Organotecture: The Symbiopoiesis of Fractal Utopia

I hope to investigate the ways in which acts of creating challenge existing conceptions of the divergence between self and world, and produce novel understandings of what it means to be a human assemblage on a living earth. The intensification of anthropogenic influences on the biosphere calls for the creation of new mythologies grounded in symbiopoiesis, the rhizomatic co-formulation of self and world through fractal entanglement. In the words of Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble: “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories” (Haraway 12). The convergence of art and science proposes a transformative framework for the synthesis of both novel human narratives, as well as generative relational ontologies that allude to the possibility of symbiotic futures; Futures in which human freedom exists in harmony with the flourishing of biotic Earth. In her evolution from cyborg to symbiont, Haraway proposes the redefinition of mind and body, self and other, and nature and culture as relational phenomena, in which “objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings” (Haraway 13).

My studies have evolved from an interest in sustainable design, biomaterial synthesis, and biomimicry, into an investigation of art as collaborative ecology, emerging through the fusion of human and non-human agencies, within the framework of the socioecological crises of the anthropocene. Specifically, I am interested in Haraway’s idea of worlding, the generation of meaning matrices through the formation of assemblages as sociotechnical biochemical fractals; In the language of Delueze and Guattari: “Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first” (Deleuze & Guattari 8). As an artist and designer, a holobiont-puppeteer made of the voices of their symbiotic puppets, I am interested in working with life-forms at all scales, ranging from the cellular to the ecological, in order to explore what Mel Chen describes as Animacy, the shifting line between the living and the dead, through a process of sympoiesis.

As an assemblage, I partake in worlding through microcosmic analysis of the ecologies that comprise me as a human holobiont, as well as the construction of eighty-foot passive solar structures, animated by the energies of the sun and wind. For me, making art, to reference Judith Butler, is not solely about the reorganization of matter into conceptual frameworks, nor purely a journey towards the realization of form, but concerns the fundamental question of how to make a life: "If I am to lead a good life, it will be a life lived with others… I will not lose this I that I am; whoever I am will be transformed by my connections with others” (Butler 218). The question of how to make a life together on planet earth has been posed countless times throughout history, and requires continuous and multifaceted acts of answering.

The trajectory of utopian thought, from Plato’s formulation of the ideal city in The Republic, and subsequent literary fabulation in Thomas More’s Utopia as a symbolic no-place, culminates in a present encapsulated by Buckminster Fuller’s words, now more than fifty years old: “Granted the proper integration of the world around potentials by political unblockings, there could be enough to provide for all men to enjoy all earth at higher standard of living than all yesterday’s kings” (Fuller 164). Through the lens of Fuller’s techno-humanism, technologically mediated control of earth systems seems to propel humanity closer than ever to the realization of a particular vision of utopia, defined by freedom from the bio-geological metabolism of the earth.

I believe that Fuller’s design based-humanism must be put in conversation with critical approaches to knowing, and being. In the words of Achilles Mbembe, “Western epistemic traditions are traditions that claim detachment of the known from the knower. They rest on a division between mind and world, or between reason and nature as an ontological a priori” (Mbembe 9). I believe that, in order to realize Fuller’s Utopia, and avoid continued, this division between designer and the designed must be deconstructed, If the anthropocene is to be seen as epoch of opportunity and symbiopoietic growth, we must compost the narratives that, to quote Bruno Latour, “Imagined humans either fell from Nature or freed themselves from it” for what he calls “the compositionist narrative,” which “describes our ever-increasing degree of intimacy with the new natures we are constantly creating” (Latour 49). I believe that the intimacy inherent to collaborative worlding that Haraway and Latour discuss, must be put in dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s concept of Vita Activa as the defining expression of humanness, and that the convergence of these ideas is reflected in the multi-species ethnographic work of Anna Tsing.

