Bio-Digital Borders: Bacteria and the Micro Cosmos

The pandemic reminds us that we are all connected, as the circulating non-human virus colonizes countless human bodies across the globe. Bio-Digital Borders: Bacteria and the Micro Cosmos (2022) is part of an ongoing collaborative exploration by artists pr0phecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, and Steve DiPaola that speculates about possible futures in which algorithms demarcate the boundaries between the biological and the digital. Combining bacteria imagery grown from local natural sites, performance, poetic stanzas, and custom-built AI systems, in Bio-Digital Borders the artists continue to explore the agential interplay between computational systems and the biological and geological systems that uphold and weave through them.

Since 2018, pr0phecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, and Steve DiPaola have collaborated in the production of a series of artworks and research-creation projects that explore the creative uses of machine learning, both practically and theoretically. Combining their diverse backgrounds as scholars, cognitive scientists, and visual artists with a particular focus on video, sound, performance, and computational creativity, they are interested in developing immersive experiences informed by feminist theories. They are attentive to the rapid developments in technology and the constant challenges these developments pose to the boundaries between the computational and the biological.