introduced by Povolny while describing urban ecosystems: Dalibor Povolny, “Einige Erwägungen über die Beziehung zwischen den Begriffen, ‘Synanthropie’ und ‘Kulturfolger,’” Contributions to Entomology 13 (1963): 431–44.

215

shared habitats

Fig. 2. Drosophila Karaoke Bar, 2018. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Ursula Damm

216

Shared Habitats

217

shared habitats

monitor for flies

Box with sand filling

Microphones

voice input

Loudspeaker for Vocoder

Sand

Fig. 3. Sketch of schematic visualization of fly sounds by Ursula Damm

Fig. 4. Drosophila Karaoke Bar, 2018. Photo: Ursula Damm

218

shared habitats

Fig. 5. Drosophila Karaoke Bar, 2018. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Ursula Damm

219

shared habitats

Fig. 6. Frequencies of flies. Photo: Rytis Šeškaitis

Fig. 7. Specially designed software enhances the real-time sounds by modulating them with previously recorded chords. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage https://vimeo.com/333591749

220

shared habitats

Fig. 8. Looking into the sound box. Photo: Ursula Damm

(sonification) and images (visualization). In this setting, visitors not only observe other beings, but communicate with Drosophila at eye (and ear) level. The artwork offers a shared practice in a direct feedback situation to facilitate a novel sensual experience. It focuses on Drosophila’s proper means of expression: What kinds of signals are they sending to their surroundings? How are they communicating? How does it sound when they are approaching their comrades? Do they want to negotiate? What are the common windows of perception? The work respects the language of the flies and thus circumvents an anthropocentric world-view of modern times. Moholy-Nagy, with his “sensual turn,” placed emphasis on aesthetic experiences: “It is the artist’s duty today to penetrate yet-unseen ranges of the biological functions, to search the new dimensions of the industrial

221

shared habitats society and to translate the new findings into emotional orientation.”2 Shared Habitats aims to detect, amplify, and unfold any creature’s means of expression. Instead of interpreting and describing our environment and the organisms living in it, and describing their behavior with our words and artifacts, the exhibition wants to immerse the visitors in a shared aesthetic activity. In the case of Drosophila Karaoke Bar, the voice of the spectator is a disruptive factor in the setting; the human voice makes it more difficult to perceive the fly song. This rupture marks the transition between the umwelt of a fly and the umwelt of a human. Technically, the volume of the human voice disturbs the sonic sphere of the flies. The setting, however, allows one to experience how much respect and technology is needed to mingle humans and flies in a shared umwelt.

2

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1947), 11.

This project was kindly supported by the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, the MO Museum in Vilnius, and the Goethe Institute in Taiwan.

Birgit Brüggemeier (*1989) is a multidisciplinary researcher with an interest in communication and a passion for measuring elusive phenomena. She studied communication, linguistics, psychology, and mathematics, and graduated with a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Oxford. During her PhD research, Brüggemeier studied the elusive courtship song of fruit flies. She currently leads a team on human-computer interaction at the Fraunhofer Institute. She has won a number of research and professional awards, including grants from the Wellcome Trust, the Fraunhofer Institute, and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.

222

shared habitats

223

shared habitats

Six Sidekicks for Free Rico Graupner

Fig. 1. Rico Graupner, Six Sidekicks for Free, 2017. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Florian Voggeneder

The installation Six Sidekicks for Free (2017), by Rico Graupner, experiments with potential relations between a somewhat chaotic biological system and sound. It explores the space between natural soundscapes and intentional methods of composition. A playground is offered between randomness and determinacy, where different questions about human perception and evaluation of the originality of acoustic phenomena are posed.

224

shared habitats

Fig. 2. Rico Graupner, Six Sidekicks for Free, 2017. Installation view at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Rytis Šeškaitis

The installation presents an automaton, consisting of weevils (Acanthoscelides obtectus) in a formicarium, sensors, various loudspeakers, and custom-made software, which, as a whole, result in a sort of audio microscope and aleatoric sound machine. Six Sidekicks for Free samples sounds from insects and their environment; thus, the soundscape of their habitat is enlarged and transferred to ours. Additionally, by coupling their motion patterns with musical parameters, the software offers a number of automated options for controlling various signal processors that alter the acoustic space. In this scenario, the insects act as composers as well as musicians who create and modulate their musical piece in real-time. 225

shared habitats

Fig. 3. Rico Graupner, Six Sidekicks for Free, 2017. Installation view at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Rytis Šeškaitis

Fig. 4. Insects in the terrarium of Six Sidekicks for Free, 2017. Installation view at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Rytis Šešekaitis

226

Shared Habitats

Fig. 5. Rico Graupner, Six Sidekicks for Free, 2017. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

Rico Graupner (*1976) is currently working toward his PhD at Bauhaus University in Weimar. He studied fine art with a special focus on acoustic art and algorithmic composition. His main interest lies in the investigation of the perception of sound and the exploration of possible relationships between biological systems and sound composition.

227

shared habitats

228

Shared Habitats

Algorithm Zoo4 “Miške” Rico Graupner

Fig. 1. Rico Graupner performing ^ lgorithmZoo Pt. 5. : KTV session at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

This concert combines electroacoustic composition and live improvisation. The main area of interest is the interaction between insects (Acanthoscelides obtectus), musicians, and custom-made real-time composition software called the “Input-controlled Composition Environment” (IcCE). In response to real-time input from the insects, a human operator dynamically decides which musical parameter should be influenced by which of the data streams. At the same time, they conduct and deter229

shared habitats

Fig. 2. Performance of ^ lgorithmZoo Pt. 5. : KTV at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Vog.Photo

mine when and with which degree of freedom the live musicians should interact. Using this methodology, the musicians are led through a guided improvisation. The concert is played on a multi-channel speaker system.

230

Shared Habitats

231

shared habitats

Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms Theresa Schubert

Fig. 1. Theresa Schubert, Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms, 2015–2016. Installation view at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Rytis Šeškaitis

Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms (2015–2018), by Theresa Schubert, is an installation consisting of living mushrooms, videos, photographs, and drawings. The project explores the morphology of fungi and evolution of geometrical shapes on living and growing membranes and ultimately how aesthetic representations can be generated by nature. As part of Schubert’s PhD research on agency in biomedia art, human and nonhuman relationships are investigated as well as how processes inscribed into biological organisms can create creative output while allowing for the biological unknown. Via a performative intervention, Schubert tattooed geometrical shapes onto self-cultivated fungus membranes. The lines embedded into these growing organisms became transformed by continuous growth. This is a way of using “natural computation” for the 232

Shared Habitats

Fig. 2. Theresa Schubert, Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms, 2015–2016. Installation view at Zebrastraat, Ghent, 2016. Photo: Theresa Schubert

self-organization of images. The fungus is, therefore, not only the artist’s canvas, but also an artist itself. Time-lapse images taken during the growth cycle form the basis for an animation, which shows the changing tattoos as white lines against a black background. By reducing it to the essence, poetic topographies of slowly changing forms develop. Ultimately, the tattoos are rooted in the tradition of Bauhaus itself, with its school of simplicity and the basic geometrical forms of the circle, the square, and the triangle, as well as the basic colors red, green, and blue. Furthermore, this project is the biological answer to generative 233

shared habitats

Fig. 3. Theresa Schubert, Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms, 2015–2016. Installation view at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Rytis Šeškaitis

and algorithmic design methods where images are created digitally and the potentials of simulations are only limited by the imagination of the creator. The deeply anthropocentric gesture of tattooing brings the fungi closer to mankind and helps to translate a growth process into an aesthetic experience.

234

Shared Habitats Fig. 4. Tattooed geometrical shape on self-cultivated fungus membrane in Theresa Schubert’s Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms, 2015–2016. Photo: Theresa Schubert

Fig. 5. Tattooed mushrooms in Theresa Schubert’s Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms, 2015–2016. Photo: Theresa Schubert

235

shared habitats

Fig. 6. Tattooed mushrooms in Theresa Schubert’s Growing Geometries – Tattooing Mushrooms, 2015–2016. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

Fig. 7. Animation still

236

Shared Habitats

Fig. 9. Drawing of tattooed mushroom by Theresa Schubert

237

shared habitats

Fig. 8. Theresa Schubert tattooing during the opening of the exhibition The New State of the Living at Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, Perm, Russia, 2018

Theresa Schubert (*1983) is an artist exploring unconventional visions of nature, technology, and the self. She received a PhD in media art from Bauhaus University, Weimar, where she was appointed as a visiting professor in 2019. Her work combines audiovisual and biomedia with conceptual and immersive installations and performances. She critically examines the relationship between humans and their environment and the emergence of matter and meaning beyond the anthropos. http://www.theresaschubert.com

238

Shared Habitats

239

shared habitats

Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics Mindaugas Gapševičius

Fig. 1. Mindaugas Gapševičius, Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics, 2016–2019. Installation view at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Brigita Kasperaitė

This project unfolds as a set of toolkits, which provide a framework for the interdisciplinary experiments on a DIY level and makes the project accessible to a broader community. While quoting artworks, technology, and science, further questions arise, ranging from abstract, philosophical examinations of creativity and authorship to global concerns about what forces dictate the organization of humanity and determine our future as a society. 240

shared habitats Featured are four toolkits, which include video tutorials and manuals. While the toolkit “My Collaboration with Bacteria for Paper Production” focusses on symbiotic relationships between living organisms and non-living things, the “Mycorrhizal Networks or How I Hack Plant Conversations” gives an idea of interaction between elements of different kinds. Meanwhile, the toolkit “Ultra-Low-Voltage Survival Kit” explores the nature of the electrical signal, and the toolkit “How I Prepare Myself to Be Cloned” questions the possibility of cloning one’s own body. Although the toolkits themselves were designed as aesthetic objects, they also include experimental settings that vary depending on who uses the toolkit, in what context, and when. So, for example, the toolkit “Mycorrhizal Networks or How I Hack Plant Conversations”1 may be used with different plants, fungi, or even humans, because all organisms are of a similar nature. The tools provided in the toolkit can enable much broader experimentation than what is introduced in the video tutorial and manual. For example, the outcome presented in the video tutorial is a performance with Martin Howse in the woods of Brandenburg, whereas Bon Alog, during the workshop at the MO museum in Vilnius, came up with an idea of the combined use of a Faraday cage and a toolkit for experiencing plants in an isolated setting.2 Another toolkit, called “My Collaboration With Bacteria for Paper Production,”3 focuses on the isolation of Acetobacter bacteria and the growth of a SCOBY. Here, the video tutorial provides a time-lapse animation on the interaction of two diverse bacterial colonies. However, the next time the toolkit is used could unfold

1

For more information, see http://triple-double-u.com/mycorrhizal-networks-or-how-i-hack-plant-conversations/ (Accessed 21 March 2020).

2

For more information, see http://triple-double-u.com/case-4-radio-myceliumhow-i-hack-plant-conversations/ (accessed 12 June 2020).

3

For more information, see http://triple-double-u.com/my-collaboration-withbacteria-for-paper-production/ (accessed 21 March 2020).

241

shared habitats

Fig. 2. Toolkits from Mindaugas Gapševičius’s Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics, 2016–2019. Photo: Brigita Kasperaitė

Fig. 3. “Mycorrhizal Networks or How I Hack Plant Conversations” toolkit. Photo: Brigita Kasperaitė

242

shared habitats as artistic research on the impact of bacterial colonies on the human microbiome.4 The toolkits could also be used for educational purposes, for instance, in the classroom, or for collaborative experience, such as in DIWO events.

Fig. 4. Exploring “My Collaboration with Bacteria for Paper Production” toolkit at Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig, 2017. Photo: Mindaugas Gapševičius

4

See the essay “Art and Experiencing with Others,” by Mindaugas Gapševičius, in the first chapter of this book.

