Performance

IVEY WAWN with AMAARA RAHEEM, ARINI BYNG, EVAN LOXTON, JIMMY NUTTAL, LUCIEN ALPERSTEIN, MEGAN PAYNE and SHOTA MATSUMURA perform Greyness and Infinity.

Greyness and Infinity uses observed microbial processes to develop a durational choreography for multiple performers, infinite microbes and the audience. Borrowing from the poetics of microbial transformation and processes of mutualistic symbiosis, Greyness and Infinity makes visible the labour of the microbial world to reconsider and reorder social togetherness towards networks of care, sensitivity and pro-sociality.

Workshop

AIDYN MOURADOV will share his latest research into algae. LUCIEN ALPERSTEIN will reflect on multi-species interactions and terroirs of synthetic culture. SCALE FREE NETWORK will share observations on microbes as social actors.

Microbes have shaped the current biosphere, and continue to drive the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, and have also created somewhere between half and two thirds of the mineral diversity on Earth. Plants, microbes and humans occupy different kingdoms and domains. Interspecies collaborations, individual permeability and widespread cooperation, however, trouble the work of making neat distinctions between these categories. All larger creatures are holobionts - unable to exist without their radically unappreciated microbial partners (microbiomes). This means that close consideration of microbial interactions brings not just modes of social organisation into question, but also the very notion of what it is to be an individual.

In this workshop, we assemble researchers, artists and activists to listen and to talk about the implications of the communal agency of microbes across different social spaces - internal (bodily, including plants and animals), and external ‘habitats’ (soil, ocean, ice). Questions we may explore include: How far does the ‘umbrella of life’ extend? Should we consider viruses as living creatures? What is the role of microbial communities in ordering present relations and shaping future ecologies in soil, sediment and seawater? Considering the work microbes perform, in what ways do recently-discovered extensive microbial divisions of labour, microbial cooperation and cross-feeding networks open up bioeconomical considerations for plant listening? If the amplification of the microbial voice is a chance to reconsider the unheard, in what ways might this extension of subjecthood work to assist the frictionless commoditisation of biomedical knowledge into productivity?

This event is one branch of the WHY LISTEN TO PLANTS? exhibition program at RMIT Design Hub. Plants know worlds, they contain worlds and they make worlds.