Public 59: Interspecies Communication by PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture Ideas

INTERSPECIES Communication Edited by Meredith Tromble and Patricia Olynyk

PUBLIC 59

Interspecies Communication

Table of ConTenTs 4

InTeRsPeCIes CoMMUnICaTIon an Introduction and a Provocation Meredith Tromble

CReaTURe CoMfoRTs anD THe TIes THaT bInD Patricia Olynyk

anIMals THaT lIVe In THe MIRRoR on Colonial bestiaries and Interspecies architecture Christopher Gutierrez

MIXInG IT UP Primates, Robots, and other Relations A Conversation with scientist Deborah Forster and artist Rachel Mayeri Meredith Tromble

InCUbaToR lab Where artists Collaborate with life Jennifer Willet

Zone of InHIbITIon Relating to the single Cell through speculative Performance Practice Louise Mackenzie

WaYs In? PRoCessInG MessaGes ReCeIVeD Kathy High

anIMal eYes Meeting the look of the Video Game animal Nicholas Hobin

sUbVeRsIVe soMaToloGY embodied Communication in the early Modern stag Hunt Shannon Lambert

[WHaT’s HaPPenInG?] I’M feelInG eMoTIonal Christina Battle

104

THe ConVeRsaTIon feedback structures, Ways of Knowing, and neurodivergence Allison Leigh Holt

114

A CACOPHONY OF SIGNALS Woodpecker Sexbots, Squirrel NORAD, and Other Robotic Systems Ian Ingram

126

INTER ALIA Aliens and AI Rita Raley and Russell Samolsky

138

PREINDIVIDUATION, INDIVIDUATION, AND BACTERIA Revisiting Gilbert Simondon’s Philosophy through the Hologenome Charissa N. Terranova

149

FERMENTING COMMUNICATIONS Fermentation Praxis as Interspecies Communication Maya Hey

158

BEING OTHER THAN WE ARE… Heather Barnett

170

PLURIPOTENT SELVES AND THE PERFORMANCE OF STEM CELLS Jennifer Johung

179

UMWELT MICROBIANA Joel Ong and Mick Lorusso

190

ON TALKING TO BEES Cameron Cartiere EXHIBITION REVIEWS

200

Same Vernon, Rage Wave Elizabeth Handley-Derry

204

Elvira Santamaria, Salt Cartographies II Matthew Mancini BOOK REVIEW

207

Ricky Varghese Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies, Damon R. Young

210

CONTRIBuTORS

Rachel Mayeri, stills from Primate Cinema: Apes as Family (2011). Original movie made for chimpanzees (opposite), with chimps' responses to the film at the Edinburgh Zoo (above).

— MEREDITH TROMBLE —

INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION AN INTRODuCTION AND A PROVOCATION

WE STuTTER AND STumBlE

Let it be said at the outset that our project, our topic of “interspecies communication,” is a mess. It falls apart at the beginning, in the middle, at any conceivable “end.” How are we to distinguish, with our new awareness of the microbiome, among “species?” Are the dynamic entities we attempt to grasp and hold within that term discrete enough to speak of “inter-”change? Even if we affirm our opening concepts as imperfect but useful, and step into the realm of “communication,” the ground crumbles before us. The many relevant sciences, from primatology to marine bioacoustics and bacterial quorum sensing, offer a swarm of different ideas about what “communication” might be. Turning to our lived experience, we ask how an exchange of thoughts, feelings, or information between a human and nonhuman can be verified, when humans rarely understand each other? These conundrums—genuine puzzles for a feeling thinker—are surfacing with frequency in the work of contemporary artists, as attuning to the unsaid, the unsung, the unregarded (the unconscious) of our culture, they do their work of pushing us from the known towards the unknown.

