----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Hello everyone, First, I also want to send my best wishes to April and Matt. I have friends and family in the same area, some who had to flee in the middle of the night with nothing more than pajamas and their cat (which, at least, is a thin silver lining). I am saddened for all, humans and nonhumans, dealing with such devastation.
I would like to thank Margaretha for inviting me as a guest to this week. Also thanks to everyone for the wonderful posts with much to consider (terroirism, affection, enlivenment, grieving and resistance thereof, turtles and other turtles, listening, learning, and communicating with nonhuman collaborators…the list goes on). Just. Wow. As Margaretha’s introduction suggests, I am interested in feeling alongside nonhumans, and in the two projects described below I attempt to create experiences that can be shared, in ephemeral and limited ways to be sure, but shared nonetheless between humans and nonhumans. I believe that feeling alongside nonhumans is a powerful counterpoint to thinking alongside of nonhumans and can help situate perspective in important ways. Biolesce is a series of interactive sculptures made with bioluminescent algae, or dinoflagellates. When physically moved the algae emits a bright flash of light. I incorporate biosensors for human audience that trigger motors that move the algae causing a bioluminescent response. For instance, one iteration used three ‘stations’ comprised of a bottle of seawater and algae embedded with motors connected to a heartbeat sensor in each. The human audience members placed their finger on the sensor, and then the algae lit up in in time to their pulse. I tried to make an intimate experience between human and algae, featuring different embodied processes. After vowing to never again work with something that requires complete darkness (more on this in a moment) I turned my attention to another embodied process: fermentation. Fermentum, a project that always seems to be in progress, uses sensors to track the fermentation process of kimchi and sauerkraut and then sonify the data. I like to say that it’s allowing the kimchi to sing, but more accurately it’s a soundtrack of bacterial individuation and environmental change. My goal is to create a sonic experience that allows a human audience to hear an ongoing, embodied process (bacteria changing their environment) and to recognize it as a rich individuation between bacteria and milieu. It is far from complete, and I’m currently working on collaborating with a lab to identify probiotic strains in my ferments as a basis for a more complex soundtrack. Both projects are predicated on the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Gilbert Simondon. Thinkers who have helped me understand experience as a non-cognitive aspect of the world, open to all entities (bacteria, single-celled algae, and Arduino microcontrollers). They have also helped me understand experience as a unfolding process, tied to a nexus of sensations, or prehensions, (Whitehead) between individual and milieu (Simondon). Simondon claims that individuals and milieus are co-emergent, he writes of them as dyads, and that the world must be understood not from the point of view of individuals, but through the processes of individuation, from which individuals and milieus emerge. Thus, interactive works based on biological processes, such as fermentation, are moments to experience an ongoing individuation, perhaps this is an enlivenment of a biological process through technical means. That’s a gross oversimplification of the contributions of both of these thinkers, but hopefully enough to stress an emphasis on experience and feeling. Feeling is key. I have returned to the dark, so to speak, as I and another faculty member are leading a research-through-design project with a small number of undergraduates. We will collectively build a bioluminescent ‘display’ and the students will work in small teams to create visualizations for the bespoke display. I’m now teaching in an engineering students, and my practice is both intriguing and bewildering to many of the students, but just last night we had a deep conversation about the limits of quantification (important when making a display that will be inexact!), and the concepts of abstraction and representation in the context of ambient displays. It was deeply gratifying when a student commented at the end of our hour-long conversation that it felt like we were in a philosophy class. We then went on to make seawater and propagate algae for our display. When finished with our prototype, the students will come up with design proposals for bioluminescent interactions and technologies, to use their experience to dream of a different future. It’s my first step at pushing them toward a speculative design practice. I hope they too will come to understand feeling alongside nonhumans as key to their futures. Thanks for having me- tyler Documentation of both projects can be found at my website: www.tylersfox.com _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