243

shared habitats

Fig. 4. Mindaugas Gapševičius, “Ultra-Low-Voltage Survival Kit #2” toolkit. Photo: Mindaugas Gapševičius

Fig. 5. Lighting up an LED from the “Ultra-Low-Voltage Survival Kit #2” toolkit with energy generated by the human body, video still

244

Shared Habitats

Fig. 5. Exploring “Mycorrhizal Networks or How I Hack Plant Conversations” toolkit at Galerie EIGENHEIM, Berlin, 2019. Photo: Mindaugas Gapševičius

This project was generously supported by the Nordic Culture Point and by the Lithuanian Council for Culture. It was executed in collaboration with many organizations and festivals, including Bauhaus University in Weimar, Institutio Media and the MO Museum in Vilnius, and Piksel Festival in Bergen. Main contributors include Brigita Kasperaitė, Auksė Gaižauskaitė, Martin Howse, and Wolfgang Spahn, among other collaborators, including dozens of participants.

245

shared habitats

246

shared habitats

Self-Repair Lab Mindaugas Gapševičius

Fig. 1. “SCOBY, Shit, and Humus” workshop at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Alanas Gurinas

Self-Repair Lab (2017–2019) is an artistic installation and a collaborative framework for biological, chemical, and geological experimentation. The installation resembles a DIY biological experiment laboratory, where artworks, lab equipment, people, and events are brought together in order to understand and to reflect on self-organization of the ecosystem, human-machine interaction, and contemporary discourses. What could one do with the knowledge gained in collaboration with artists, scientists, and engineers? How could one “produce” new meanings in a collaborative setting? Self-Repair Lab is also about acquiring knowledge and seeking answers while making things. Having no access to a science laboratory or 247

shared habitats scientists, but having access to kitchen tools and the Internet, one could aspire to knowledge, which could help in solving tasks, especially those related to one’s health and the ecosystem. How would that work, and what would be the role of the artist in such a framework? In the article “A Shift in the Role of an Artist,”1 Gapševičius tries to deconstruct the role of the artist in a workshop setting. Providing two examples, Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab, led by Marc Dusseiller, along with Gapševičius’s own artwork, Proposal for Microbial Therapy, the author suggests that the leaders of the workshop are mediators between scientific knowledge, technologies, and artistic ideas. Hence, the artwork in the workshop setting is never the same; it depends on the participants (or the audience), who, while sharing their ideas and knowledge, influence the artwork itself. The same can be said for Self-Repair Lab: the leader in

Fig. 2. “SCOBY, Shit, and Humus” workshop results. Animation by Akvilė Paukštytė, 2019

1

See article, p. 294.

248

Shared Habitats the setting, who could also be another artist or scientist and not necessarily Gapševičius himself, performs the role of a mediator and, while providing their specific knowledge, activates the audience. Referring to the idea of Self-Repair, Gapševičius suggests the importance of understanding how humans are influenced by the environment and how they influence the environment. There are also other questions that arise, such as: How far can one experiment with one’s own body? Or, to whom do parts of one’s body belong if they are detached from said body? To put it simply, “self-repair” relates strongly to the adaptability required to live in a changing environment: when humans talk about evolution, they say that life has survived due to its ability to adapt to changing conditions (for example, Lynn Margulis’s theory of evolution). While the aim of “self-repair” is to adapt to present conditions, there is a need to reflect on developing technologies, scientific discoveries, and the changing understanding of humans as beings.

Fig. 3. “Lactose-Intolerance DNA Portraits” workshop results. Slide show by Paulius Baranauskas, 2019

249

shared habitats

Fig. 4. “I, Machine, and Energy Harvesting” workshop results. Notation by Tatjana Frenkel, 2019

Fig. 5. “Radio Mycelium or How I Hack Plant Conversations” workshop results. Video stills by Paula Julija, 2019

250

Shared Habitats

251

shared habitats

Other Encounters

252

Shared Habitats

253

shared habitats

Close Encounter Jan Georg Glöckner

Fig. 1. Jan Georg Glöckner, Close Encounter, 2019. Installation view at the MO Museum, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Rytis Šeškaitis

254

Other Encounters The installation Close Encounter (2018–2019) attracts its audience with a big glass bioreactor. In this 90-liter bioreactor resides the fungus Armillaria spp., and the nutritious solution and the sterile air is circulated to sustain its vital functions. During the initial 2.5-month growth phase at the MO Museum in Vilnius, ping-pong-ball-sized spheres emerged. At the end of the Vilnius phase, they agglutinated into a more compact form. During the trip from Vilnius to Ars Electronica, the fungus contracted its body and became more dense. In Linz, the fungus was strong enough to swim in non-sterile liquid. It shrouded itself in the reactor by releasing metabolites to create an exclusive environment for itself. After the multiple trips, it was released back to where it was displaced from. This work makes it possible for the audience to encounter fungus while changing the perspective of the human relationship with nonhumans. To the question, “What is the mushroom doing?” the reply from the artist would be, “Nothing! It does not need to produce or do anything. It is alive.”

255

shared habitats

Fig. 2. Jan Georg Glöckner, Close Encounter, 2019. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

Fig. 3. Jan Georg Glöckner, Close Encounter, detail, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

256

Other Encounters

This installation was developed in collaboration with Janis Liepins (PhD), a researcher at the Institute for Microbiology and Biotechnology at the University of Latvia, Rīga. Scientific consultants include: Diana Meiere and Inita Daniele from the Latvian Museum of Natural History, Dr. Tālis Gaitnieks and Dr. Natālija Burņeviča from the Latvian State Forest Research Institute “Silava.”

Jan Georg Glöckner (*1985) studied visual communication, fine art, and media art at the Kunsthochschule in Kassel, the Estonian Art Academy in Tallinn, and Bauhaus University in Weimar. Questioning opinions and changing perspectives is vital in his practice and is the underlying principle that drives his research. He investigates nonhuman-human collaborations in active and historical practices. http://www.jan-gloeckner.com

257

shared habitats

258

Other Encounters

The Poetic Design: From Mimesis to Catharsis Homero Ruiz García

Fig. 1. Homero Ruiz García, The Poetic Design: From Mimesis to Catharsis, 2019. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

The installation The Poetic Design: From Mimesis to Catharsis, by Homero Ruiz Garcia, features drawings and a book that, according to the author, explore visual poetry by taking up the foundations of Greek aesthetic philosophy through its four main stratum elements: mimesis, poiesis, apate (aesthetic illusion), and catharsis. While the installation shows illustrations, the book contains a collection of different diagrams, methodologies, 259

shared habitats

Fig. 2. Homero Ruiz García, Axolotls Regeneration, 2019

illustrations, personal thoughts, visual metaphors inspired by nature, and nature’s approximations from a contemporary Latin-American perspective. The book also speculates on how non-artificial-entities (organic or non-organic) have been created. Ruiz Garcia’s drawings are the result of visual poetry generated by the alteration of meanings in materiality by melting discourses into the physical elements. The creative process itself unfolds with the use of metaphors, affordances, systems, visual poetry, and design methods. 260

Other Encounters

Fig. 3. The first page of Homero Ruiz García’s book The Natural Process of Creation, 2019. Photo: Homero Ruiz García

Fig. 4. A spread introducing the work Tracing frame 7/30 in Homero Ruiz García’s book The Natural Process of Creation, 2019. Photo: Sam Abell

261

shared habitats

Homero Ruiz García (*1990) is an artist/designer based in Monterrey, Mexico. He integrates conceptual, technical, and philosophical skills in the areas of design and the arts. His master’s thesis was developed at Bauhaus University, Weimar, in poetic design (2019). Currently, he is a junior professor at the School of Architecture, Art and Design of the Tec de Monterrey, where he develops and supervises projects related to artistic research, ceramics, visual communication, philosophy of design, and other creative areas.

262

Other Encounters

263

shared habitats

Probing the Planthroposcene Alexandra Toland The installation Probing the Planthroposcene (2019) displays a video essay with the same title and two drawings – Assets: Alyssum murale and Liabilities: Ambrosia artemisiifolia – which all together discuss opposing economic narratives as two sides of the same impossible coin. On the one hand, the phyto-mining potentials of hyperaccumulators are presented as agricultural “assets” that can convert heavy-metal burdened land into fertile ground to be cultivated. On the other hand, a highly allergenic neophyte is presented as a “liability” to conservation efforts. One plant a benefit to society, the other an uncontrollable pest that costs governments precious funding resources to keep at bay each year. To categorize certain species as assets or liabilities, services or disservices, is, however, to reduce the plant world to an economic foil of our own making. Inspired by the work of anthropologist Natascha Meyers, the video essay reframes the concept of ecosystem services as a cooperative pact of care involving labor on multiple sides – a shift from exploitation to reciprocity. The Planthroposcene, according to Meyers,1 is a call to change the terms of encounter, “to make allies with green beings.” With such alliances, Toland aims to transform the economic paradigm of ecosystem services into a multispecies, plant-based economy. With the installation, Toland refers to the Western postmodern transition from manufacturing societies to service societies over the last half a century, which has demanded a thorough restructuring of labor and a re-conceptualization of goods. While capitalist societies have always extracted natural goods for profit, the explicit extraction of services from 1

Natascha Meyers, “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/People Involution,” History and Anthropology 28, 30 (2017): 297–301.

264

Other Encounters

Fig. 1. Alexandra Toland, Probing the Planthroposcene, 2019. Installation view at the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, 2019. Photo: Silke kleine Kalvelage

non-human entities is relatively new. Under this conceptualization, not only what plants are, or what materials they are made of, but also what they do can now be calculated in terms of services that benefit humans. In urban and industrial areas, for example, the shading and cooling actions of trees and bushes function as living air conditioners to offset negative effects of the urban heat island phenomenon. Like invisible housekeepers of the Anthropocene, plants also filter particulate matter (PM) by “brush265

shared habitats ing” the air with their leaves and petals, and “sucking” up heavy metals from the soil and storing them in their tissues. These special abilities are described by ecologists and policy-makers as Ecosystem Services (ESS), a Western economic approach to the valuation of nature. Introduced by the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) in 1989 and popularized by the UN Global Biodiversity Assessment in 1993, ESS has been instrumentalized in emissions trading schemes, biodiversity banking, and other “payment for ecosystem services” (PES) programs. The outgoing question of this work is, how do plants benefit from this way of thinking? And is an equivalent “human services” program to benefit ecosystems imaginable? Alyssum murale is at home in nickel-rich ultramafic soils in southeast Europe, but can be “employed” elsewhere to take up heavy metals from mining areas, degraded agricultural fields, or along roadsides. Biomass is dried and burned to extract a concentrated bio-ore that can be used again in industry – a non-edible crop of the Anthropocene. Historically, one of the main uses for nickel has been as an alloy in coins. Batteries, medical devices, pigments, and other manufacturing and process engineering needs all depend on nickel ore. The mineralized “coinage” must simply be transformed from its soil-bound state.

Fig. 2. Alexandra Toland, Botanomics – Towards a Plant-Based Economy for the Common Good, video still, 2019

266

Other Encounters

Fig. 3. Alexandra Toland, etching of a digital cliché made out of historical illustrations, engraved with hand-pulverized street dust and shell gold, 2019

In Greek mythology, ambrosia was the food of the gods. In urban ecology, Ambrosia artemisiifolia is the poster child for ecosystem disservices. Highly allergenic, ragweed has been widely spread by humans in bird food mixtures, and is pollinated by wind and insects from June to October. It has created so much discomfort for allergy sufferers that there are multiple eradication programs in Germany to control its 267

shared habitats further spread. Like all other flowering plants, ragweed also performs beneficial services, such as the stabilization of soil, provision of food and shelter to insects, and cooling the ground from direct sunlight.