In this issue, artists exercise the freedom of contemporary art to question, to be ardent, inexpert, and bold, and to stutter and stumble toward meetings with other minds through interspecies puzzlement, rejection, and serendipitous connection. An equally lively group of scholars offers concepts that open the door to practice, with that old saw about “the difference between practice and theory being greater in practice than in theory” hovering over the enterprise. Together, we embrace confusion, productive failure, and appreciation for the gap between our notions of the world and the world itself. That is, as part of understanding ourselves as enmeshed in the world rather than in charge of it. Noting that the digital and robotic have become screens upon which are projected human fears of losing control of the world (whether or not that control ever existed), we extend the notion of “species” to digital, robotic, and artificially intelligent entities. And according the omnipresence of microbes more weight than their means of reproduction, we add them to our expanded spectrum of species with whom we just might communicate. The issue’s route into theory is through making or investigating images. This route wanders along messy lines of thought, since images mash together different kinds of cultural materials. Unfolding ideas from images, one encounters marbled layers of disparate knowledge worlds. Bristles of biology poke through a skin of art history to tickle a blob of information theory, or a speck of literature glints from a dusting of evolutionary theory on a mechanical structure. This can arouse suspicion in a reader who knows a great deal about one discipline or another. Yet, messy togetherness is how ideas live together in the world, where humans whose knowledge is imperfect must, despite those imperfections, act. Art captures and stores such imperfect amalgams of knowledge in all their monstrous entanglements. However, these atypical constructs may also be atypically fertile, producing new insights despite their strangeness. Artists know that “rigour” is a vector, traveling toward some particular set of values. Rigour in art does not always equate with disciplinary exactitude, as communication among species does not always equate—may not ever equate—with anything resembling human-to-human exchange. RETHINKINg, Of NECESSITy

They [species] have no absolute meaning, but are merely stages in the classification, or systematic categories, and of relative importance only. —Ernst Haeckel, Species Concepts in Biology Our extended approach to “species” goes against the flow of contemporary biology, in which genetic analysis describes living bodies and their evolutionary histories with new authority, transforming understandings inherited from Haeckel’s day. Yet, his insight that classification is a tool to think with, relative to one’s goals, remains. An elastic and generous approach to the term “species” serves our purpose, which is to knit our culture more lovingly into the web of life. We wish, furthermore, to knit with needles from our own “Western” heritage, with its conflicted “life science” that has been so intertwined with the objectification and killing of non-human beings (and the objectification and killing of humans considered nonhuman.) While valuing the life ways of human cultures who, in their own terms, have contemporary, active forms of interspecies communication, we know that cultures run so deeply that they cannot be simply transferred from one group of people to another.

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We must grapple with our own fissures, alienations, and fears on our own terms if we wish to enrich our encounters with other kinds, as a necessary part of becoming adept in what Donna Haraway calls “the arts of living on a damaged planet.”1 The damage Haraway refers to takes ever-more visible shapes. At the time of writing, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released a massively researched report warning that we have only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5°C, beyond which the world we know will vanish. Biogeographer Debra Roberts, a participant in the report, is quoted as saying, “It’s a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now.”2 Accompanying a news story about the report was an article headlined “Overwhelmed by climate change? Here’s what you can do.”3 Not one of the practical suggestions for taking climate action involved talking to animals—or robots or microbes—or even mentioned art. Yet, at this moment for action, we have an urgent and terrible need to imagine our lives differently. Part of that re-imagination is emotional: connecting with the other beings around us, nurturing our own sense of care and consideration, and maintaining the vision of making a future for all species. And part of that re-imagination is building reserves of hope, humour, and play with which to meet the difficulties ahead—upping our game in the face of failure and finding the stamina to try anew. Such re-imaginings are the territory of art. CARE, CONfINES

