We can only come into being through contact and exchange with other bodies—as lodgers, hosts, parasites, guests, and fellow travellers—swept up in the tides of each other’s oceans.¹

If, as Astrida Neimanis suggests, our bodies are a ‘metastable choreography of matter and meaning’, what does this mean for an artist investigating subjectivity (self) and power? This provocation informs studio research, which attempts to acknowledge all elements—texts, materialities, language, agencies—as entangled in complex ways via modes of affective auto-ethnography. My research with algae and experimental image-making will be discussed in this essay via a methodology that is attuned to ‘the visceral realm, a realm where social structures and bodily sensations come together and exude each other’.²

Holding Chlorophyta

My query started with attempts to hold my relations with aesthetic excess to account. In an era of declining and polluted resources I sought to interrogate my/our modes of production rather than merely pointing my finger at larger concerns. It felt necessary to acknowledge the methods of resource use embedded within the excesses of capital driven desire in my production of objects and images. In a world saturated in the effluent of image and object as elements of self formation, narration and critique I wanted to remind myself that art is at the apex of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This led me to consider and evaluate my use of fossil extraction and the legacies of copper and metal production in my years of making etchings. I have a deep love for metal in all its incised, scored, hammered and shiny beauty, and for the syrupy purple toner in the early photocopier I kept in my childhood bedroom. And in all honesty, sometimes I want excess, I want to turn over capitalism and play with its folds. But I also want to find new methods to reproduce, ways that are more embedded in relational networks, both embodied and material (organic and inorganic), that acknowledge my material use as an artist producer.

As Marisa Georgiou states in her essay The Algae is Actually Sad,

The Capitalocene is often discussed in social, political and economic terms, but rarely in aesthetic terms. Our current mediascape renders our aesthetic environment a flow of autonomous affects that can move so fast they feel like one. A neverending stream of unmediated, decontextualised semiology that disrupts our nervous systems to skim time, attention and other embodied commodities. Simultaneously, it offers us macro experiences: immense, engulfing spectacles that dominate the bodymind through sheer size and affective intensity…Art experiences are increasingly implicated in these levers—often even celebrated as we internalise the message that it legitimises them.³

Marisa’s words reflect on the complicity of making. It is a complicity I am not seeking to avoid or negate but extend into materiality itself.

My methodological goal is to retain the ontological perspective of print replication as copy while I seek to evade or confuse its instrumentalisation in systems of extraction and representation. That is, to move away from a direct copy and paste modality into something more attuned to the vibrational potential of a feminist quantum materialism. This approach uses the methods of replication to open-up a relational instability while also still re/producing in the iterative sense. I use indeterminacy and diffraction as studio methods and I ruminate, along with Karen Barad, on the notion that ‘matter in its iterative materialisation is a dynamic play of in/determinacy. Matter is never a settled matter. It is always already radically open.’⁴

Echo

One of the key figures that I draw upon to frame this approach is the mythological nymph Echo. Her story exists in the spectral shadow of Narcissus who has long claimed semiotic clout in relation to the self and image. Leon Battista Alberti even ascribed the invention of painting to Narcissus, thus inscribing the auratic image and the hierarchy of art to his romantic legacy. I argue that in place of Narcissus that Echo’s material relations to self,  image and affect are of particular relevance to our time and its gendered relations.⁵

What critical relevance might this story of Echo hold for our contemporary AI text to image or image to text mediated circularity? Anne Carson discusses the instrumentalisation of ‘text’ and voice as a subjective enclosure, particularly by males re-telling the story of Echo where ‘putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day’.⁶ Opening Carson’s door to the female subject via Echo thus becomes a deeply oceanic act, one that brings her legacy into contemporary vocality via waves of diffracted potential. Such a review of Echo can open up the reverberative capacities of repetition into the kind of Différance that Derrida defines as,

The systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive.⁷

Reading Echo from this Derridean perspective brings her into the contemporary as she encapsulates both the agency and oligarchy of our image/text exchange matrix but also its pontential release. My sense is that our daily algorithmic degustation emanates over us like a detractive wave, an ebb and flow of creation and destruction. It no longer replicates the static mirrored gaze of Narcissus and we no longer operate within a linear copy and paste matrix. Rather, we exist in a performative feed of diffracting echoes of content that we repeat, refine and degrade through exchanges that can be both meaningless and meaningful. 