Fig. 4. Alexandra Toland, Botanomics – Towards a Plant-Based Economy for the Common Good, video still, 2019 Fig. 5. Alexandra Toland, etching of a digital cliché made out of historical illustrations, engraved with hand-pulverized street dust and shell gold, 2019

268

Other Encounters

This project was funded in part by the Kreativfonds of Bauhaus University, Weimar. Thanks to Marie-Odile Simonnot, Baptiste Laubie, Ramez Saad & Jean Louis Morel (University of Lorraine; ECONICK) for images and information regarding the agromining of Alyssum murale. Thanks to Uwe Starfinger (Julius Kühn-Institut), Annette Scharmann (Land Berlin), and Birgit Seitz (TU-Berlin) for information regarding control measures for Ambrosia artemisiifolia.

Alexandra Toland (*1975) is a visual artist and environmental planner with research interests in ecosystem services, urban ecology, soil and culture, multi-species relationships, and the Anthropocene. She is Junior Professor for Arts and Research at Bauhaus University, Weimar, where she directs the PhD program in Art and Design. She has published widely on the topic of soil and art in scientific book publications and journals, including most recently the co-edited book publication Field to Palette – Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene (CRC Press, 2018).

269

shared habitats

270

Other Encounters

Other Minds: Ruyer, Damasio, and Malabou Audrone Žukauskaite •

•

The recent predicament of the posthuman condition urges us to rethink our relationship with nonhuman others and their environments. After the overthrow of anthropocentrism and humanism, posthumanist critical theory not only takes into account nonhuman animals (other species) but also urges us to redefine the notion of consciousness, previously allocated only to human animals. On the one hand, the neurosciences have discovered that a significant part of cerebral activity takes place in our bodies without our conscious intervention; on the other hand, many biologists have observed that nonhuman animals express some kind of conscious behavior, which proves that they are sentient beings. For example, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher and diver, after many years of observations and interactions with octopuses on the coast near Sydney, came to the conclusion that octopuses are sentient beings and have subjective experiences of their own. In his book Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (2016), he argues that cephalopods (which include octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid) can be regarded as an independent experiment in the path of evolution, because they possess large brains that are completely different from ours. The common octopus has about 500 million neurons in its body; humans have many more – about 100 billion. But the question here is not about measuring or counting – there is no single pattern or scale to measure intelligence. Rather, it is a question of a different design, a different kind of relationship between the brain and the body. If human intelligence is defined according to the brain and body divide, presuming that the brain contains intelligence and cognition while the body is submitted to its control, the octopus presents a different pattern of embodied brain. As Godfrey-Smith points out, “much of a cephalopod’s nervous system is not found within the brain at all, but spread throughout the body. In an octopus, the majority of neurons are in the 271

shared habitats arms themselves – nearly twice as many as in the central brain.”1 This leads to the conclusion that, in an octopus, we find a very different design of the brain, one that is decentralized. Cephalopods present an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains, in other words, “evolution built minds twice over,”2 first as cephalopods and second as human brains. This insight not only helps to deconstruct anthropocentric exceptionalism but also allows us to rethink the brain and body divide. The example of an octopus as an embodied cognition can be applied not only to octopuses but also to human animals: “Our body itself, rather than our brain, is responsible for some of the ‘smartness’ with which we handle the world. Our body’s own structure encodes some information about the environment and how we must deal with it, so not all this information needs to be stored in the brain.”3 In this sense, we can argue that the brain and body divide is much more complicated than it is presented in metaphysical philosophy. With this complication in mind, I want to reconsider two different theories: first, Raymond Ruyer’s idea that consciousness and mind can be attributed not only to humans but also to other organisms; second, Catherine Malabou’s idea that human consciousness cannot register all processes that take place in our bodies because they are non-conscious and operate automatically. For example, an organism can regulate its level of sugar automatically, and our consciousness is “blind” in regard to this process. In this sense we can conceptualize the existence of “other minds,” which can be imagined either as an organic consciousness characteristic to all living organisms, or as a “cerebral unconscious,” which informs the human brain about continuous organic activity taking place in our organisms. 1

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (London: William Collins, 2016), 67.

2

Ibid., 9.

3

Ibid., 74.

272

Other Encounters

Raymond Ruyer: Organic Consciousness The first idea can be traced to philosopher of biology Raymond Ruyer, who elaborated an original theory of organic, or primary, consciousness in Neofinalism (1952/2016) and The Genesis of Living Forms (1958/2020). Ruyer argues that there are different kinds or forms of consciousness that are dialectically interrelated, and which he designates as Form I, Form II, and Form III. Form I is the characteristic of all material entities at the scale of the molecule that is defined by self-relation and self-enjoyment. Form II is characteristic of all entities with motor schema, which leads to becoming a perceptive or schematizing consciousness of humans and animals. Finally, there is Form III, which appears exclusively as human consciousness, thanks to the techniques of language and symbolism. What is important for Ruyer is that these three types of forms are derived from each other and that Form I, or organic consciousness, is fundamental to the other two: “The three types are distinct, but each is united with the one preceding it.”4 This continuity between organic consciousness and perceptive and psychological consciousness is also supported by biologists and psychologists: physiological phenomena taking place in the organism and specific psychological phenomena are interrelated in internal and external circuits. However, some important differences occur between Form I and Form II. Ruyer describes Form I as a “consciousness of transformation”: For example, a hormone exercises a chemical action on the relevant tissue and deforms or transforms it in a certain manner. Thus, Form I has the potential for qualitative change and internal transformation. Besides that, the organism is not only in possession of itself, but also in relation to its vital domain: for example, an animal organizes its domain as a den, a burrow, hunting terrain or a terrain of refuge.5 Following Jacob von 4

Raymond Ruyer, The Genesis of Living Forms, trans. Jon Roffe and Nicholas B. de Weydenthal (London, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), 150.

5

Ibid., 154.

273

shared habitats Uexküll, Ruyer argues that an animal has at its disposal not the whole of the objective space but a piece of a subjective space and time (Umwelt). The constitution of a subjective milieu characterizes Form II, or higher animals, and marks the emergence of perceptual consciousness. Here, we have not an internal transformation, but a differentiation between the organic body and its vital domain, or between the interior and exterior. This differentiation carries certain information between the organic form (an organism) and extra-organic form (a territory): it is as if the organic form of the body is projected onto a much broader screen of a vital milieu. A spider and its web, or bees and their directing dances, transmit certain information of how the animal perceives and manages the surrounding milieu. This is why Form II is not a consciousness of transformation but a consciousness of information.6 In its turn, Form II produces Form III, which is human consciousness, mediated by the techniques of language and symbolism. A signal or an index, which guides an animal life, now becomes a symbol that can be detached from a vital domain. Vocal gestures become words, emotional gestures become ritual gestures, the expressivity of perceived forms become the free creation of artistic forms. Thus, symbolization allows the possibility of detaching consciousness from a primary organic form and its vital domain. As Roffe points out, “Whereas transformation allows for no gap at all in the encounter of a Form I being with its environment, and information only gives rise to an internal differentiation of the Form II being, symbolisation at once projects the primary activity of the being into the world and separates it from the need – in the social(ised) part of the environment – for unrestricted direct engagement.”7 In other words, the passage from Form I to Form III can be seen as an extension or exter-

6

Ibid.

7

Jon Roffe, “Form IV: From Ruyer’s Psychobiology to Deleuze and Guattari’s Socius,” Deleuze Studies, 11, no. 4 (2017): 587.

274

Other Encounters nalization of morphogenetic themes, which is followed by the increasing control of space and time. However, it is important to stress that, for Ruyer, both perceptual and psychological consciousness is derived from primary organic consciousness: “forms II and III are only connected up with the themes because they are particular cases of Form I. The human is only conscious, intelligent and inventive because all living individuality is conscious, intelligent and inventive. […] This is to simply forget that the human brain which invents itself is first of all only an organic tissue, a network of cells, and that every human and social deployment of invention is only auxiliary and accessory.”8 Our brain has the capacity of perception and cognition only because it is made of organic tissue and possesses the characteristics of primary consciousness. One of the basic characteristics of primary consciousness is the capacity for self-survey, which means that consciousness has immediate contact with itself without mediation or objectification. In a conventional or phenomenological sense, consciousness is consciousness of something (of an object or of another consciousness), whereas, for Ruyer, consciousness is in direct contact with itself and is in no need of another consciousness. In other words, primary consciousness knows itself without making itself an object of intentionality or observation. According to Ruyer, all false analyses of consciousness observe it as an object taking place in geometrical Cartesian space. By contrast, Ruyer wants to examine visual sensation as a state of consciousness that does not obey the laws of geometry. As Ruyer points out, the Cartesian approach explains perception as being geometrical, quantitative (or divisible), and dimensional, because it always needs one more dimension (n+1) to be proven. The Cartesian perception resembles the “mythical” third eye, used in photography and cinematography, which “observes” the interaction between the perceiving subject and a perceived object. By contrast, Ruyer argues that our perception is indivisible

8

Ruyer, The Genesis of Living Forms, 171.

275

shared habitats and in no need of any supplementary dimension (n+1, or the third eye). For Ruyer, when we perceive the object, the perception, consciousness, and the perceived object merge into one sensation of self-survey, without division or separation. According to Ruyer, “My visual field necessarily sees itself through an ‘absolute’ or ‘non-dimensional survey.’ It surveys itself without positioning itself at a distance and in a perpendicular dimension. It is therefore a gross error to imagine the visual field in the occipital area as a kind of photograph, or as those cinematographic montages in which a three-dimensional scene suddenly becomes an album page that begins to turn before us on the screen.”9 Thus, by absolute survey Ruyer means that visual perception is not a perception of an external object but an intensive sensation that takes place inside the organism. If external vision is based on the extensive qualities of composites and its parts (partes extra partes), which can be divided, measured, and so on, visual sensation is indivisible. It is a unity of forces, a structuring activity. In this respect, Ruyer challenges Husserlian phenomenology, based on the assumption that there is a division between a perceiving subject and a perceived object. For Ruyer, consciousness is described by this capacity of self-survey and self-proximity, and it does not need any external stimuli or perception. Consciousness is defined by this “inner cinematography,” which has no external observers: “The fundamental paradox, which is the origin of all the others, is that a domain of primary consciousness is in ‘absolute survey’ – that is to say without any need of an external scanning – that it possesses a kind of autovision without gaze. […] It is very difficult to admit that a protoplasm, a molecular edifice, an embryo, an organic tissue or a cortex, are conscious of themselves (possess their own form) before becoming, by added modulation, conscious of the form of other beings,

9

Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism, trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 97.

276

Other Encounters and without being obliged to pass by this detour.”10 This autovision without a gaze does not provide visual perception in the Cartesian sense, but it implies a visual sensation that occupies primary consciousness without a distance. This means that living beings not only have the dynamic potential for change but are also capable of being in touch with all these changes, of following them in self-survey. In this respect, self-survey presents a certain kind of auto-affectivity, which is characteristic not only of human consciousness but also of any organism that is capable of auto-vision and self-survey. As Ruyer points out, “why couldn’t the protozoan ‘see’ itself directly just as much as our cortical tissue? The protozoan has neither eyes nor mirror; but neither does our cortex have an eye or a mirror to see what the eyes have already brought it.”11 Nevertheless, the protozoan is capable of this auto-vision, just as our organism is capable of self-survey in case it has to detect and compensate for cellular damage. Ruyer concludes that “there is at bottom only a single mode of consciousness: primary consciousness, form-in-itself of every organism and at one with life.”12 Secondary cerebral or perceptual consciousness gives us external objects, but they do not represent the essential content of consciousness or life. At first, consciousness is in immediate contact with itself: it knows itself through self-survey, and only afterwards cerebral consciousness perceives the objects of the external world. This attempt to dissociate consciousness from human perception and cognition is the most radical statement in Ruyer’s work. For Ruyer, it is an organic form, possessing the capacity of equipotentiality and

10 Raymond Ruyer, Paradoxes de la conscience et limites de l’automatisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1966), 167; cited in Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 224. 11 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 97. 12 Ibid., 98.