In The Mushroom at the end of the world, Anna Tsing speaks to the possibility of interspecies flourishing in the ruins of capitalist accumulation. Thinking with Matsutake mushrooms, Tsing identifies the possibility of working with disturbance as a tool for creating productive spaces capable of sustaining both human and non-human livelihoods through reciprocal action. In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguishes action as a specific type of political engagement, in which “men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world” (Arendt 179). She proposes that the construction of a social self is the paramount condition necessary for human existence, reverberating with Butler’s concept of the good life, declaring that: “a life without action and speech… has ceased to be a human life” (Arendt 176). In order to evolve democracy towards a sustainable morphology, Arendt's conception of action as the defining feature of humanness, must be extended to encompass all of life as a symbiotic tapestry of worlding, within the context of Haraway’s sympoiesis. In my view, Tsing’s mycorrhizae are sociopolitical beings, structuring agency into matter through the ancient practice of terraforming; their actions, the transformation of the dead into sustenance for the living, are signals that we, as environment aspects and eventual compost, must attune to, in order to produce transformative ontologies. For me, these ontologies cannot originate in the mythology of humanist development away from an initial edenic state, or neoliberal individualism, but will rise from the recognition of symbiotic mythology. This mythology is evoked in what Ursula Le Guin describes, in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, as the Life-Myth.

I believe that the evocation of self is inherent to all of life, and that in order to process the anthropocene as a time of creative evolution, opposed to apocalypse, the agency of all beings must be mobilized in a novel formation of ‘self’ within the structure of the holobiont theory of evolution formulated by Lynn Margulis, which positions the relationships between symbionts, whether parasitic, commensal, or mutualistic, as the driving force of evolution. In What is Life, Margulis examines contemporary ideas of the nature of organic being, challenging cartesian-dualism and human exceptionalism through the lens of scientific realism. She argues for the interwoven nature of all life, as imbued with agential animacy: “That bacteria are simply machines, with no sensation or consciousness, seems no more likely than Descartes's claim that dogs suffer no pain” (Margulis 220).

I am aligned with Margulis’ view that the generation of new mythologic frameworks might arise from “The dual understanding of scientific inquiry and creation myth could become a single view” (Margulis 218). This union of biology and narrative is central to my concentration and is embodied in the words of Aristotle: “it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen— what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity“ (Aristotle Poetics 6). I want to embody the sympoiesis of new imaginaries for human existence, and humanness by creating dialogues with other organic beings as an artistic assemblage.

My work engages with Haraway’s framework of sympoiesis, in concert with the Hologenome Theory of Evolution, to position myself as a bodily ecology engaged in the reciprocal synthesis of possible worlds; Viewed as a plurality of cell-types, holobiome-I rejects dystopia and linear narratives of domination and colonial conquest of self and world in the name of progress, for Le Guin’s conception of the hero of the future as a vessel, a container for the lives of others. This idea of being a vessel for the world reverberates with the words of Lao Tzu in their description of The Tao: “It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities” (Lao Tzu 2). Lao Tzu’s conception of the Tao speaks to a unity of being, a oneness, which encompasses all things in formless communion, and from which all things emerge. In Le Guin’s poem, Tao Song, describes the expression of The Tao in embodiment of life. The poem begins: “Oh slow fish, show me The Way. Oh green weed, grow me The Way, the way you grow, the way you go, is The Way.” In this poem, one is presented with a lyrical representation of what Lao Tzu’s calls “subtle perception of the way things are,” the practice of awareness of complexity, referred to by Anna Tsing as the “Arts of noticing” (Lao Tzu 15, Tsing 17). Lao Tzu blends the distinction between self and world, posing their intrinsic oneness: “Love the world as your self; then you can care for all things” (Lao Tzu 5). What mythologic structures could emerge from a union of the principles of Taoism, Margulis’ biological realism, Le Guin’s hero-vessel, and Haraway’s multi-species sympoiesis?

