Semiotic Symbiosis for the Posthuman Commons

The microorganisms living in and around us have special properties: they grow, they know no boundaries or ranks, they transform sexually while facing economic exploitation, they can deceive, pretend, and manipulate, and they think within a decentralized process. As wandering inhabitants of the world, they are capable of a wide range of environmental operations. These same capabilities, however, are lacking in the evaluative systems that increasingly characterize human life: signs. Being indifferent to the living, signs enable its storage, comparison, and exchange. In our experiments, artistic, monetary, and linguistic signs reinvent themselves by exchanging information with living microorganisms. This way, we aim to create a commons that resists the logic of economic exploitation. Our questions are: What forms of life evolve as exchange is reorganized through imitation, archiving through growth, measurement through deception? How does our language change as part of a microbial environmental operation? How do we speak when oral microbes become co-authors? Does art resist potential exploitation when it lives and remembers? Is a relic allowed to grow? Is pretend or decentralized money a worthwhile medium of exchange? Our experimental artistic arrangements aim to establish a self-organizing commons of information and living matter, which reflects on an age after the supremacy of man. What kind of commons could be imagined if new life forms developed autonomously from the information that humans left behind? We work with media art, sign theory, machine learning, biotechnology, microbiology, cultural and social sciences, mythopoetic narratives, and performance art. The cross-matter commons that emerges becomes an independent actor and co-author of our working sessions, conferences, and artistic works.