277

shared habitats self-survey, that is the primary and real consciousness. All other organic forms, including perceptual and psychological consciousness, are only added to primary consciousness. As Ruyer points out, “If we want to grasp the facts, we have to become used to dissociating consciousness and brain and to associating consciousness and organic form. The brain is not an instrument for becoming conscious, intelligent, inventive, or reminiscent. Consciousness, intelligence, invention, memory, and active finality are tied to the organic form in general. The brain’s ‘superiority’ or its distinctive character is that it is an incomplete organ, an always-open network, which thus retains equipotentiality, the active embryonic consciousness, and applies it to the organization of the world.”13 Ruyer’s insights into organic finalist activity change not only our understanding of the brain and consciousness, but also the definition of subjectivity. If consciousness is defined not by someone’s capacity to perceive the world or itself as an external object but by immediate self-survey and self-enjoyment, then the notion of subjectivity could be dramatically extended. What is important to understand here is that the capacity of self-survey is itself a kind of auto-affectivity, a microbrain that is in no need of a brain behind the brain or subject behind the subject. As Grosz points out, it is consciousness without a “subject-individual who would be the proprietor of the consciousness.”14 In this sense, primary consciousness can be named as a kind of “subjectless subjectivity,”15 which embraces not only human, but all living beings, capable of self-enjoyment

13 Ibid., 75. 14 Elizabeth Grosz, “Deleuze, Ruyer and Becoming-Brain: The Music of Life’s Temporality,” Parrhesia, no. 15 (2012), 6. 15 Paul Bains, “Subjectless Subjectivities,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), 101-116.

278

Other Encounters and self-survey. Human consciousness thus appears to be not the highest form of organization but a transition phase in the organic continuum. As Bogue points out, “Ruyer’s object is not to attribute all aspects of human consciousness to other living forms, but instead to situate human consciousness within a continuum of living forms from atoms to humans […].”16 In this sense, every living being is seen as an active form, capable of self-formative activity. However, it is important to note that Ruyer is not trying to entitle human consciousness to all living beings and is aware of the “risk of naïve anthropocentrism”: the researcher’s aim is “instead to seek what is schematically common to the molecule, the organism, and consciousness. In all these cases, the common schema is a domain of absolute survey and activity.”17 In other words, what defines consciousness is a special kind of connection, a dynamic activity, that has the power of self-survey and qualitative change. Ruyer asserts that the human brain has no monopoly over consciousness, learning, or the acquisitions of habit, but rather is immersed in the general activity of any living being: “If the brain is an instrument of finalist activity, then by definition the ontogenesis that constitutes this instrument has to be a finalist activity, one that can do without the brain.”18 Ruyer is arguing that every organism or living being is guided by its own finalist activity, and only on some occasions can this activity be appropriated by the human brain. The brain has no priority of possessing consciousness or finalist activity; by contrast, the brain possesses consciousness only to the extent that it is an organic living tissue.

16 Ronald Bogue, “The Force that Is but Does Not Act: Ruyer, Leibniz and Deleuze,” Deleuze Studies, 11, no. 4 (2017), 522. 17 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 162. 18 Ibid., 38.

279

shared habitats

Catherine Malabou: Cerebral Unconscious Another idea that I want to elaborate is the relationship between nonconscious cerebral activity and conscious subjectivity. This relationship between the cerebral and the mental is elaborated in Catherine Malabou’s work19 with the help of the notion of “plasticity.” Plasticity refers to the qualitative change that takes place both at the level of cells (cell plasticity) and the brain (neuroplasticity), and that can be either creative or destructive. It is destructive plasticity that is the most interesting for neurological and philosophical investigations because it reveals the rupture between the cerebral and the mental, or between cerebral auto-affection and mental auto-affection. In these cases, we discover something that Malabou names as the “cerebral unconscious” – cerebral activity without consciousness. These discoveries open a gap between the brain and the mind, or between the biological and the logical origin of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari already started questioning the central role of the brain and described it as an interaction between an inside and an outside. In a similar tone, Malabou argues that instead of being seen as a proprietor of the brain, the subject is defined by their neuronal activity. Malabou elaborates her theory of plasticity by referring to and also opposing the neurosciences, and especially the works of Antonio Damasio. Damasio is a strong proponent of a univocity of life, asserting the continuity between different levels of organic organization. In his latest book, The Strange Order of Things (2018), Damasio asserts that all living beings, from unicellular organisms to complex organisms with a central nervous

19 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

280

Other Encounters system, follow the fundamental principle of homeostasis: “Homeostasis is the powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative, whose discharge implies, for every living organism, small or large, nothing less than enduring and prevailing.”20 Both un-minded bacteria and complex organisms like us, with their senses and feelings, seek the flourishing of life. Between the pure organic state and the mental state is the intermediary level of feelings, which, as Damasio points out, are “the mental deputies of homeostasis”: negative feelings express deficient homeostasis, whereas positive feelings express the appropriate levels of homeostasis. However, the notion of feeling here refers not to a mental state, but to the nonconscious connection with the biological or chemical processes taking place in our bodies. As Damasio points out, the term homeostasis “refers to a nonconscious form of physiological control that operates automatically without subjectivity or deliberation on the part of the organism. Obviously […] it can even operate well in organisms without a nervous system.”21 For example, most organisms automatically control their level of sugar, temperature, or water balance by alerting compensatory mechanisms. It is important to stress that homeostasis leads not to a perfect equilibrium (which would lead to death), but to a state of flourishing and well-being. Thus, Damasio creates a strong analogy between unicellular organisms and complex organisms with a central nervous system, as they both strive for homeostasis in a similar way; however, he points out that this inclination towards homeostasis is non-conscious and cannot be interpreted as a certain “kind” of consciousness. In contrast to Ruyer, who argued that organic, or primary, consciousness is characteristic of all living organisms, Damasio is reluctant to name homeostatic activity as “consciousness.” He points out that simple living beings respond to the conditions of their

20 Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things. Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018), 25. 21 Ibid., 47.

281

shared habitats environment, similarly to plants responding to temperature, hydration, and sunlight. “All these creatures continually sense the presence of other living creatures or of the environment. But I resist calling them conscious, in the traditional meaning of the word, because that traditional meaning is tied to the notions of mind and feeling, and in turn I have linked mind and feeling to the presence of nervous systems.”22 However, Damasio argues that between basic biological processes, such as cellular sensing and mental states, lies an intermediary level of feelings. “Feelings are core mental states, perhaps the core mental states, those that correspond to a specific, foundational content: the internal state of the body within which consciousness inheres.”23 Feelings express the intimate relationship between the body and the brain, which, together with the network of the nervous system, form a single organismic unit. In other words, neither the nervous system nor the brain can provide and produce mental phenomena if they work separately, and only their permanent interaction creates a continuity between organism and the brain. As Damasio points out, “brains and bodies are in the same mind-enabling soup,”24 which creates a kind of cerebral organism. In his earlier book The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Damasio gives a more detailed analysis of feeling and a more nuanced explanation of different levels of consciousness. His basic insight is that feelings express a certain type of organic consciousness, which exists “before” subjective consciousness. Damasio asserts that our brain, which is undoubtedly conscious, contains some kinds of nonconscious mechanism that inform the brain about the state of our organism. “These devices continually represent, nonconsciously, the state of the living body, along its many dimensions. I call the state of activity within the ensemble of such devices the 22 Ibid., 157. 23 Ibid., 158. 24 Ibid., 240.

282

Other Encounters proto-self, the nonconscious forerunner for the levels of self which appear in our minds as the conscious protagonists of consciousness: core self and autobiographical self.”25 In other words, the “proto-self ” is a collection of neural patterns that represent the state of the organism at multiple levels of the brain nonconsciously. These representations create feelings, sensory patterns, or images, which inform the brain about the state of the organism; they also help to create a “core self,” which collects these feelings into a second-order pattern and is conscious of them. This “core self ” is encapsulated in the “autobiographical self,” which includes both past experiences and future anticipations. The “autobiographical self ” is an archive of imaginary representations or storytellings that the “self ” is endlessly presenting to itself. “The entire construction of knowledge, from simple to complex, from nonverbal imagetic to verbal literary, depends on the ability to map what happens over time, inside our organism, around our organism, to and with our organism, one thing followed by another thing, causing another thing, endlessly.”26 Thus, the brain is encapsulated in the wordless stories about what happens to an organism. In this sense, Damasio asserts that there is a neural continuity between the organism and the brain: “The relationship between organism and nervous system is incestuous. The nervous system is, after all, inside the organism […] The nervous system interacts with varied parts of the body thanks to neural pathways, which are distributed in all body structures, and thanks, in the reverse direction, to chemical molecules, which travel in the circulating blood and can gain direct access to the nervous system […].”27 In other words, the body and the brain interact and form a single organismic unit, which expresses itself as a feeling: a feeling is a percep25 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (London: Vintage Books, 1999), 22. 26 Ibid., 189. 27 Damasio, The Strange Order of Things, 126–7.

283

shared habitats tion not of some object, but of body-as-subject, a feeling of what happens within the body. The discovery of the continuity between the body and the brain reveals “the strange order of things”: it appears that feeling and subjectivity depend on the prior emergence of nervous systems and not on the existence of the cerebral cortex. This discovery might change the commonly accepted idea about human exceptionalism, because humans are not the only species that possess feelings and self-awareness. As Damasio asserts, “the emergence of feeling and subjectivity is not recent at all, let alone exclusively human. […] Not only are all vertebrates likely to be conscious experiencers of a variety of feelings but so are a number of invertebrates whose central nervous system design resembles that of humans as far as spinal cord and brain stem are concerned. Social insects are likely to qualify, and so do charming octopuses drawing on a very different brain design.”28 Human exceptionalism is based on the presumption that subjectivity is determined by the cerebral cortex of upper vertebrates, whereas Damasio highlights that subjectivity depends on the auto-affective capacities of a cerebral organism, which inform the organism about ongoing life processes. This auto-affectivity is the precursor of feelings and subjectivity: “The fact that we can find so much in common in the social and affective behaviors of single-celled organisms, sponges and hydras, cephalopods, and mammals suggests a common root for the problems of life regulation in different creatures and also a shared solution: obeying the homeostatic imperative.”29 Nervous systems are only servants to this primary homeostatic imperative, which is the basis of any organic activity. This insight helps to assert the continuity between all forms of life and throws into question the exceptional place of human beings. Malabou is quite critical about this harmonious passage from the body as organism to the complexity of the brain. In What Should We Do with 28 Ibid., 238. 29 Ibid., 239.

284

Other Encounters Our Brain? (2008), she argues that between the “proto-self ” and the “conscious self ” there should be an intermediary plasticity, which would represent the transition from the neuronal to the mental in terms of negation and resistance. “There is no simple and limpid continuity from the one to the other, but rather transformation of the one into the other out of their mutual conflict.”30 She argues that the transition from the neuronal to the mental is more like a rupture, or an explosion, than a continuum. “Only an ontological explosion could permit the transition from one order to another […] The neuronal and the mental resist each other and themselves, and it is because of this they can be linked to one another, precisely because – contra Damasio – they do not speak the same language.”31 In the same way that organisms have to destroy certain cells in order to change and develop (this phenomenon is known as “apoptosis”), the neuronal network also has to destroy itself to remain creative. In this sense, there is a contradiction between the maintenance system, or homeostasis, and the potential for change. The system cannot change without exploding homeostasis. As Malabou points out, “if we didn’t explode at each transition, if we didn’t destroy ourselves a bit, we could not live.”32 Thus explosion is seen as the necessary condition for creativity and freedom. However, this explosion does not necessarily lead to positive changes, but might take a destructive turn: in some specific cases, such as a brain lesion or neurodegenerative disease, there appears a gap or a rupture between the neuronal and the mental. Malabou discusses this rupture in The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (2012), where she examines Damasio’s theory once again. What is problematic in Damasio’s work is the question of representation: if the “proto-self ” collects data about the state of the organism, why is this 30 Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? 72. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 74.