Algaeic Intent

In my artistic practice the matter I diffract with are algae, sound and bacteria. I work with these as inter-agentic conduits within a deeper choreographed performativity. The algae, sound and bacteria operate both independently and as (ventriloquist) metonyms of human subjectivities and my own interpretative discourses of matter and meaning. They inhabit two material domains: one of control under my anthropomorphic desire and one that always escapes control as matter itself. Despite the algae being contained, coerced and aestheticised it differs from more standard material in the studio in profound and fundamental ways. It exceeds the parameters of conceptual coercion and determines its own reactivities, in turn speaking for itself. I understand this exchange as an part of a relational machine of visual production.

What is Echo and What is Noise?

Modern feminist reinterpretations reclaim Echo’s repetitive speech as subversion. Repetition becomes a creative force, as she is no longer passively mirroring but actively reshaping acts of representation and distribution. Her figure acts as a porous interconnected reflexivity at a quantum material level—that is the vibrational echo that enters and exits all matter.

My research methodologies take the shadow and textual legacies of these metaphoric extensions, and diffract them through acts of reproduction and amplification as interspecies echos. In this way the organic and inorganic Other permeates. To quote Barad ‘diffraction is not a set pattern, but rather an iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling.’⁸

Derrida also describes the nuance between the hegemonic model of (Narcissistic) reflection vs the iterative mode of entanglement that Echo offers when he states that ‘although she repeats, without simulacrum, what she has just heard, another simulacrum slips in to make her response something more than a mere reiteration.’⁹ Here Echo’s diffraction is a sensual intermingling and leakage into an indeterminate space.

First Dates: Echo Meets Algae

In searching for a material co-agent I found myself listening to a news item on an algal bloom. I found the newsreader’s position of bias interesting. They were openly pro dead fish and anti-algae, as if one biological thing was good and one was bad. He offered no nuance or context for the outbreak and its biological intermingling. I kept thinking of the spirulina he probably had for breakfast and the ancient life-giving force (early algae) that our bodily forms are indebted to. I thought about Astrida’s oceans within us and a desire to touch the forces and confusions of a capitalocene desire.

I collected what I thought was algae brine and attempted to grow it (in captivity) in my studio.

I chose algae as it has a direct relation to ocean health and offers itself as nutrient. It is both a negative and a positive in capitalism’s hierarchy of exchange—as both food source and pollutant. I activate this Deleuzian potential within aesthetic means to consider my/our complicity in material extraction and the ongoing sonic colonisation of the earth. I merge and compost philosophical positions from New Materialism, species understandings, and the comprehension that soft irony can be more serious than dry fact.

How do the sonic traces of late era capitalism effect organic forms and how much of the production of capital is a vibrational bodily pollution, in particular those low in the food chain of capital value? What is the ‘playlist’ of economic extraction? I reflect on my own actions towards other species and how I activate capitalisms' own dialogues of dispersal and pollution to ask how can visualities re-present these sonic traces as affect? 

I read one day that 98% of data still travels via ocean cables, colonising the floor of the ocean with the remnants of our spreadsheets and movie downloads. We also move acoustic-electromagnetic power sources under the ocean, a bad-taste side effect for our desperate need to be connected to the other side of the world at all times. In Shirley Roburn’s article Sounding a Sea-Change Acoustic Ecology and Arctic Ocean she identifies mid frequency sonar used in naval exercises as implicated in the deaths of cetaceans. Our sonic and electromagnetic leakage is a weapon.¹⁰

All this sonic and effluent pollution has made our bodies of water ‘the unheeded recipient of the material wastes and toxins of late-capitalist production and consumption.’¹¹

Sites of Infection           
Sites of Infection/extraction co-opts social processes of replication, amplification and echo via the sonic traces of late capitalism. The work develops a visual exchange between data noise, verbal abuse and algae to think about the systems our porous bodies are dependent on, contribute to and extract. The artefact created is a living ecosystem that operates before the gallery context (in my studio and prior to that as the algae spores and salt and water), within it (while in the gallery and during the stage of witnessing),  and beyond it as I return the excess biological entities to my tanks and into experimental photo emulsion. This unfolding and dependant state of aesthetic becoming offers a productive mode of inter-relational affect by working collectively with agents outside of my aesthetic control.

