Do biota want to collaborate? (Future Environments Thought Leadership x LASER Auckland)

Critical questions around relationality and difference emerge for artist-scientists, scientist-artists and ecological activists working with or against biotechnology and AI (ancestral intelligence/artificial intelligence) in their creative research. From whakapapa ties to te taiao (the environment) to how a CPU parallels a clamshell, mycelium uses sound, live performance meets taonga plants or colonizing weeds, or quail bones generate robot infrastructures. When human agents engage with other living beings, speculatively, or at a cellular level, we ask whether a non-extractive approach to interspecies communion is possible.The panelists discuss what we can learn from more-than-human biota for our planetary futures and how we might account for time scales that are faster or slower than human life spans and ultimately whether more-than-human entities can desire collaboration at all.

About the panel members

Dr Alizée Armet is an artist-researcher at the boundary of biotechnology and machine learning. She creates hybrid installations at the intersection of plastic, technology and biology to demystify our anthropocentric conceptions through a practice derived from biomedia.

Yitong Tseo (they/them) is a biorobotics researcher and gaia-artist deeply dissatisfied with how human-centric humans have become. Coming from MIT to Auckland on a year-long Fulbright fellowship, Yitong busies themself with connecting pieces of our world that have never met before – whether that’s giving worms a taste of Shakespeare, turning chicken wings into robots, or reading clams into poetry.

Dr Mark Harvey (Taranaki Whānaui) is an artist and researcher working with public performance, ecology and environmental perspectives, community approaches, mātauranga Māori, and notions of activism. He is a graduate from the AUT School of Art and Design and teaches at Waipapa Taumata Rau, The University of Auckland.

Dr Jo Burzynska is a cross-modal artist, researcher, and writer working at the intersection of hearing, taste, smell and touch, researching sensory interactions and their creative application. Through a focus on embodied and nonvisual sensory knowledge and aesthetics, she is interested in exploring the different understandings this can bring to connections between people, culture, nature, and place.

_{Hosted as part of the School of Future Environments Thought Leadership Series × AUT Visual Arts Practice-led Research Centre, presented in partnership with the Embassy of France in New Zealand, Villa Antipode / Te Ataata, and LASER Auckland (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous).}