In The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas offers a poetic vision of biological life. He identifies the need for a bestiary of symbiotic chimeras in the creation of mythologies of assemblage. He describes the protozoan Myxofricha paradoxa as a candidate for myth making:

This is the protozoan, not yet as famous as he should be, Who seems to be telling us everything about everything, all at once. His cilia are not cilia at all, but individual spirochetes, and at the base of attachment of each spirochete is an oval organelle, embedded in the myxotricha membrane, which is a bacterium. It is not an animal after all--it is a company, an assemblage (Thomas 68).

Thomas’ description of the symbiotic assemblages of microscopic pre-animals resonates with the words of Tobias Reese, who, in his review paper documenting the ways in which research into the human microbiome changes our conceptions of the self, states: “The microbiome is not ‘influencing’ the genome; it is co-constituting the metaorganisms we humans are” (Reese 4).

In T-Zero, Italo Calvino also explores the boundaries of the self in the creation of a series of mind bending evolutionary narratives that blend science and mythology as they flow into one another. One story traces the genesis of the first cell from the cells perspective in first-person, blurring the idea of subject and object: “I was seized with a need to stretch to my full width, to a kind of intermittent stiffening of the nerves I didn't have” (Calvino 100). The work of artist Diana Scherer also serves a source, both of personal inspiration and possible mythologies. In her work, Scherer collaborates with grasses, growing intricate textiles from their rhizomes in geometric molds, and weaving these textiles into garments. My own interest in living environments, and work with clothing as ecologies is directly influenced by Scherer’s textile biosynthesis. In concert, the bio-mythology of an immunologist, the musings of a social scientist, the time-traveling imaginaries of a journalist, and the biomaterials of a visual artist, point to a deep well of material from which to synthesize new mythologies for future of ecological. As put by Donna Haraway in The Cyborg Manifesto: “The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge” (Haraway 33).

Through the synthesis of the minds of a multiplicity others, my creative practice has evolved from an initial interest in sustainable design, and fungal biotechnology as means of, in the words of Fuller: “Transferring the scientific do-more-with-less capability from a weaponry to a livingry focus,” to encompass broader considerations of what it means to create as an embodied ecology, intertwined in sympoietic tapestries (Fuller 29). As one of my primary influences, Fuller inspired my construction and flight of a manned passive solar aircraft, as well as a deep interest in the idea of systems thinking, which, through generative contamination, have bloomed into a dream of a future in which things are grown, opposed to made; A future, in which organisms are conceived as nested unities, in a state of evolutionary utopia, one which allows humanity to grow and flourish as aspects of an ecological whole. In Earth Democracy, Vandana Shiva calls for “The creation of all-inclusive living economies that protect life on earth while providing basic needs for all” (Shiva 43). Going forward, I will continue to research the growth of environments from cellular assemblages, in the context of the ontological frameworks provided by Vandana’s Earth Democracy, Haraway’s Terrapolis, and Fuller’s synergetics. Building off of my past projects, including the growth of a sun hat made of reishi mushroom mycelium, the amplification of spontaneous urban plants through seed saving and inoculation, the synthesis of bacterial cellulose fabrics, the cultivation and consumption of edible micro algae in my apartment, and the growth of ritual garments out of wheatgrass, I hope to bring together fungal, bacterial, algal, and plant cells in the modulation of my internal and external ecologies. One of my current projects involves the growth of play structures out of living trees at the Hayground School on eastern Long Island. Building off of the lush history of tree shaping, outlined by David Reemes in Arborsculpture: Solutions for a Small planet, I want to unify forest and urban environment in the synthesis of novel ecosystems that function as mythologic bridges to possible futures (Hobbs et al. 2013). These assemblages of living and non-living matter are a challenge to cultures of acceleration, responding to dreams of infinite economic growth with ecologies of radical permanence that operate on tree-time. In the words of Lucretius in On the Nature of things: “One status after other, nor aught persists forever like itself. All things depart; Nature she changeth all, compelleth all to transformation” (Lucretius 308). I believe that I now posses the beginnings of an intellectual framework through which to take part in the synthesis of life-matter assemblages that exist as allusions to Le Guin’s life-myth. Joining with the voices of others, I hope to engage with the dream of utopia as the process of making a life together in mutualism.