285

shared habitats activity described as non-conscious? Damasio asserts that the “proto-self ” consists of a multiplicity of neuronal patterns that map the state of the body at different levels. However, this mapping is not collected in the brain, but rather appears at different levels, from the brain stem to the cerebral cortex. In other words, the organism is both being sensed and sensing at the same time: “These structures are intimately involved in the process of regulating the state of the organism. The operations of acting on the organism and of sensing the state of the organism are closely tied.”33 The signals coming from neuronal patterns produce certain images or a kind of internal representation, which should not be confused with our conscious feeling of self. “We are not conscious of the proto-self. […] The proto-self has no powers of perception and holds no knowledge. Nor is the proto-self to be confused with the rigid homunculus of old neurology.”34 Thus, the “proto-self ” is a cerebral auto-affection, or, in Ruyer’s terms, a kind of self-survey that expresses an immediate proximity of an organism to itself. Both for Ruyer and Damasio, this auto-affection exists before perception and knowledge, and does not presuppose any “subject” behind it. Malabou makes an interesting theoretical intervention here with the suggestion to relate nonconscious activity, taking place via neural patterns and feelings, with the Freudian notion of the unconscious. Malabou suggests the term “cerebral unconscious,” which would cover the entirety of these cerebral processes that both inform the brain about ongoing organic activities taking place in the organism and translate this information into affects. As Malabou points out, “The autorepresentative activity of the brain, ceaselessly mapped out within psychosomatic states, thus scrutinizes its own inside, translates it into images and affects itself with this activity, of which, we see, it is both sender and 33 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 154. 34 Ibid.

286

Other Encounters receiver. The ‘cerebral unconscious,’ then, designates less the entirety of nonconscious processes than the auto-affection of the brain itself in its entirety.”35 However, the notion of auto-affection does not mean that the brain is “conscious” of itself, or “perceives” itself directly. Malabou makes a distinction between subjective auto-affection and cerebral auto-affection. Subjective auto-affection, in a traditional sense, means that the subject is capable of experiencing themselves as self-identical, and creating their subjectivity and identity with the help of inner mental space. Cerebral auto-affection means something different: it is the brain’s capacity to track organic processes taking place within the organism. As Malabou points out, “Cerebral auto-affection, which designates the set of homeostatic processes, thus characterizes the brain’s capacity to experience the altering character of contact with itself. Emotion plays a fundamental role within the constitution of this cerebral psyche: the brain affects itself – that is, modifies itself – within the constant flow of vital regulation.”36 However, the question is, who is the holder of these affects and what kind of representation does this cerebral auto-affection presuppose? If the organism is both the sender and the receiver of these affects, how can this auto-affectivity be translated into the language of mental states? Malabou argues that this is a kind of blind spot: our psyche cannot directly access the unconscious, and, in a similar way, our subjective consciousness cannot access our organic consciousness, or the “proto-self.” Thus, cerebral auto-affectivity does not create any kind of identity or self-reflexivity, and, in this respect, it should be distinguished from subjective auto-affectivity, which is the essence of our subjective identity. In the structure of subjective auto-affectivity, the subject reflects themselves as being identical to themselves, whereas, in the structure of cerebral auto-affectivity, the feeling of “what happens” does not lead to subjective 35 Malabou, The New Wounded, 41. 36 Ibid., 42.

287

shared habitats identity. As Malabou points out, “No one can feel his or her own brain; nor can he or she speak of it, hear it speak, nor hear himself or herself speak within it. Cerebral auto-affection is necessarily and paradoxically accompanied by a blindness, an inability of the subject to feel anything as far as it is concerned. […] Cerebral auto-affection is the unconscious of subjectivity.”37 In other words, the “cerebral self ” remains unconscious within the subjective self. However, the term “unconscious” may not be the right one, because the “cerebral self ” is quite “conscious” and well informed about its own activity. It is true, as Malabou asserts, that the “cerebral self ” does not represent itself in the sense that it has no language, but still, it is not deprived of representation. Malabou herself notices that cerebral auto-affection is not verbal but is of a specular nature: “To speak of cerebral auto-affection, therefore, is to admit that the brain is capable of looking at itself, touching itself as it constitutes its own image. Homeostatic regulation has a specular structure; it operates as a kind of mirror within which the brain sees itself live.”38 The brain sees itself but does not speak to itself; in other words, it functions in a different register than the unconscious, which, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, is structured like a language. For this reason, we can argue that Malabou’s notion of “cerebral unconscious” is not justified, because the cerebral and the mental are not translatable into the same language. As Damasio points out, any organism, and any brain as a kind of cerebral organism, is capable of mapping and image-making, which provides information about the current state of affairs. The cerebral organism is always busy with making a “movie-in-the-brain,”39 which provides the internal representation of “what happens.” This idea is very close to Ruyer’s insight about self-survey as a kind of organismic inner 37 Ibid., 42–3. 38 Ibid., 42. 39 Damasio, The Strange Order of Things, 146.

288

Other Encounters cinematography, a vision without a gaze, which creates the condition of immediate self-proximity. This inner representation can be imagined as “cerebral cinematography,” which does not need any actual observer in the sense of a completed or bounded individual. The cerebral organism is both the film that is screened and the observer who is watching the film. Malabou is interested in these specific cases, where the “cerebral self ” and the “subjective self ” break apart, such as with brain lesions or neurodegenerative diseases – dementia, Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s. In these cases, the “cerebral self ” undergoes a radical change and cannot reconnect to its former subjective personality. Although change is a necessary component of the notion of plasticity, this time, it is a different kind of plasticity – destructive plasticity. In Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2012), Malabou defines destructive plasticity as the phenomenon when something appears only through a negation and rupture: “Something shows itself when there is a damage, a cut, something to which normal, creative plasticity gives neither access nor body: the deserting of subjectivity, the distancing of the individual who becomes a stranger to herself […].”40 Destructive plasticity tears apart the “cerebral self ” and “subjective self ” and presents itself as a scar, a radical change that is irreversible. However, this rupture or cut can be thought of as a natural process of any organic development. To acquire a new form of identity, we have to undergo a change, to destroy our old forms and identities. As Malabou points out, “The fact that all creation can only occur at the price of a destructive counterpart is a fundamental law of life. It does not contradict life; it makes life possible.”41 This imperative for destruction is obvious even at a cellular level: in order to develop and acquire a new organic form, an organism has to destroy its previous form. Referring to biologist Jean Claude Ameisen, Malabou 40 Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, 6. 41 Ibid., 4.

289

shared habitats notes that “the sculpting of the self assumes cellular annihilation or apoptosis, the phenomena of programmed cellular suicide: in order for fingers to form, a separation between the fingers must also form. It is apoptosis that produces the interstitial void that enables fingers to detach themselves from one another.”42 In this sense, even the destruction of the conscious self can be seen as a necessary part of organic creation.

Being with Other Minds Ruyer’s theory about three types of consciousness (organic, perceptive, and psychological), similarly to Damasio’s theory about three types of consciousness (the “proto-self,” the “core self,” and the “autobiographical self ”), suggests that some kind of transition between the types might be possible. If “the feeling of what happens” informs us about the homeostatic processes taking place in our bodies, maybe it can inform us about the processes taking place in the bodies of other species. If in some cases of destructive plasticity this connection is lost, maybe in some other cases, such as artistic activity, these connections might be restored or created. That could make us think that the notion of consciousness might be extended to incorporate more-than-human forms of life. More-than-human includes basic characteristics of life, which encompass not only the human and the animal, but also their constant becoming: the becoming-animal of the human and the becoming-human of the animal. As Brian Massumi points out, “one finds oneself always already more-than-human: mutually included in the integral animal continuum as it follows its natural path in the direction of its immanent self-surpassing.”43 This allows us to speculate about the general theory of organic consciousness that might incorporate different “kinds of minds.” 42 Ibid., 4–5. 43 Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us About Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 92–3.

290

Other Encounters I believe that this imperative is behind many artistic practices that involve non-human partners and demand long-term cohabitation with them. This imperative might be discerned in the works of Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin (Art Orienté Object), Maja Smrekar, Kira O’Reilly, Ursula Damm, and others. I would like to conclude by mentioning Robertina Šebjanič’s work Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva sonification (2015), which examines the co-evolution between humans and jellyfish. The common jellyfish, Aurelia aurita, is an ancient species that has been around for more than 500 million years. Even if the environment of the oceans and seas is rapidly changing, it seems that it does not disturb the jellyfish. The Aurelia aurita has some rudimentary sensory nerves that allow it to perceive light, smell, and orientation. Its gravity receptors, containing calcium crystals, are similar to the human vestibular system. With these similarities in mind, Šebjanič investigated the possible cohabitation and communication between humans and jellyfish. She recorded the sound of jellyfish in their natural environment and then navigated this resulting sound archive with the help of a special program that translates the movements of jellyfish into specific sounds found in the archive.44 Here, the performer, who navigates the sound and the recording of previous experiments, acts as another organism, trying to harmonize her melody with the host organism. This sonic and visual experience creates the feeling that the observer is immersed in the milieu of a living organism and takes part in its creation and development.

44 For more detailed information, see: Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva sonification (2015) by Robertina Šebjanič. https://robertina.net/aurelia-1hz-proto-vivasonification/ (accessed 15 April 2020).

291

shared habitats

Audronė Žukauskaitė is Chief Researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. Her recent publications include the monographs Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Philosophy: The Logic of Multiplicity (in Lithuanian, 2011) and From Biopolitics to Biophilosophy (in Lithuanian, 2016). She also co-edited (with S. E. Wilmer) Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016; 2018) Her research interests include contemporary philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, biopolitics, biophilosophy, and posthumanism.

292

Other Encounters

293

shared habitats

A Shift in the Role of an Artist Mindaugas Gapševicˇius We are entering an era in which everyone takes responsibility for the common culture, by participating in the decisions and actions which will inform it. – Roy Ascott 1 One of my Toolkits, called “My Collaboration with Bacteria for Paper Production,”2 provides tools to work with the interaction of microorganisms. In a broader context, it introduces the symbiotic relationships between living organisms and non-living things. While using this toolkit as a basis for artistic experimentation within a collaborative setting such as a workshop, this essay develops the idea of a shift in the role of an artist from being central to being a mediating figure.

Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab First, I would like to highlight one of the events I attended during the Pixelache Festival in Helsinki in 2016, called “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab.” The event was led by Marc Dusseiller, a co-founder of and the spirit behind the Hackteria community, which began their activities in 2009. The event was described as follows: Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab is a durational, collaborative and explorative experimentation on taxidermy with Marc Dusseiller, aka dusjagr, a co-founder of the Hackteria network. The aim of the lab was to investigate artistic practices and traditional craft with living/ non-living media to reconnect us with our ecosystem and ourselves.3 1

Roy Ascott, “The Cybernetic Stance [1968]” in Systems, E. A. Shanken (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015).

2

For more information, see http://triple-double-u.com/my-collaboration-withbacteria-for-paper-production/ (accessed 21 March 2020).

