<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Dear Norie,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Thanks for the great connections to both the Algae Opera and your own microbiotic grumblings. </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">I have read about the Algae Opera, and would really love to see it live. I think reframing our own autonomic processes of breathing and digesting as collaborative endeavors is a powerful move (production of our oxygen is obviously reliant on other actors, and so too is our digestion). I don't think I've successfully been able to do this in my work yet, but it is always on my mind. </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Tyler</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 6:41 PM, Norie Neumark <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:norie5@mac.com" target="_blank">norie5@mac.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div style="word-wrap:break-word">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">Hello Tyler and everyone</span></p><p class="m_4489676890390771846p1"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">What
a great post, Tyler, and wonderful to hear about your work. Perhaps you know about the algae
opera by Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta? </span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">(<a href="http://www.burtonnitta.co.uk/algaeopera.html)" target="_blank">http://www.burtonnitta.co.<wbr>uk/algaeopera.html)</a>.
</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">I
haven’t seen it myself but read about it and accessed it online and was enchanted. Again, apologies
for being lazy (if this is really bad net etiquette, let me know!) as I just put in an excerpt about the work from my <i>Voicetracks</i>
book:</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"> <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span></span><span style="text-indent:36pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">Breath also connects us to the place
through which it resonates and the </span><span style="text-indent:36pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt">others in that place and in the
shared medium of air. It not only connects </span><span style="text-indent:36pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt">people, <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>intersubjectively, it also
connects people to animals and things, </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt"> voicing the connections between
breath and the natural environment. I </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">listen to this in </span><i style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">The Algae <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>Opera</i><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">
of artists BurtonNitta (Michael Burton and </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">Michiko Nitta), for example, which
literally breathes life into the natural </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">environment, giving voice to the
<span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>relationship between human breath and </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">plant life on our planet. In this
work, it is an opera singer’s copious voiced </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">breath that literally breathes life
into algae. <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>Masked in a specially designed </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">piece of biotechnology, an algae
headdress, the opera singer, the algae, the</span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt"> audience and I (watching
documentation) form a strange <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>relationship, a </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">curious assemblage. The carbon
dioxide in her breath feeds the algae, which </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">later will be fed to the audience,
so that they can literally “taste her <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>song.” </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;text-indent:36pt"><font size="3"> </font></span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:12pt;text-indent:36pt">In </span><i style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:12pt;text-indent:36pt">The Algae Opera</i><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:12pt;text-indent:36pt">, the head
mask, attached to tubing which channels the</span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:12pt;text-indent:36pt"> breath to an algae tank, is a
strange mixture of a Greek mask, a persona, <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span></span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">and a beautiful lunglike filigree
that looks like a seahorse. The singer feels </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">part sea creature herself as she
intones her algae opera. I listen to the voice </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">as medium <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>here, life-giving medium,
medium for life. Meanwhile the other </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">sense of medium merges into the
undertones as, medium-like, the singer </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">crosses an ether and <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>connects me to
another life form. And when the audience </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">eats the algae, I sense that that
they are actually ingesting the singer’s </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">voice. In an odd way, the work <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>makes
me think about John Baldessari’s </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">1972 video of teaching a plant the
alphabet. As far as I know (I wonder if </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">anyone ever followed up with those
plants?), that <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>work was more humorous</span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt"> </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">and conceptual than literal, in
contrast to the literal relationships </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">between plant life and voice that
animate works made after the new <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>materialist </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">turn. And it is with new materialist
ears that I encounter </span><i style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">The Algae </i><i style="text-indent:36pt"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Opera </span></i><span style="text-indent:36pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">as
it provokes a listening to breath between the human and </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt;text-indent:36pt">nonhuman—<span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>opening an awareness of the
vibrancy of breath and the productiveness </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt">of its connections. It voices and
breathes life into a sense of intersubjectivity beyond the <span class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"> </span>human.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif"> </span><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt">Speaking of Whitehead and fermentation and guts,