I am excited to engage with these topics at my colloquium in context of the continuation of my intellectual journey after Gallatin. Numerous questions still lay unanswered. In Staying with the Trouble Haraway calls us to avoid falling into the despair of dystopian visions, posing the question: “How can we think in times of urgencies without self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse?” (Haraway 35). Building off of Haraway’s question, how can we change the mythology of today to align with symbiotic reality of planet earth? How can we create collaborative ecological space, in which human freedom is unified with ecological flourishing? How can we move past the internalizations of the neoliberal paradigm towards a generative sociality not defined by consumerism? Is the divergence from models of capitalist growth proposed in Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era possible through the union of technological advancement and socio-spiritual transformation? Or, alternately, how can humanity evolve and grow without destroying itself? These questions reach to the core of my being, as both an artist and an assemblage, and are shadowed by a more personal question: Will I truly ever be able to release myself from the narratives and cultural matrices of the hero myth in which I continue to participate? And if not, can this hypocrisy, the joy of self-destructive energy, imbue the pursuit of a utopian reconfiguration of making and relating with a vital tension, or, in the words of Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has humanity passed the tipping point at which “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Benjamin 20)? This question will most likely require countless moments of asking and answering, but to quote Lucretius, the answer is present within life itself, within the soul of the earth: “How merited is that adopted name of earth—"The Mother!"—since from out the earth are all begotten.” (Lucretius 306).

References:

1. Lao Tzu, and Stephen Mitchell. Tao Te Ching: a New English Version. HarperCollins, 2006.

2. George, A. R. The Epic of Gilgamesh: the Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian ; Translated and with an Introduction by Andrew George. Penguin Books, 2000.

3. Plato, and Benjamin Jowett. Plato: The Republic. Forgotten Books, 2008.

4. More, Thomas, et al. Open Utopia. Minor Compositions, 2013.

5. The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch

6. Aristotle. Aristotle De Anima. Distribuidor De, 2007.

7. Aristotle, and S. H. Butcher. The Poetics of Aristotle. Lits, 2010.

8. Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Digireads, 2015.

Humanities:

1. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2015.

2. Thomas, Lewis. Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. Demco Media, 2002.

3. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury, 2017.

4. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press, 2015.

5. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition: Second Edition. Univ of Chicago Press, 2018.

Social Sciences:

1. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalisms Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015.

2. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University Press, 2012.

3. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2014.

4. D’ Alisa, Giacomo. Degrowth: a Vocabulary for a New Era. Routledge, 2015.

5. Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy. Zed Books, 2016.

Love

1. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

2. Fuller, R. Buckminster . Utopia or Oblivion: the Prospects for Humanity. Lars Muller Publishers, 2019.

3. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2017.

4. Latour, Bruno, Shellenberger, Michael, and Ted Nordhaus. Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Breakthrough Institute, 2011.

5. Fukoaka, Masanobu. The One-Straw Revolution: an Introduction to Natural Farming. Other India P., 1992.

6. Mbembe, Achille. “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive.” Indexing the Human Project, 2015.

7. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. What Is Life? University of California Press, 2000.

8. Le Guin, Ursula. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” http://theorytuesdays.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/The-Carrier-Bag-Theory-of-Fiction-Le-Guin.pdf.

9. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, et al. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

10. Rees, Tobias, et al. “How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self.” PLOS Biology, vol. 16, no. 2, Sept. 2018, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.2005358.

11. Fuller, Matthew. “Art for Animals.” V2_Lab For the Unstable Media, 19 July 2011, https://v2.nl/archive/articles/art-for-animals.

12. Calvino, Italo, and William Weaver. T Zero. Harcourt Brace, 1994.

13. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Penguin Books, 2008.

14. Hobbs, Richard J. Novel Ecosystems: Intervening in the New Ecological World Order. Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.