3

See “Proposal: Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab,” available at

294

Other Encounters The description proposes that the event aims at an experimental laboratory, with collaborative experimentation around taxidermy. The description is packed with keywords that raise additional questions, including the (possible) killing of an animal, the purpose of preserving a dead body, and borders of experimentation in artistic practices. In light of the Hackteria event having been aimed at the investigation of artistic practices and traditional crafts such as taxidermy, next, I will try to: 1) deconstruct the role of the artist and 2) define the experiential part of the event. The two-week-long “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab” included the setup of a temporary lab, an introduction to the methods and tools of taxidermy, the preservation of rats and mice, and the collaborative production of a booklet, which included documentation of the event, a set of instructions for taxidermy, and reflections from participants. On one hand, the event reminded me of a DIWO workshop for learning and experimenting with taxidermy techniques, something that can be described as a traditional craft. On the other hand, the context aimed at engaging participants with contemporary artistic practices. I take Dusseiller’s use of the term “ecosystem” to mean a community of living organisms and chemical compounds interacting with each other in their environment, and our “reconnection” with the ecosystem would be catalyzed by artistic practice. In his essay “BACK TO NATURE II: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century” (1995), Roy Ascott criticized both reductionist and holistic sciences for their approaches, thus expressing a need to redefine how we live in “natural” space. His sketched vision of nature involved working in an electronic space, with a call for artists to be mediators between nature and technology.4 With no aim of contrasting nature and

4

https://temporary.fi/experiments/hackteria-s-empathetic-taxidermia-lab/ (accessed 6 March 2020) Roy Ascott, “Back to Nature II: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Transhumanis Reader, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2013), 439.

295

shared habitats technology, Ascott suggested the artist’s role as mediating nature. In the case of the taxidermy workshop, I see the project leader Dusseiller as being in the position to help the participants to understand the tools, the making, and the ecosystem. While thinking about artistic reconnection with the ecosystem, I suppose it is not literally about wiring dead mice and rats, but rather about sensing (and in such a way experiencing) them, and thus understanding that the ecosystem is composed of living and dead matter. Dusseiller, who is, among other roles in the workshop, a mediator of tools, taxidermy, and the ecosystem, might intend for the participants of the workshop to feel disgust, or, more specifically, to experience the ecosystem through the disembowelment of rats and mice. Through his workshop, he may also be instrumentalizing disgust, which, on one hand, could be simply explained as a biochemical reaction that happens through the release of hormones by the brain, thus modulating how our bodies deal with potentially unpleasant feelings. On the other hand, acknowledging the social dimension of disgust, in order to break through the unpleasant thoughts and feelings associated with it, a participant in the workshop would have to transcend cultural influence to a degree, thereby potentially reconnecting themselves with the ecosystem while simultaneously communicating, sensing, thinking, and tinkering. Here follows the “us” and “ourselves” mentioned in the project description above – a recursive aspect of our bodies that is framed as being less mental, affecting certain homeostatic senses, like the aforementioned disgust response. While sensing and dealing with living, semi-living, or dead bodies in the taxidermy workshop, the reconnection with ourselves and our ecosystem is more than imaginary – it is triggered by our homeostatic senses and, perhaps, thoughts induced by communication and tinkering. What is new in a “traditional craft” setting such as taxidermy? First of all, we have a workshop leader in the role of a mediator, aiming at intro296

Other Encounters ducing tools, the process of taxidermy, and the idea of an ecosystem, through which workshop participants experience the ecosystem viscerally, through embodied interaction. Secondly, the event itself, ending with concrete outputs, including the preserved rats and mice, the documented thoughts of the participants, and instructions for how to repeat the taxidermy process, may provide direct references from the participants and, in such a way, remain accessible to other people as a set of artifacts through which they can imagine the activities of the workshop, or even to repeat the experience. Moreover, in the taxidermy workshop, while able to trigger a disengaged sense such as disgust, the artist mediates his knowledge of taxidermy and the ecosystem, and the participant in the taxidermy event can eventually critically evaluate their relationship to the ecosystem and perhaps reconnect with it through individual senses. Additional thought needs to be given to the killing of mice and rats for the workshop. As this act might very well be deemed unethical, it should be positioned with specific purpose. If, say, the purpose is to kill for food, or in the name of population management, then killing an animal may be ethically supported. Killing for the sake of art, on the other hand, is perhaps not easily argued to be ethically acceptable, especially if the discourse of the workshop itself is the posthuman state as described by Rosi Braidotti5 or Donna Haraway,6 which would suggest a horizontality that is not reflected by the human-nonhuman power dynamic of a taxidermy workshop dependent on non-human death. Nonetheless, the workshop positions the experience of the death of an other as the bonding tie with the ecosystem.

5

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

6

Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

297

shared habitats The emotional experience provided by Dusseiller invites me to think of participative and performative art practices from the 1960s, particularly the Fluxus movement, which aimed at breaking the traditional understanding of art as an object and challenging entrenched taboos; it proposed experiential, experimental, and social activity that included the audience in a mutual action. Dusseiller’s work also harkens back to art practices of 1990s, particularly relational art, which dematerialized the art object into human relations and social contexts. In this way, both Fluxus and relational art practices historically emphasized mediation between the audience and the arts, which had otherwise been largely focused on the – sometimes fetishized – object itself. Still, what makes “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab” a compelling contribution to artistic practice?

Experiment, Experience, and Mediation Having proposed a collaborative workshop within a temporary lab, the leader of “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab” becomes a mediator, responsible for providing knowledge about the tools, the know-how about the taxidermy, and references to scientific and artistic work related to an ecosystem. On the other hand, the participant of the event is invited to produce their version of taxidermy or contribute to the booklet, which then might develop into something more tangible, perhaps a new art project, which, in turn, would additionally be experienced within the framework of the workshop. So the contribution by the participant becomes possible only through input provided by the mediator and one’s own experience, which, again, is fed back into the mental reconsiderations and practical tinkering by the participant. Moreover, able to learn new methods and to discuss ecology within the framework of the workshop, the participant is triggered by a new experience, which could include a thought exercise, or additional auditory, visual, or tactile sensing. 298

Other Encounters How is that different from art of the 1960s and relational art? Quite a few experimental activities were happening in the 1960s: Joseph Beuys created his installations in real-time; George Maciunas conceptualized the Fluxus movement, organizing and performing early happenings; Robert Rauschenberg collaborated with technicians on interactive pieces. Events to mention include 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering and E.a.t., which became a platform for showing the newest collaborations between the arts, technologies, and sciences. Contextualized by the concurrent performance art, happenings, and experiential art of the time, both 9 Evenings and E.a.t. could be described as experimental, or laboratory, activities. Coming out of Fluxus parallel to the happenings were also “Fluxkits,” collections of objects placed in various boxes. According to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a Fluxkit encapsulates a collection of small objects to be held in the hand, read, and manipulated.7 As Alison Knowles has described it, a “Fluxkit is an effort to namely contradict framed pieces on a wall, but to give people the idea of holding something in a hand, and also representing many different artists in one small container.”8 In so doing, Fluxkits enter a direct experiential moment, coordinated exceptionally by the viewer herself: the viewer decides how to navigate through the objects, how to read them, and how to place them back in the kits – even replacing the original objects with new ones. Yet another format introduced by Fluxus is a set of instructions for how to perform an artwork, or a “score,” as per The Fluxus Performance Workbook, compiled by Friedman and colleagues.9 The book is essentially an anthology of step-by-step Flux-

7

See the description at http://mo.ma/3c0RPjt (accessed 2 March 2020).

8

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPi0UyHB95U (accessed 2 March 2020).

9

Ken Friedman, Owen Smith, and Lauren Sawchyn, eds., The Fluxus Performance Workbook (Performance Research e-Publications, 2002), https://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/fluxusworkbook.pdf.

299

shared habitats us instructions by a variety of artists across many years, similar to short theater plays that could result in an artwork.10 Following the logic of Fluxus performance, the taxidermy lab starts with the invitation for the audience to bring their “own rat,” alive or dead. While dealing with living, semi-living, and dead animals, the participants of the lab – that is, the audience of the event – have a chance to experience empathic feelings for the animal they have brought. The animal – alive or dead – becomes part of the artwork through empathic contact. With the aim of adding a technological framework to artistic performance, or inviting the viewer of the artwork to contribute to it, what happened in “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab” is very close to Fluxus experiments. On the other hand, having placed the focus on the conceptual part of the experiment itself, neither the performances nor happenings nor Fluxkits of Fluxus explicitly dealt with the meaning that evolves in reference to the mediator or the tools.11 How can relational art be positioned next to “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab”? Nicolas Bourriaud12 introduced a number of artworks from the 1990s as examples to help define the then newly coined term “relational aesthetics.” Rirkrit Tiravanija organized a dinner in a collector’s home, Christine Hill worked as a check-out assistant in a supermarket, Pierre Huyghe summoned people to a casting session, and so on, all in the frame of artistic practice. The short descriptions of the events can be seen as connecting back to the Fluxus happenings or installations of Joseph Beuys from the 1960s. Bourriaud described these events as “interactive,” as 10 The form of manuals, which are similar to Fluxus instructions, is also used by artists in DIY and DIWO settings. 11 See “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music” (2000), by Kim Cascone, who, while defining post-digital art, suggested that specific tools and not the technology communicate the meaning of an artwork. 12 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002).

300

Other Encounters lacking “imaginary and utopian realities,” or simply, as “ways of living.”13 In other terms, they merge within themselves an artistic setting and a social space, such as an exhibition’s opening reception or a cooking session with an artist, to claim the idea of evolving meanings of an artwork through social process and engagement.14 In such a setting, both the artist and the audience become an integral part of the artwork. If relational aesthetics added to Fluxus happenings a sense of daily experience, such as a cooking session or an exhibition opening,15 “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab” further contributes to this lineage with the role of the artist as mediator. While the artist within the relational artwork is a performer or part of the audience, the artist in a taxidermy lab is the one who mediates the artwork. In other words, the artist listens to the audience, reflects on the comments, and builds the artwork upon the reflections. At the same time, the audience is given a stage to participate in the emergence of new forms. 13 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics [2002], translated from the original Esthétique relationnelle (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998). 14 Claire Bishop is perhaps right that the artworks as defined by Nicolas Bourriaud (such as those by Liam Gillick or Rirkrit Tiravanija) were not that innovative in comparison to prior happenings or the social sculptures of Joseph Beuys. On the other hand, the social actions of Fluxus happenings were not, in their time, considered an integral part of the evolving meaning of the artwork. 15 To elaborate on the idea of Merleau-Ponty about the unlimited range of possible readings, it is worth adding the practical experience an artwork provides. In 1945, Merleau-Ponty introduced the concept of temporal perception, which is not defined as a process of considerations but rather as a unity of considerations and practical experience. To illustrate it, he wrote about the table upon which he was writing. The idea of the table was evolving through a series of “sensations” that allowed him to perceive it (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). This is something similar to what Luhmann called a redescription: in order for an artwork to become established in the art system, it needs to be redescribed. It is the same in relational aesthetics – the meaning of an artwork emerges from the interaction between an audience and an artwork.