your post set thinking about my amazing acupuncturist, Mattie Sempert, who is a
Whitehead scholar (part of the Sense Lab in Montreal) and essayist as well as
acupuncturist — she is writing a book of essays about the entanglement of all
of these. Anyway, her “twirling fingers” as she feels my gut to sense where to
needle are in-touch with the life that my gut tspeak to her – attuning her to what’s
happening throughout my whole body(/mind). It’s an amazing collaboration and as
the needles start to work, my stomach gurgles appreciation and joy.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt">best</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt">Norie</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/oDLrBgc315WNF8?domain=out-of-sync.com" style="font-family:'Times New Roman',serif;font-size:11pt" target="_blank">www.out-of-sync.com</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:'Times New Roman',serif">
<a href="https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/AG1dBvT0YaEbiE?domain=workingworms.net" target="_blank">workingworms.net</a><br>
<a href="https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/38LEBkSqmERMtY?domain=unlikely.net.au" target="_blank">unlikely.net.au</a> <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<div><blockquote type="cite"><div>On 13 Oct 2017, at 5:19 AM, Tyler Fox <<a href="mailto:tylersfox@gmail.com" target="_blank">tylersfox@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="m_4489676890390771846Apple-interchange-newline"><div><div>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>Hello everyone,<br><br>First, I also want to send my best wishes to April and Matt. I have<br>friends and family in the same area, some who had to flee in the<br>middle of the night with nothing more than pajamas and their cat<br>(which, at least, is a thin silver lining). I am saddened for all,<br>humans and nonhumans, dealing with such devastation.<br><br>I would like to thank Margaretha for inviting me as a guest to this<br>week. Also thanks to everyone for the wonderful posts with much to<br>consider (terroirism, affection, enlivenment, grieving and resistance<br>thereof, turtles and other turtles, listening, learning, and<br>communicating with nonhuman collaborators…the list goes on). Just.<br>Wow.<br><br>As Margaretha’s introduction suggests, I am interested in feeling<br>alongside nonhumans, and in the two projects described below I attempt<br>to create experiences that can be shared, in ephemeral and limited<br>ways to be sure, but shared nonetheless between humans and nonhumans.<br>I believe that feeling alongside nonhumans is a powerful counterpoint<br>to thinking alongside of nonhumans and can help situate perspective in<br>important ways.<br><br>Biolesce is a series of interactive sculptures made with<br>bioluminescent algae, or dinoflagellates. When physically moved the<br>algae emits a bright flash of light. I incorporate biosensors for<br>human audience that trigger motors that move the algae causing a<br>bioluminescent response. For instance, one iteration used three<br>‘stations’ comprised of a bottle of seawater and algae embedded with<br>motors connected to a heartbeat sensor in each. The human audience<br>members placed their finger on the sensor, and then the algae lit up<br>in in time to their pulse. I tried to make an intimate experience<br>between human and algae, featuring different embodied processes.<br><br>After vowing to never again work with something that requires complete<br>darkness (more on this in a moment) I turned my attention to another<br>embodied process: fermentation. Fermentum, a project that always seems<br>to be in progress, uses sensors to track the fermentation process of<br>kimchi and sauerkraut and then sonify the data. I like to say that<br>it’s allowing the kimchi to sing, but more accurately it’s a<br>soundtrack of bacterial individuation and environmental change. My<br>goal is to create a sonic experience that allows a human audience to<br>hear an ongoing, embodied process (bacteria changing their<br>environment) and to recognize it as a rich individuation between<br>bacteria and milieu. It is far from complete, and I’m currently<br>working on collaborating with a lab to identify probiotic strains in<br>my ferments as a basis for a more complex soundtrack.<br><br>Both projects are predicated on the philosophies of Alfred North<br>Whitehead and Gilbert Simondon. Thinkers who have helped me understand<br>experience as a non-cognitive aspect of the world, open to all<br>entities (bacteria, single-celled algae, and Arduino<br>microcontrollers). They have also helped me understand experience as a<br>unfolding process, tied to a nexus of sensations, or prehensions,<br>(Whitehead) between individual and milieu (Simondon). Simondon claims<br>that individuals and milieus are co-emergent, he writes of them as<br>dyads, and that the world must be understood not from the point of<br>view of individuals, but through the processes of individuation, from<br>which individuals and milieus emerge. Thus, interactive works based on<br>biological processes, such as fermentation, are moments to experience<br>an ongoing individuation, perhaps this is an enlivenment of a<br>biological process through technical means. That’s a gross<br>oversimplification of the contributions of both of these thinkers, but<br>hopefully enough to stress an emphasis on experience and feeling.<br>Feeling is key.<br><br>I have returned to the dark, so to speak, as I and another faculty<br>member are leading a research-through-design project with a small<br>number of undergraduates. We will collectively build a bioluminescent<br>‘display’ and the students will work in small teams to create<br>visualizations for the bespoke display. I’m now teaching in an<br>engineering students, and my practice is both intriguing and<br>bewildering to many of the students, but just last night we had a deep<br>conversation about the limits of quantification (important when making<br>a display that will be inexact!), and the concepts of abstraction and<br>representation in the context of ambient displays. It was deeply<br>gratifying when a student commented at the end of our hour-long<br>conversation that it felt like we were in a philosophy class. We then<br>went on to make seawater and propagate algae for our display. When<br>finished with our prototype, the students will come up with design<br>proposals for bioluminescent interactions and technologies, to use<br>their experience to dream of a different future. It’s my first step at<br>pushing them toward a speculative design practice. I hope they too<br>will come to understand feeling alongside nonhumans as key to their<br>futures.<br><br>Thanks for having me-<br><br>tyler<br><br>Documentation of both projects can be found at my website: <a href="http://www.tylersfox.com" target="_blank">www.tylersfox.com</a><br>______________________________<wbr>_________________<br>empyre forum<br><a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.<wbr>edu.au</a><br><a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.<wbr>edu</a></div></div></blockquote></div><br></div><br>______________________________<wbr>_________________<br>
empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.<wbr>edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.<wbr>edu</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><a href="http://www.tylersfox.com" target="_blank">http://www.tylersfox.com</a><br><a href="http://twitter.com/tylersfox" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/tylersfox</a><br><br>“It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.” ~ William Gibson<br></div></div>
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