Living Ashes

Abstract

Here we discuss Living Ashes II, a performance alongside protocells staged at the 2016 CLICK Festival in Helsingør. We use membranes, material and metaphorical, to make sense of our role as human performers in a more-than-human assemblage, exploring the notion of microperformativity and the consequences of considering matter as capable of ‘performativity’.

Protocells are materially animated by their membrane, their locomotion fuelled by the energy of rupturing chemical bonds and interfacial tension. Other, more metaphorical boundaries are produced by the way biotechnologies have engulfed and absorbed creative practices, creating numerous sites of exchange and contamination that make it harder to create a narrative wholly independent of scientific referents. We use an auto-ethnographic approach to make sense of the various difficulties we had in staging protocells — emerging from our difficulty in negotiating both physical and metaphorical membranes and finding the sites of transference between scientific and artistic practice as much as those between the inside and outside of a petri dish.

We conclude by extrapolating our experience to the wider field of bioart, suggesting that although the field can be understood through its progression from a symbolic to a material engagement with life, the membrane dividing both is highly porous, resulting in myriad combinations of human and non-human performativity. We discuss the importance of tactics that allow audiences to understand the transformational processes that take place in front of them — tactics which are however always entangled in a dense matrix of symbolic associations, generating conflicting messages that can undermine efforts to dissolve the divide between living and non-living matter.

Notes

1 CLICK is an annual festival in Denmark that explores the intersection between contemporary art, science and technology. The 2016 performance and art programme was dedicated to ‘microperformativity’ and curated by Jens Hauser. See: clickfestival.dk

2 Knowing that it was difficult to replicate the exact same conditions of our kitchen-workshop on stage, we recorded the performance of protocells as we tested the protocol. We kept the footage in case we failed to produce protocells on stage and although we did succeed, we incorporated some of the clips, switching modalities from live action to recording at the end of our performance using sound and light to signal the shift.