Mothering Bacteria installed @ C&C | DIS 2019

An iteration of our ongoing project Mothering Bacteria is currently installed at Ecologies of Transformation, an exhibition for the 2019 ACM conferences Creativity and Cognition (C&C) and Design Interactive Systems (DIS).

Mothering Bacteria: A Speculative Forecast of the Body as an Interface (2018)

Bodies are interfaces, thresholds, vestibules, and gateways capable of hosting, carrying and birthing other life forms. Occupying indeterminable positions, interfacing with multidimensional borders, cultures, media, and ecologies; mediating internal and external inputs/relations – bodies feel vibrations, perceive and collect information, remediate, respond, negotiate expectations, and make connections through the limbs, eyes, ears, skin, cells and beyond. Scholars, critics, and theorists describe this complex interfacing as a multispecies relationship consisting of deep histories, continually re-forming and transitioning into something new (Dooren et al., 2016). What Eben Kirksey deems as the microorganism, Wolbachia, a post-human actor that meshes a variety of species together that exist in different time frames and realities (Kirksey, 2018).

Mothering Bacteria: A Speculative Forecast of the Body as an Interface (2018), is an adaptation of an ongoing research project that combines bodies, bacteria, performance, and embedded computational, AI tools in real-time. Artist’s prOphecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, and Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda conceptualized, performed and edited the initial piece. The work provides a speculative forecast of future time in which algorithms demarcate the boundaries between the biological and the digital. As AI shapes every aspect of modern human life, computational algorithms can no longer be considered separate from the technologies that uphold their present global, political and cultural systems.

More inforamtion on the show: https://ecologiesoftransformation.ucsd.edu/