[Humans are] mammals who talk too much. —Lynn Margulis, “The Conscious Cell” We are social animals, and our sociality does not stop with our own kind. We talk to our plants, our pets, and our cars. Given our propensity for discourse it would be strange if we did not want to exchange with other species. We do. In a 2015 essay titled “A Longing in Our Hearts: Interspecies Communication in Contemporary Art,” I wrote of the widespread fascination with animals, evidenced in billions of Internet animal video views, as an echo of a lost sublime—the long aeons when we were primarily companions or competitors to the species that co-evolved with us, not their exterminators.4 This fascination with animals is not only about looking. A significant number of those Internet animal videos are directly and emotionally concerned with interspecies relationships conducted with varied forms of communication.5 Because most humans talk a lot, we want other species to talk back to us, forgetting that even among our own kind, more communication is nonverbal than verbal.6 Artists and scholars throughout this issue use words to point to experiences that exceed words, discussing strategies for decentering “talk” in order to better access other forms of communication. Key strategies include empathy— imagining what the other is experiencing from their point of view; self-deprecating humour; and an expanded notion of “listening,” describing various forms of active attentiveness to the other. If entities will not talk back to us in the way we are used to, perhaps we may exchange with them by re-imagining our own habits and possibilities. The desire for interspecies exchange erupts even in locations that are sculpted from the get-go by a culture of human dominance: the laboratory and the zoo. In one set of essays in this issue, artist

Patricia Olynyk considers the upwelling desire for interspecies contact in a lab, an impulse that beneficially undermines objectifying animals for “scientific” purposes. Communication scholar Christopher Gutierrez discusses the disappointment that ensued when an architect failed to communicate with—indeed, even to consider—his animal clients at the London Zoo. Artist Rachel Mayeri and cognitive scientist Deborah Forster describe their collaboration and the development of Primate Cinema, including a drama of chimpanzee life enacted by humans for chimpanzees in the Edinburgh zoo. Bioartist Jennifer Willet reworks the concept “laboratory” to encompass empathy with the species studied therein. Filmmaker Louise Mackenzie’s workshop and film script enact empathy through imagined human/microbial conversation about bioengineering. New media artist Kathy High contributes a discussion of her decades of artwork on communication with non-human others, spanning meso- and micro-scales, and emotions from fond to caustic, always with a degree of humour. PuRSuIT, PuzzlEmENT

…when the mirror does not reflect our own likeness, it does not prove there is nothing to perceive. —Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State When Clastres wrote the words above, his point of reference was decidedly human. His thought, nonetheless, is apt. Bedeviled by the conviction that human kind is special and “better” than other kinds, traditional scientific views of species often located that specialness in language. The assertion that language makes us human may be half-true, but it shines a blinding light on our communicative potential, washing out the sight of other means of exchange. Even as evidence is reported that “human” evolution shows evidence of substantial mixing with “Neanderthal” and “Denisovan” “species,” the framing belief is often that language distinguishes us from our ancestors. A quote from a recent National Geographic publication betrays this frame at work: By comparing the genomes of apes, Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans, scientists hope to identify DNA segments unique to the different groups. Early results already suggest modern humans underwent genetic changes involved with brain function and nervous system development, including ones involved in language development, after splitting from Neanderthals and Denisovans. Identifying and understanding these genetic tweaks could help explain why our species survived and thrived while our close relatives died out.7 Yet, if some contemporary bodies with the brain function and linguistic capabilities we assign to “modern humans” bear Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, why do we not frame ourselves as descendants of the Neanderthals and Denisovans, in the same way that we refer to birds as “modern dinosaurs?” Why choose the language of partition over the language of continuity? Let us not forget that even in-species linguistic communication has a befuddlingly high ratio of noise to signal; the

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A player confronts a wolf. Screenshot by Nicholas Hobin from Far Cry Primal (Guerrilla Games, 2017).