301

shared habitats

Emergence of New Forms If I were to consider the emergence of the cells of living unicellular organisms, I would think of self-reference, of splitting DNA or RNA code into two identical sequences, and forming a new identical cell or an organism. On the other hand, if the cell is damaged, it could try to fix itself by repairing damaged strands of DNA and RNA. It is similar with multicellular organisms, which try to rebuild missing or damaged cells. In this way, on one hand, the organism reflects itself, and, on the other hand, it adapts to its environment while reflecting it. However, this process is not necessarily perfect, and even though the organism refers to itself in this process, mistakes or changes are inevitable. These mistakes and changes might range from a change in one nucleotide in a DNA sequence to the development of a completely different organism. A parallel could be made with a Fluxkit, where the viewer, depending on their views and reflections, might replace the missing object or add something new, changing the idea or even the identity of the kit itself. The context of a workshop setting is also similar, where the mediator might give instructions on how to use tools in one context or another, but the result would still be different because it would be reflected from an individual perspective. The emergence of new forms is worth mentioning because of the similarity between the above-mentioned cases: the naturally self-referencing organism and the participation of an audience in a creative process. This action could be described through the concept of “umwelt,” introduced by Jacob von Uexküll in his book Theoretical Biology back in 1926, wherein he described the adaptation of a living organism in its environment through the number of activities undertaken by the organism. In his concept, Uexküll distinguished between two sets of functions: the internal cycle and the external circle. In addition to the external function circle, which includes sensing (Merkwelt) and acting (Wirkungswelt), in the animal world, the animal has its inner function circle, which helps it to reflect its

302

Other Encounters

Fig. 1. Mindaugas Gapševičius, Proposal for Microbial Therapy, 2020. Aquariums with Lactobacillus reuteri (left) and Streptococcus thermophilus (right) bacterial strains. Installation view at Atletika, Vilnius, 2020. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko

senses and act upon them, in turn, influencing its umwelt.16 The umwelt obtains features of the animal and the animal obtains features of the umwelt, making the animal and the umwelt interconnected. Referring back to “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab,” reconnection with our ecosystem and ourselves would mean sensing an umwelt and acting upon it. While Marc Dusseiller proposed a reconnection through participants’ experience dealing with dead and semi-dead organisms, the next step would be to envision a situation where living, non-human organisms could participate within the interactive setting as well. In this way, we would be able to experience the impact of the organisms, and or16 Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company Inc., 1926).

303

shared habitats ganisms would be able to experience us. Referring to scientific papers that deal with the impact of the microbiome on humans, I propose including microorganisms in the artistic framework. Such a framework may provide us with a mutual experience with our microbiomes, which, in turn, may result in the emergence of new feelings, visions, and forms.

Proposal for Microbial Therapy The installation Proposal for Microbial Therapy – presented for the first time in the exhibition Microorganisms & Their Hosts at Atletika Gallery 17 – featured two aquariums with different sorts of yogurt: one colonized with Lactobacillus reuteri bacteria, and the other with Streptococcus thermophilus bacteria (Fig. 1). While questioning the ecology of humans, the impact of the microbiome on humans, and self-healing strategies, the installation proposed literally experiencing relationships with microorganisms. This artwork would not have been developed without collaborators, including Auksė Gaižauskaitė and Hege Tapio, who contributed their ideas to the project. The artwork emerged during several collaborative workshops at Alt lab. Working with molecular biologist Auksė Gaižauskaitė, I started with the isolation of bacterial strains from yogurt. This step seemed to be important for understanding how yogurt is composed and if diverse sorts of yogurt might have different effects on physical wellbeing. Then followed a two-day-long workshop with artist Hege Tapio, with whom we brainstormed our ideas to later be implemented aesthetically, for instance, the isolation of microorganisms from yogurt and the impact of the hormone oxytocin on humans. Then followed another two-day-long workshop plus an additional three weeks allocated for the implementation

17 For details, see http://triple-double-u.com/proposal-for-microbial-therapy (accessed 20 February 2020).

304

Other Encounters of ideas, called “Lactose Intolerant? Let’s Employ Bacteria!”18 with Auksė Gaižauskaitė and workshop participants. And finally, we had a three-day-long workshop called “Biochemistry of Emotions” with Hege Tapio, Auksė Gaižauskaitė, and a bunch of participants.19 The workshops welcomed contributions from anyone interested in the biological basis of empathy, art, and interdisciplinary projects. Having started with the toolkit “My Collaboration with Bacteria for Paper Production,” which provides tools for working around the interaction of microorganisms and, in a broader sense, the symbiotic relationships between living organisms and non-living things, my installation was built upon the idea of the impact of microorganisms on humans. Conducting the series of participative workshops, I was able to finally construct my new artwork, Proposal for Microbial Therapy. While tinkering and discussing questions raised, we sourced a few scientific papers worth referring to. One is the paper “Lactose Digestion from Yogurt: Mechanism and Relevance,” by Denis Savaiano, which claims that fresh yogurt with Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus has active bacterial lactase, which helps break down lactose in the intestine and therefore can prevent symptoms in lactose-intolerant people.20 Another paper, “Microbial Lysate Upregulates Host Oxytocin,” by B. J. Varian and colleagues, concludes that yogurt with Lactobacillus reuteri may affect the release of oxytocin, a hormone that is responsible for social bonding.21 Speculation on the idea that the consumption of 18 More information at http://howto-things.com/Lactose_intolerant%3F_Let's_ employ_bacteria! (accessed 20 February 2020). 19 More information at http://howto-things.com/Biochemistry_of_emotions (accessed 20 February 2020). 20 Dennis A. Savaiano, “Lactose Digestion from Yogurt: Mechanism and Relevance,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 99, 5 (2014): 1251–55, https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.113.073023. 21 Bernard J. Varian, Theofilos Poutahidis, Brett T. DiBenedictis et al.,

305

shared habitats fermented dairy products may improve lactose malabsorption or affect the sense of social bonding provoked further speculations on symbiotic relations between microorganisms and humans. While providing visitors with the opportunity to collaboratively experience the isolation of microorganisms, to consume yogurt of particular strains, and to use protocols for individual experimentation, I offered an artistic setting for the mutual experience of humans and microorganisms. Having considered and reconsidered the outcome of the collaborative workshops,22 I came up with a concept for my artwork, which is as follows: How can one experience their own microbiome? Is there any interdependence between what we eat, how we behave, and what we think? Combining the isolation of a single microorganism, cooking medium for it, looking after it, and finally consuming it, the audience is invited to experience the relationship between the targeted microorganism and themselves. The installation consists of two aquariums with yogurt: the first one is inhabited by Streptococcus thermophilus and the second with Lactobacillus reuteri bacterial strains. The aquariums have appended electronics that help track the change in pH levels. In order for a human to experience a significant impact, it is recommended to consume 500g of yogurt per day for several weeks.23

“Microbial Lysate Upregulates Host Oxytocin,” Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 61 (2017): 36–49, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2016.11.002. 22 See “My Collaboration with Bacteria for Paper Production” toolkit, which is a part of the larger work Introduction to Posthuman Aesthetics, available at: http://triple-double-u.com/my-collaboration-with-bacteria-for-paper-production (accessed 10 March 2020). 23 See, for example, Dennis A. Savaiano, “Lactose Digestion from Yogurt,” 1251–55, https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.113.073023 or Kirsten Tillisch, Jennifer Labus,

306

Other Encounters Keeping in mind that homemade yogurt may contain pathogens and unhealthy chemical compounds, the author suggests ingesting homemade consumables at their own risk. With this concept in mind, and having executed several workshops and worked on the implementation of individual ideas, I would like to point to two moments that may illustrate the artistic value of mediation between the humans, microorganisms, and chemical compounds. The first moment is related to the emergence of new forms and meanings in a collaborative setting, achieved through the ideas of the participants, new considerations, and updated implementations of the project. Before starting the workshops, my plan was to work exclusively with the isolation of bacteria that thrives in yogurt to make a homemade yogurt for further consumption and possible wellbeing. The continuous discussions with Hege Tapio, Auksė Gaižauskaitė, and workshop participants led me to understand the impact of the microbiome on health at a molecular level. The scientific paper “Microbial Lysate Upregulates Host Oxytocin,” provided by Gaižauskaitė, led me towards the idea of a self-controlled emotional state achieved by the consumption of Lactobacillus reuteri, which might help to release more oxytocin in the human brain. The second moment is related to the fact that continuously consuming a certain group of microorganisms could have an impact on humans through the production of different chemical compounds: in the case of the consumption of Lactobacillus reuteri, the human brain produces oxytocin, and, in the case of Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, the active lactase in the intestine breaks down lactose and prevents symptoms in otherwise lactose-intolerant people. In my project, I speculated that consuming yogurt with either Streptococcus thermophilus Lisa Kilpatrick, “Consumption of Fermented Milk Product with Probiotic Modulates Brain Activity,” Gastroenterology 144, 7 (2013): 1394–401, https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2013.02.043.

307

shared habitats or Lactobacillus reuteri would have two distinct respective impacts on a person’s wellbeing. If we consider further Uexküll’s idea of umwelt, that is, a mutual response between the world and ourselves, we see how input from others, including humans and microorganisms, may affect the experience of humans. Still, it is interesting to ponder how, in the above-mentioned cases, the microorganisms themselves are affected. While the study “Microbial Lysate Upregulates Host Oxytocin” suggests that the regular ingestion of yogurt may affect the release of oxytocin, it is not clear from that particular research how oxytocin itself may affect the targeted microorganisms and whether the continuous growth of Lactobacillus reuteri bacterial colonies would result in continuous release of oxytocin. Therefore, in one workshop, we developed an experiment on the impact of oxytocin on Lactobacillus bulgaricus, which is supposed to be similar to Lactobacillus reuteri, and Streptococcus thermophilus, a different strain compared to the first one. This idea led to the execution of two experiments: in the first experiment, we applied synthetic oxytocin to the isolated bacteria, and, in the second experiment, participants attempted to apply synthetic oxytocin to themselves by directly spraying it into their noses. While the first experiment did not show any particular impact for the growth of bacteria, the second experiment ended up with different effects on the emotional states of participants. While, in some cases, the effect was emotionally positive, in my case, spraying of the oxytocin into my nose did not invoke any perceptible impact on my emotions.24 Consulting Auksė Gaižauskaitė during 24 Participants also filled out questionnaires on their emotional state, which provided further ideas on the different effects of oxytocin on the participants (see, for example, the work by Juozapas Švelnys, introduced in the next chapter). For more information, see http://howto-things.com/Biochemistry_of_emotions (accessed 5 April 2020).

308

Other Encounters the workshop, we arrived at the conclusion that, in the first experiment, there was no particular perceptible impact, because, from the perspective of the bacteria, oxytocin is a set of compounds to be consumed by bacteria based on need; they did not absorb it automatically, or at least, there was no visible impact on the bacteria. Whereas, in the second experiment, the oxytocin molecules, perhaps because they were bigger in relation to other molecules,25 did not seem to pass to my brain through the cell membranes and therefore I experienced no apparent emotional impact. While collaborating with people from different disciplines and with different expertise in a workshop setting, we artists came up with ideas, involving interaction between the world and organisms, and scientists contributed with knowledge regarding functions of organisms. While working together, we evoked alternative paths to experience the world. For example, if we wanted to help our organism break down lactose, we could produce and ingest homemade yogurt with specified bacterial strains. In addition, by working with other people, we came up with solutions to avoid using synthetic oxytocin to experience social bonding. Within the project, the consumption of yogurt with Lactobacillus reuteri and Streptococcus thermophilus was not the goal but rather an option to be tried at home or in a gallery.26 Moreover, the project may still be contemplated, reimplemented, or imagined while looking at its documentation and reading the step-by-step instruction sets for the experiments (see Annexes I and II).

25 For more information, see https://www.worldofmolecules.com/emotions/oxytocin.htm (accessed 2 May 2020). 26 Unfortunately, there is no record of whether participants practiced the isolation of bacterial strains individually outside the workshops.

