Microbial Keywording

Abstract

Drawing on object-oriented-ontology we aim for a hybrid language that not only processes formal symbols but interacts with the microbes in the speaker’s mouth. We argue that the metaphors historically used to frame the relationship between oral microbiota and speech cannot account for the co-creative material relationship between human speech and microbial, environmental and biotechnological needs. In our performances we harvest oral yeast microbes from the audience. Via a spectrogram, repetitively spoken phonemes drive pattern pumps, which add pheromones to the microbes, the latter which then are faded out. In the microbes, for some replication cycles an ecological adaptation to the individual phonemes persists, affirming – in our definition – some phonemes and deleting others, thereby improving the eco-sphere in the mouth by changing the alphabetical order of the input phonemes. The audience observes the adaptation by respelling words. We propose ‘microbial speech’ as a category between semantic and phonetic meaning, with a transcorporeal mattering between speech and the body as a new ecolinguistic quality. We aim at a language becoming a biological state in order to protect its own ecology. We consider these collective posthuman forms of relationality, subjectivity and biopolitical praxis as multiple ecologies of belonging and a more ethical mode of microbes existing in-common with language, affirming the transversal relations of all living and non-living matter.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Funded by the Medical University of Vienna, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) V501-G24 and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Supported by Ars Electronica, Linz, Angewandte Innovation Lab Vienna, brut Vienna, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and the University of Salzburg, Department of Biosciences.

Notes

1 In such a theoretical approach the operational power of performativity is not simply based on language as doing, but on doing as materialization (Barad 2003). This includes the assumption that matter and language are neither exclusively given nor solely an effect of pure human action.

2 Klaus Spiess and Lucie Strecker’s Microbial Keywording performance first took place within the context of the festival and symposium ‘Applied Microperformativity: Live arts for a radical socio-economic turn’ held at the University of Applied Arts Innovation Lab, Vienna 2018, https://bit.ly/2CP51ck

3 We aim to not foreground linguistic models of speech acts, as developed by the British philosopher J. L. Austin, but models of posthumanist performativity. Therefore, we consider speech acts here as flow of saliva, its changes in acidity, tongue friction on teeth, palate and mucous membrane or air pressure.

4 Extimacy describes a very intimate connection between subject and object, which nevertheless remains external. Jacques Lacan (1986 [1959/60]), who coined the term, considered the voice as an element with which the subject is connected by means of extimacy.

5 We decided to work with eucaryotic cells of the Saccharomyces boulardii subtype of yeast (Sen and Mansell 2020), mouth fungi with probiotic characteristics that represent less than 1 per cent of the oral mycobiome, yet is characterized by its extraordinary ability to both link environment and brain and to memorize stress.

6 We used the Python Programming Language, Pure Data visual programming language and speech-to-text- recognition software for programming. This programmed predictive network was developed based on data from our previous performances (saliva acidity, replication and apoptosis rates, spectrograms, phonemes). A logistic equation was adopted to model how oral microbes and linguistic fields interacted. Despite trivial denominations of data, the programmed network aimed at non-trivial modelling with hysteresis and memory as an internal part of programming itself.

7 Pheromones are secreted or excreted chemical factors that trigger a social response. They can also be purchased as engineered products from biotech companies. We ordered them from Genscript: https://bit.ly/3aHtDjs

8 We adapted Lindeberg’s (1993) software to measure the death-related shrinkage and replication- related bulging of the cells.

9 We hypothesize that the pathway that was triggered in the later phase of our experiment is based on weak cross-modal correspondences (Suslick 2012) between pheromones, phonemes and the anticipated homeostasis based on cellular pattern recognition (Trdá et al. 2015). However, one has to consider that what we performed was less a controlled experiment to test a hypothesis than a weighted manipulation of conditions in order to generate a desired artistic outcome.

10 In an early version of the performance with a slightly different concept, a drug was administered as a rectal suppository (see also K. T. Zakravsky’s article in this issue that foregrounds a non- material humanist critics of the microbial process involved). In this version, we filled small bottles with microbial cultures, labelling them with the corresponding letter of the phonetic alphabet. Due to an unknown medical risk–benefit ratio and safety of the application, we did not invite the audience to consume. The performance can be considered as a phase 0 study, which would have to go through phases I to IV before becoming an approved medical treatment.

11 The speech act theory of J. L. Austin was later further developed by American philosopher John Rogers Searle (1969), devising a system of speech act categorization. Utterances are considered not only to convey information but also to perform actions at different levels.

12 Watch videos of the project on the PR YouTube channel and on Vimeo: Angewandte Innovation Lab December 2018 https://bit.ly/2Ri2A5K Microbial Keywording. Animation https://bit.ly/2QTqILK Microbial Keywording at Ars Electronica https://bit.ly/3iAdRdH