imprecise relationship between language and communication, biblically symbolized by the Tower of Babel, lives on in our daily lives. Who among us can claim perfect communication with even our closest human interlocutors? Opening this subject, another group of essays plays with the subtleties and tricky instabilities of communication, intra- or interspecies. English scholar Nicholas Hobin investigates the act of looking at animals and the experience of being looked at in return as they appear in and are transformed by video games. Scholar of English literature Shannon Lambert reaches back to the sixteenth century to describe the purposeful looking and “subversive somatology” of the hunt—an instructive reminder that “communication” is not morally positive or even neutral, but at times most definitively deceptive and dangerous to its targets. Artists Christina Battle and Allison Leigh Holt reflect on partial and fraught intra-species exchange, Battle considering the ways in which GIFs with human or animal imagery are used to patch flaws in human digital communiqués, and Holt offering a vision of communication as feedback informed by her work teaching media to neurodivergent students. Artist and roboticist Ian Ingram discusses his efforts to interpret animal languages robotically, wryly reporting on a host of species-specific challenges. His communicative experiences with Earthly species are no less strange than the imaginary of alien communication discussed by English scholars Rita Raley and Russell Samolsky, who interrogate work by several artists in light of the growing presence of artificial intelligences.

Artists Joel Ong and Mick Lorusso harvest water from rapids in Niagara, NY in 2018.

mANy, ONE

…signs are not exclusively human affairs. All living beings sign. We humans are therefore at home with the multitude of semiotic life. Our exceptional status is not the walled compound we thought we once inhabited. —Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think The doors to what Kohn calls our “walled compound” are opening. We are not the only beings to sign, nor are we the only tool users. We are also probably not the only creatures to imagine the mental states of other creatures—what is sometimes called “theory of mind.” But we exist at a certain scale and in a certain state of coherence; we do not communicate with microbes or hive minds. Or do we? Could we? In a third group of articles, the authors search for points of contact and exchange with lives that exist beyond the reach of our senses or in changing configurations. Scholar Charissa N. Terranova takes us beyond the “animal,” turning to the philosopher Gilbert Simondon to consider the category-dissolving bodily realities of microbes. Food scholar Maya Hey proposes the common practice of fermentation as a sort of corporeal communication with bacteria, moulds, and yeasts, while artist Heather Barnett takes empathetic communion with slime mould into performance and group practice. Art historian Jennifer Johung describes artist Guy Ben-Ary’s robotic construction, animated by his own, transformed skin cells, while artists Mick Lorusso and Joel Ong present a body of work exploring the exchange between human and microbial bodies in mythic form. Artist Cameron Cartiere gets the last word with her evocative account of working simultaneously with human and bee communities.

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Rachel Mayeri, still from Primate Cinema: Apes as Family (2011).

RIDICulOuS, NECESSARy

The “presence” we recognize in another when we meet in mutuality is something we feel more than something we know, someone we taste rather than someone we use. In mutuality, we sense that inside this other body, there is “someone home,” someone so like ourselves in their essence that we can co-create a shared reality… —Barbara Smuts, “Encounters with Animal Minds” The scholars among you may have noticed that at no point have we carefully defined that most important term for our project, “communication.” In closing, I step out from behind the editorial “we” I share with my co-editor, Patricia Olynyk, with a personal, discursive, and imagistic account of the meanings we gather together in that word—and the meanings we discard. As I sit seeking words, I jump up at regular intervals in response to my old cat’s signals of need. Domestic animals have been loved companions through almost all my years, requiring no theorizing about communication to manage our lives together. These humble, private relationships, made possible by thousands of years of exchange between our species, offer daily opportunities to practice. They are one immediate, lived model for negotiating a shared interspecies reality. What I call communication is the experience of mutuality, emphasizing two-way signaling rather than obedience, although care and command do co-exist. Such mutuality is hard to come by, even interacting with mammals who have faces and eyes and who, mostly, seek my company. When what one of us wants to express exceeds the common signals we have negotiated over time, the other is often confused, misses the meaning, or fails to attend. Given the limitations of interspecies

Meredith Tromble and Dawn Sumner. Still from Dream Vortex 8.2 (2018). Digital video from interactive 3-D programming.

