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

Abstract

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). For this exhibition, we introduce Mothering Bacteria: A Speculative Forecast of the Body as an Interface (2018), a multichannel artwork with an embedded AI that interacts with bacteria, as it grows in real-time.