The oxygenated algae strains—Nannochloropsis, Dunaliella Salina, Tisochrysis and Spiralina—listen to data noise collected from a Sydney City Council artist studio and internet hate speech. I then transmute the echo of this data into an aesthetic artefact for the human gaze. This data noise is our identity and our acoustic waste dispersed back into the major navigation lanes of capitalism (the sea). We think that planes move our goods and that information goes between satellites but both still travel via the ocean as part of a massive industrialisation of our watery depths. This data filth also classifies our worth—its algorithmic listeners deciding who is signal and who disposable noise.¹²

Temporal Persistence

Once the tank algae were flourishing, I harvested it to use in a work that engages more directly with the image and subject. My motivations arose from a sensory response when standing in a projected light field of another artists video work. I felt as if I was touching their image as diffracted light fell over me. This intermingling of image via matter and light generated an entanglement with the image as a spectral transmission. The work Temporal Persistence makes use of this mediated space of mingling and bio-material exchange via matter and light.

Temporaral Persistance brings the human and other into exchange and proximity via performance and intermingling. In the work three looped videos of an ex-offender cleaning themselves in repetitious hygiene acts of pain is projected over small tanks of algae, merging the othered body of the soiled criminal (myself) with the othered material of algae, to find a deeper understanding of abject ‘Otherness’. Two of the videos have an additional sky sequence which speaks to my desire for a world where we no longer imprison people for their social conditions. I should note that EVERY INMATE DREAMS OF SEEING THE SKY. As climate change encloses us I speculate that everyone will start to experience the enclosure and constraint from purity and desire that bodies in detention understand at a visceral level. The work operates within the tradition of abject parody as I attempt to usurp my own civic death (civiliter mortuus) using acts of absurdity. Image and affect co-mingle as the cord for the air pump is positioned at my neckline to indicate a point of suffocation, a depth of no return.¹³

Between both these works were small photographic images where I attempt to touch algae (and self) with forgiveness via the agency of affect and the desire of intimacy. These works are made with photo emulsion extracted from the algae I have grown, which acts as a light sensitive material that will fade and disappear in its own refractive instability.

These works intersect with earlier investigations into weaponised sound and the use of excessive noise as a torture device. On a subjective level how does being ‘yelled’ and sworn at impact the body? Who gets to yell and who gets yelled at? This premise was partially explored in an earlier work (Bacterial nervosa 1) where swear words were spoken to Petrie dishes filled with Agar which then grew images in response to this hate speech. Agar was my first date with Algae. Made of two species of red algae it presents as the perfect site for the intermingling of subjectivities and capital excess. I view the Petrie dishes as subjective portraits of the body, and I bring these bodies into conversation with the art discourse that frames our legacies by manufacturing them into  modernist shapes (square, triangle) rather than the circular format of science. Speak to the agar features artists reading a critical text that informs their research into a dish of Agar that is lightly swabbed with a bodily trace. Shivanjani Lal reads Postcolonial Love Poems (2020) whilst Jesse Hogan reads ‘Afterword’ from A History of Art: Thames and Hudson (1989). The relationship between their embodied sonic trace and the conceptual parameters of practice become entwined in the material co-relationship with agar and bacteria.¹⁴

The work is both parodic and intensely serious as I believe that the chorus line of words as pure sound, as liturgy and  belief impacts systems through their ripples and vibrations. The differences between sonic pain and pleasure also relate deeply to rhythmic action as discussed by Lefebvre.¹⁵

Final Dance

My projects with algae and agar oscillate between methodologies of quantum distribution, diffraction and irony to consider ways to find meaning at the edge of precarity. I also look to see how I can enter a more ecologically responsive ethos in terms of what it means to generate images in an era of excess of production and consumption. Discussing my work within the frame of affective visual ethnography moves the work into contexts that can operate outside of the arena of pure aesthetics to consider positionality as comprising not only ‘the surroundings of the organism but a zone of entanglement.’¹⁶

Because as Barad states,

The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other." The intra-actively emergent "parts" of phenomena are co-constituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one's skin, but in one's bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and future...¹⁷