communication, even in these highly favourable circumstances, what is the point of pushing to the exotic extreme, of energizing exchanges with microbes and cells, with wild animals, with technologically-born intelligences? Is it not a ridiculous effort? At this juncture I make a ridiculous move, turning to an image, a video still, from a dream-like sequence that, in my own visual language, encapsulates the dilemma. A spinning vortex, like a hurricane throwing debris, spews forth images: first a human, a male signaling aggression in his mode of dress, a football uniform. A daisy follows, momentarily crowning him; a school of octopuses surges forward threatening to engulf the dominating man and his temporary glory. The still is taken at the moment that the man and the daisy begin to fade away together, leaving the field to invertebrate intelligences. Clue: in a (sort of) humourous piece for the science-fiction magazine, Lightspeed, octopuses were identified as one of the five most likely species to take over the planet after humans, and their environment, are gone.8

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Can you follow—perhaps stumbling, perhaps remixing the words and pictures I have given you with their context—this imagistic communication? Perhaps it will not resolve, perhaps it will stick in your mind and resurface at four a.m., perhaps it will annoy you and be forgotten by tomorrow. Or perhaps you will muse on the potential for communicating with an octopus, wonder if, in this inbetween moment when there are still humans, and daisies, and octopuses co-existing together, it might not be worth seeking mutualities, forming alliances, attending to a wider range of signals as part of striving for a continuing human reality. Perhaps the encounter with the image will simply let you feel the effort that interpreting strange signals involves. That would be enough. The importance of that effort, and what is not at all ridiculous about radically extending our attention to other forms of being, are the tiny changes this effort makes in us. Imagining ourselves into communication with other species exercises our ability to notice, to evaluate, to interpret unfamiliar events. It requires a modest estimation of our own importance, an openness to the desires and interests of other beings. Practicing these human capacities, as they are practiced in every contribution to this issue, is an assured benefit, although even as we submit our compendium of essays on interspecies communication for publication, the work has just barely begun. Perhaps the intraspecies languages that some humans made such a point of pride for our kind are just a starting point; stimulated by the dream of interspecies communication we can access more channels of exchange and richer communicative capacities.

NOTES 1 Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene Staying with the Trouble: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet,” https://vimeo.com/97663518 (accessed 14 October 2018). 2 Jonathan Watts, “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN,” Guardian, October 8, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmarkun-report. 3 Matthew Taylor and Adam Vaughan, “Overwhelmed by climate change? Here’s what you can do,” Guardian, October 8, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/climate-change-what-you-cando-campaigning-installing-insulation-solar-panels (accessed 14 October 2018). 4 Meredith Tromble, “A Longing in Their Hearts: Interspecies Communication in Contemporary Art, in Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, eds. Charissa N. Terranova and Meredith Tromble (New York and Milton Park: Routledge, 2017), 467-468. 5 Erica Goode, “Learning from Animal Friendships,” New York Times, January 26, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/science/so-happy-together.html (accessed 8 October 2018). 6 David Matsumoto and Mark G. Frank, Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications (Los Angeles: Sage Publishing, 2013), 12. 7 National Geographic Genographic Project, “Why Am I Denisovan,” National Geographic, 2018. https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/denisovan/ (accessed 8 October 2018). 8 Jeremiah Tolbert, “Five Animals That Will Take Over the Earth After We Eradicate Ourselves,” Lightspeed, Issue 8, January 11, 2011.

