Cosmos

Cosmos is a short video essay that reflects on the entanglements between humans and non-humans created by Matilda Aslizadeh and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda as part of Mitochondrial Ontologies: Deep Time and the Digital.

The video combines excerpts from Arthur Bradley’s Originary Technicity (2011) with images and sounds generated by humans and non-humans. The text is taken from the chapter Life of Bradley’s book in which he ponders on the evolution of life and technology as one and the same to theorize the concept of technicity. “In the beginning, it was already a machine” (1) Bradley begins to describe the process by which early organisms initiate a complex process of creating and liberating energy that has generated diverse philosophical and metaphorical approaches to understand the relations between machines and organic life. With this video, we ponder on such relations and the deep connections between biological and technological forms of life.

The video consists of an animated selection of images of cultured bacteria from domestic spaces taken from Matilda’s home. The images were shot with a microscopic camera and then edited and enhanced using photo and video editing software. The sound composition was created by using image-to-sound and text-to-speech software to sonify the images and voice the text.

The use of these digital tools makes us reflect and question the ways in which digital tools (algorithms), bacteria and humans understand what we as humans call “images and sound.” What does an image-to-sound software see in order to translate the image to sound? What does text-to-speech software read to voice the text? What emerges from working with these agencies (bacteria, digital and human) in an artwork?  Is there a possibility of working outside an anthropocentric framework or is working with these agencies the only way in which new realities can emerge?

Mitochondrial Ontologies: Deep Time and the Digital is an ongoing collaborative project which uses the concept of the mitochondria as a metaphor to explore the female body as a generative host of human and non-human life.  The workshops aimed to build a collective repertoire of butoh-inspired movements to choreograph a live performance to generate audio and visual records to develop an AI-driven video installation as the basis for Mitochondrial Ontologies.  In parallel, each participating artist recorded audio reflections, images of growing bacteria, poetry, and movements to develop other choreographies. These resources were used to create additional projects and foster collaborations between the participants. The workshops became rich environments, hosts of energies, affects, ideas and resources that have inspired symbiotic interactions between the participants.