309

shared habitats

Contributions by Others Although I developed a new artwork, my artistic role in the workshop series was rather of a mediator between the participants of the workshop, the technologies, the microorganisms, and so on. My role was activated during the collaborative work, spread over the duration of three months. On one hand, I explained how to use tools for the isolation and culturing of bacteria, and, on the other hand, I explained how microorganisms may affect our ecology. Then came the collaborative experience of both isolating and cultivating microorganisms, discussion of the issues raised, and working on new ideas. During the term of the collaborative work, the participants and I executed three workshops with 15 participants, who developed ideas, some of which turned into further artworks. For the sake of variety, I would like to briefly reflect on three works: Narrative to Biochemistry of Emotions by Hege Tapio, N by Bon Alog, and Initial Thoughts on Musical/Sonic Potential Regarding Emotional States by Juozapas Švelnys. All the works emerged from different circumstances, but, at the same time, they were developed while reflecting on the input from other workshop participants. As a concrete suggestion to feed into the workshop, Hege Tapio introduced the idea of collaborative work on an interface that could measure oxytocin in humans.27 Additionally, the problem proposed was described by Tapio as follows: “In a contemporary society that favors artificial intelligence, algorithms, logic, and analytical processes, it seems important to reintroduce the concept of biology. Humans are built to function on a biological level – where our interaction with the world is run by a mutual response where biochemistry triggers emotional responses and vice versa.” As in the earlier quotation by Dusseiller, here I also see the need to recon27 For more information, see the documentation of the project at http://howto-things.com/Biochemistry_of_emotions#Hege_Tapio (accessed 17 April 2020).

310

Other Encounters

Fig. 2. Bon Alog, N, 2019. Installation view at Alt lab, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Vilius Vaitiekūnas

sider the relationship to the ecosystem, or, to be more precise, the world – our umwelt. Differently from Dusseiller, Tapio proposes taking a look into biochemical reactions. Although the speculative design of the device to measure the amount of oxytocin was developed, further discussions pushed the project into a broader scope – the overarching topic dealing with senses, and by extension, empathy. Having developed parallel work around the human brain’s response to the Lactobacillus reuteri bacterial species, Tapio ultimately dropped the idea of an interface that measures the amount of oxytocin in blood, and continued developing her idea about empathy, which could be controlled by the consumption of yogurt with specific bacterial species. So the collaborative work opened up new horizons to Tapio for the development of the project.

311

shared habitats The installation N by Bon Alog (Fig. 2) reflects upon the effect of our microbiome on our wellbeing.28 The DIY ingestible capsule was to include Lactobacillus spp., vitamin D, and the concentrated fiber, vitamins, and minerals available in dried fruits. The composition of different components in a capsule may boost the immune system (Lactobacillus spp.),29 invoke a positive mood (vitamin D),30 or improve blood pressure (dried fruits).31 Further reflections on the input and discussions of those reflections led Alog to speculate on playful forms of the capsules, which could potentially trigger positive thoughts and be helpful to humans experiencing a bad mood or fatigue. The artwork suggests a critical reevaluation of the benefits of our microbiome and critical reflection on the pharmaceutical industry’s manufacturing of standardized supplements. Altogether, the collaborative process pushed the realization of the artwork a step further, from speculation to a prototype of a consumable product. The participative installation Initial Thoughts on Musical/Sonic Potential Regarding Emotional States by Juozapas Švelnys (Fig. 3) is yet another 28 For more information, see the documentation of the project at http://howto-things.com/Lactose_intolerant%3F_Let%27s_employ_bacteria!#Bon_Alog (accessed 18 April 2020). 29 See, for example, Carolina Maldonado Galdeano & Gabriela Perdigón, “The Probiotic Bacterium Lactobacillus casei Induces Activation of the Gut Mucosal Immune System through Innate Immunity,” Clinical and Vaccine Immunology 13, 2 (2006): 219–26, https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FCVI.13.2.219-226.2006. 30 See, for example, Maria A. Choukri, Tamlin S. Conner, Jill J. Haszard, et al., “Effect of Vitamin D Supplementation on Depressive Symptoms and Psychological Wellbeing in Healthy Adult Women: A Double-Blind Randomised Controlled Clinical Trial,” Journal of Nutritional Science 7, e23 (2018), https://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2Fjns.2018.14. 31 See, for example, Pablo Hernández-Alonso, Lucía Camacho-Barcia, Mònica Bulló, et al., “Nuts and Dried Fruits: An Update of Their Beneficial Effects on Type 2 Diabetes,” Nutrients 9, 7 (2017): 673, https://doi.org/10.3390/nu9070673.

312

Other Encounters idea that demonstrates how collaborative work may critically reflect upon conventional methodologies used by science.32 The artwork features a laptop showing two sine waves being played in different frequencies. Next to the monitor, there is a bottle and glasses with a kombucha drink to be consumed by the visitors. On a conceptual level, the artwork speculates about the impact of sound on the release of oxytocin in the brain. In the artwork description, the author presents two cases: listening to the prerecorded music, and performing a sound piece with other people. While in both cases the release of oxytocin was assumed, the release in one case was triggered by listening and in the other case by performing with others. Being unable to perform collaborative singing, Švelnys chose to replace singing with the consumption of kombucha, which naturally fit with the public presentation of the workshop results. Although, at first glance, both types of objects (the laptop and the glasses of kombucha) are not of the same nature, the social experience triggered by the release of oxytocin in the brain (through listening to the music and consumption of kombucha) is in effect. Aside from the input from other participants during the workshop, in this artwork, the collaborative experience unfolded through socializing, listening to the music, and the release of chemical compounds in the brain. To conclude, all these works were developed while listening to, reflecting on, and discussing input from other workshop participants. I suppose that my input for Tapio’s work was the idea that we may control our behavior (and, at the same time, the release of oxytocin in the brain) while controlling (and, at the same time, feeling) our microbiome, and not necessarily by using technological tools to measure it. I also believe that Alog was influenced by my idea of the possibility of controlling our

32 For more information, see the documentation of the project, available at http://howto-things.com/Biochemistry_of_emotions#Juozapas_.C5.A0velnys (accessed 18 April 2020).

313

shared habitats

Fig. 3. Juozapas Švelnys, Initial Thoughts on Musical/Sonic Potential Regarding Emotional States, 2019. Installation view at Alt lab, Vilnius, 2019. Photo: Linas Tamošaitis

mood with homemade consumables. Finally, Švelnys was swayed by the idea of consuming homemade foods to trigger the release of oxytocin in his participative installation about social bonding. Working in collaboration with other people within a shared framework such as “Hackteria’s Empathetic Taxidermia Lab” or in the collaborative workshops at Alt lab may result in the realization of new ideas or even complex artworks such as those by Bon Alog or Juozapas Švelnys. The mediated ideas, the know-how about the isolation of microorganisms, and the consumption of symbiotic cultures could also lead to experiencing symbiosis with microorganisms through a change in physical wellbeing. Such frameworks suggest the shifted role of the artist, from being a centralized author to becoming a mediator between participants, technologies, and other organisms. In addition, as part of the artwork, participants, technologies, and other organisms can contribute to the artwork with their input.

314

Other Encounters

Annex I. Experiment #1. Isolating the Lactobacillus spp. bacterial strain This experiment introduces the isolation of the Lactobacillus spp. bacterial strain from yogurt purchased from the supermarket. Some Lactobacillus bacterial strains that live in the human gut – for example, Lactobacillus reuteri – may upregulate oxytocin,33 a hormone that plays a role in social bonding and sexual reproduction. To prepare 150 ml of the medium, we will need: Equipment:

Ingredients:

• pot

• yogurt with Lactobacillus spp. bacteria (commonly found in Greek yogurt)

• electric stove • 2 flasks

• 7.8 g MRS broth34

• 5 petri dishes

• 2 g agar

• pressure cooker

• 200 ml distilled water

• incubator • refrigerator • pipette (ml or µl) • paper clip • 70% alcohol for sterilization of your desk and tools Steps: 1. Suspend MRS powder in 150 ml of distilled water. Divide the solution into two flasks, one with 100 ml for use with the agar medium and another with 50 ml for the liquid medium. 33 Bernard J. Varian et al., “Microbial Lysate Upregulates Host Oxytocin,” Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 61 (March 2017): 36–49, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2016.11.002. 34 You can get the broth, for example, at Merck KGaA, https://www.sigmaaldrich. com/catalog/product/sial/69966?lang=de®ion=DE.

315

shared habitats 2. Add 2 g of agar to the flask with 100 ml of distilled water. To ensure homogeneity, shake the flask well before use. 3. Mix well and heat with frequent agitation until the medium comes to a boil. 4. Sterilize by cooking in the pressure cooker for 15 minutes. At the same time, sterilize the liquid MRS broth. 5. Cool down the agar medium enough that you can handle the flask with your hands, then pour it into five petri dishes, each up to approximately 5 mm, and leave until the medium stiffens. 6. Add about 1 ml of yogurt into 10 ml of sterile water. Be sure that the water is no warmer than body temperature. Shake well. 7. Take a drop of diluted yogurt with a pipette and release it onto the first stiffened petri dish. Distribute evenly. Dilute the diluted yogurt with 10 ml of sterile water and release onto the second petri dish. Repeat this action two more times. Leave one petri dish with no yogurt. 8. Leave the petri dishes in the incubator at 37 °C for 2–3 days until you see the formed bacterial colonies. 9. Inspect your bacterial colonies. Take a sample of Lactobacillus and transfer it to a fresh petri dish with stiffened medium. Use a sterile paper clip to distribute the sample around the petri dish. Leave for 2–3 days in the incubator until the colonies have formed. 10. Take some biomass from the grown bacterial colonies and mix it into the liquid MRS broth. Leave the bacteria in the incubator at 37 °C for a couple of days to colonize the medium. 11. Store the liquid MRS broth with the bacterial strains in the refrigerator at 2–8 °C.

316

Other Encounters

Annex II. Experiment #2. Preparation of yogurt with Lactobacillus bacterial strain In this experiment, we will prepare the required amount of yogurt and use it for therapeutic purposes, and, in so doing, we will set up bidirectional communication between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract, the so-called “brain-gut axis.” The brain-gut axis is a complex system that includes the vagus nerve, which connects the emotional and cognitive areas of the brain with gut functions. To prepare 3.5 liters of yogurt, we will need: Equipment:

Ingredients:

• pot

• 3.5 liters cow milk, any fat percentage

• 3-liter jar

• bacterial colonies in a liquid medium (see Experiment #1 in Annex 1)

• electric stove • incubator Steps:

1. Pasteurize the milk by cooking it in a pot for 15 minutes. 2. Cool it down to room temperature. 3. Transfer the milk to the 3-liter jar. 4. Add the liquid culture with Lactobacillus spp. bacterial strain to the milk. Mix evenly. 5. Leave the milk in the incubator at 37 °C for 2–3 days, after which point it will be yogurt that is ready to eat. 6. Consume the yogurt daily for one week, 0.5 liter per day.

317

Cultural Studies Gabriele Klein

Pina Bausch's Dance Theater Company, Artistic Practices and Reception May 2020, 440 p., pb., col. ill. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-5055-6 E-Book: PDF: 29,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-5055-0

Elisa Ganivet

Border Wall Aesthetics Artworks in Border Spaces 2019, 250 p., hardcover, ill. 79,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4777-8 E-Book: PDF: 79,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4777-2

Krista Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern, Ian Alan Paul (eds.)

Moving Images Mediating Migration as Crisis May 2020, 320 p., pb., col. ill. 40,00 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4827-0 E-Book: available as free open access publication PDF: ISBN 978-3-8394-4827-4

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-publishing.com

Cultural Studies Andreas Sudmann (ed.)

The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence Net Politics in the Era of Learning Algorithms 2019, 334 p., pb., col. ill. 49,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4719-8 E-Book: available as free open access publication PDF: ISBN 978-3-8394-4719-2

Jocelyne Porcher, Jean Estebanez (eds.)

Animal Labor A New Perspective on Human-Animal Relations 2019, 182 p., hardcover 99,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4364-0 E-Book: PDF: 99,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4364-4

Ramón Reichert, Mathias Fuchs, Pablo Abend, Annika Richterich, Karin Wenz (eds.)

Digital Culture & Society (DCS) Vol. 4, Issue 1/2018 – Rethinking AI: Neural Networks, Biometrics and the New Artificial Intelligence 2018, 244 p., pb., ill. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4266-7 E-Book: PDF: 29,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4266-1

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-publishing.com

shared habitats

318