PUBLIC 59 Editors for PUBLIC 59: Meredith Tromble and Patricia Olynyk Managing Editor: Shawn Newman Art Reviews Editor: Jim Drobnick Book Reviews Editor: Sara Swain Copy Editor: Nancy Jo Cullen Design: Jennifer de Freitas, Associés Libres Printed in Canada by Deschamps Impression PUBLIC EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE Patricio Dávila, OCAD University Christine Davis, New York Jim Drobnick, OCAD University Sylvie Fortin, New York Saara Liinamaa, University of Guelph Susan Lord, Queen’s University Janine Marchessault, York University PUBLIC EDITORIAL BOARD Ariella Azoulay, Bar Ilan University Ian Balfour, York University Bruce Barber, NSCAD University Vikki Bell, Goldsmiths, University of London Simon Critchley, The New School Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, London Michael Darroch, University of Windsor Maria Fusco, Edinburgh College of Art Monika Kin Gagnon, Concordia University Peggy Gale, Toronto John Greyson, York University Gareth James, University of British Columbia Michelle Kasprzak, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute Nina Möntmann, The Royal Institute of Art Kirsty Robertson, University of Western Ontario Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne Karyn Sandlos, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Johanne Sloan, Concordia University Imre Szeman, University of Alberta Dot Tuer, OCAD University PUBLIC ACCESS ADVISORY BOARD Ron Burnett, Emily Carr University of Art + Design Dick Hebdige, University of California, Santa Barbara Arthur Kroker, University of Victoria Chip Lord, University of California, Santa Cruz Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda, Havana Kaja Silverman, University of Pennsylvania Michael Snow, Toronto Aneta Szylak, Wyspa Institute of Art Peter Weibel, ZKM Akram Zaatari, Beirut

COVER: Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). Still from video.

PUBLIC ACCESS 303 Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts York University, 4700 Keele St Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada public@yorku.ca www.publicjournal.ca Spring 2019/Volume 31 Issue 59 Print ISSN: 0845-4450 Online ISSN: 2048-6928 INDIVIDUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS 1 year (2 issues): $35 2 years (4 issues): $65 Please subscribe at www.publicjournal.ca/subscribe. Back issues are also available on our website. INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS Public is available in both print and electronic formats through Turpin Distribution: +1 860 350 0031 (North America) +44 (0) 1767 604 951 (UK and ROW) custserv@turpin-distribution.com DISTRIBUTION Public is distributed domestically by Magazines Canada and by Central Books in Europe. Content © 2019 Public Access and the authors and artists. Content may not be reproduced without the authorization of Public Access, with the exception of brief passages for scholarly or review purposes. Any opinions suggested or expressed in the images and texts are those of their respective authors. Public is a biannual magazine published by Public Access, a registered Canadian charity (# 13667 9743 RR0001), in association with Intellect Ltd. It is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and York University.

INTERSPECIES Communication Edited by Meredith Tromble and Patricia Olynyk Human and non-human lives are inextricably linked in a welter of being. The artists and scholars in this issue engage the comedies, tragedies, surprises, and satisfactions of interspecies communication,

Contributors:

broadly defined. Energizing our connections with

HEATHER BARNETT

others through conscious communication seems

CHRISTINA BATTLE

irresistible to humans, as social primates. Likewise,

CAMERON CARTIERE

non-human creatures enter the communicative

DEBORAH FORSTER

exchange through vocalization, gesture, touch, and

CHRISTOPHER GUTIERREZ

non-verbal cues. From art projects that imagine

ELIZABETH HANDLEY-DERRY

interspecies dialogues, to lab experiments that

MAYA HEY

produce rhizomatic, non-hierarchical forms of

KATHY HIGH

knowledge, to attempts to connect with microbes

NICHOLAS HOBIN

or alien life, the works presented here enliven

ALLISON LEIGH HOLT

human understanding of interspecies discourse.

IAN INGRAM

Drawing on art, animal studies, anthropology,

JENNIFER JOHUNG

architecture, art history, bioethics, game studies,

SHANNON LAMBERT

neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, robotics, and

MICK LORUSSO

technology studies, this issue of PUBLIC considers

LOUISE MACKENZIE

the negotiation of information exchange among

MATTHEW MANCINI

different forms of embodiment. Each contribution

RACHEL MAYERI

reveals a unique aspect of the aesthetic, social, and

PATRICIA OLYNYK

ethical dimensions of interspecies entwinements.

JOEL ONG RITA RALEY RUSSELL SAMOLSKY CHARISSA N. TERRANOVA

www.publicjournal.ca

MEREDITH TROMBLE RICKY VARGHESE JENNIFER WILLET

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