As the global elite prepare to abandon their bodies and upload themselves into the virtual beyond, a malfunctioning Empathy A.I. is mistakenly assigned to assist with the procedure, but instead unwittingly inspires a bodily-bacchanal for the ages.
The Summit is an experimental performance written, directed, and designed by Isla Hansen, Tucker Marder—a former SymbioticA artist-in-residence—and Christian Scheider, commissioned by the Guild Hall Center for the Visual and Performing Arts.
Upcoming Performance | Occurs: 31 August + 1-2, 4-8, 9 September 2018 | Guild Hall | East Hampton, US
Image attribute: Candida albicans scanning electron micrograph 2014 Tarsh Bates
What does it mean to be human when we recognise our bodies as multispecies ecologies?
My research explores the intimate and fraught contact zones of biology, aesthetics, culture and care between Homo sapiens and Candida albicans, the yeast commonly known as thrush. C. albicans is one of the hundreds of viral/bacterial/fungal/insect species dwelling in the complex ecology that is the human body. I consider the human body as a queer ecology, a complex and diverse entanglement of relationships between H. sapiens, Candida albicans, other microbes, culture and technology.
Queer ecologies disrupt the mutually constitutive apparatuses of “nature” and “sexuality,” and reconfigure the entanglements of biology, sex, sexuality, intimacy, affiliation, geography, geology, ecology, culture and technology (Sandilands 2016). This figuration enables me to explore how CandidaHomo relationships are constituted and who gets to be at the table, when and where. The human body is a profligate beat of myriad more–than–human sexualities, where human cells and microbes, including C. albicans, replicate, procreate and propagate.
Mas Subramanian and his team actually wanted to test the magnetic and electric properties of manganese oxide, but instead stumbled upon a previously unknown pigment, YInMn Blue. And it’s precisely this shade of blue that adorns the posters announcing this year’s Ars Electronica #Festival and its “Error – The Art of Imperfection” theme. September 6-10, 2018, the focus will be on #mistakes, #fails, #blunders and deviations from the norm. Whether celebrated as a marvelous source of innovation or scorned as the cause of catastrophic accidents, error is the center of attention this year.
This digital time-lapse video of Candida albicans reproducing and changing shape, taken on a live imaging microscope, fills the room, contaminating the architectural space (and any bodies within it) with animate images of Candida albicans cells. The title of this work “Ereignis, Gelassenheit und Lichtung: A love story installation 2015”
combines terms used by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose work redefined understandings of “being-in-the-world.”
