Review

Jenna Sutela

First published by Art Monthly, July 2017

Nam-Gut, Banner Repeater, London, 24th May - 30th July

Amid the globular pops, staccato drips and burbling sounds of percolation that could be heard reverberating through the intimate gallery at Banner Repeater, a faltering anodyne voice appeared to be telling a story. ‘The Lord of Bacteria, endowed with wisdom, changed the speech in their mouths,’ it said cryptically, ‘put contention into it, into the speech of Homo Computans that had been one.’

The strange voice belonged to Nam-Gut (the microbial breakdown of language), 2017, an auto-generative poetry system devised by the Finnish artist Jenna Sutela, whose recent works constitute a rich and evolving matrix of organic computational networks and home-brew computing projects. Appearing here as a video installation, Nam-Gut resembled a quivering blue-green liquid test subject, its gelatinous mass permeated with translucent alpha-numeric characters that drifted around lackadaisically, infrequently snagging on one another and forging temporary, almost-sensical graphemes. Between the broken words on screen and the tentative voice borne on the air, the peculiar realisation that Nam-Gut was, in its own way, communicating a message between the non-human and human worlds, became a question as to where consciousness might be located.

If, as Sutela has argued this year in her fantastic essay ‘Solid/Solipsism Remedy’, ‘brains are not a prerequisite for complex and interesting behaviour’, then how might we interpret Nam-Gut’s science-fictive communiqués, and what could they tell us about technology as a mediating factor between sentient and non-sentient agents? The material ‘stuff’ of the piece is simple enough, a Kombucha culture, or ‘symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast’, originally popular in Asia and now marketed as a voguish health drink in the West. Subjected to a ‘wetware random number generator’, this fermentation process had been made to ‘speak’ a series of pre-determined phrases provided by the artist while also interfacing with an anagram-solving algorithm responsible for the cryptographic expressions on screen.

It would be a mistake to interpret these expressions as indications of ‘intelligence’, that’s not really Sutela’s point. Instead of a representation of non-human cognition, she visualises a problem-solving process at play, albeit one heavily mediated, aestheticised and rerouted towards her own conceptual ends. This was perhaps made more apparent in the short ‘video mantra’ RI JIRI I O WA NU RU DAINICHI T-1000, 2017, which played on a separate screen in the same gallery.

Soundtracked by a menacing loop of Brad Fiedel’s lurching theme for James Cameron’s 1991 tech-nightmare Terminator 2, this short film focused on the wondrous behaviour of Physarum polysephalum, more commonly known as slime mould. Slime moulds are single-celled, visually alluring, tentacular networks now considered to be a form of ‘biological computer’ given their logistical ability to map the most efficient routes between food sources, or their deployment of extracellular matter as a form of externalised physical memory, a kind of living hard-drive.

According to the philosopher Steven Shaviro, ‘the value of Physarum-based computing is precisely that this organism does not share our human biases and assumptions’. For Shaviro, and the many researchers he cites, this organism ‘might well suggest distinctions, and even algorithmic procedures, that we could never think of on our own.’

Sutela documents this acid-green entity’s slow creep around a metal structure, the form of which she derived from a mandala drawn by Minakata Kumagusu, a Japanese naturalist in the employ of Emperor Hirohito throughout the 1920s, who, through his diagrammatic extrapolations sought to delineate the limits of anthropocentric thought and the possibility of other experiential systems. Intercutting this footage are fragments of Cameron’s blockbuster movie, showcasing a villain composed of intelligent liquid metal, a ‘mimetic polyalloy’ nano-engineered to disperse or reconstitute itself in a manner strikingly similar to the slime mould’s monomaniacal behaviour.

These two works eloquently invoked a complex dynamic of enmeshment between organic and simulated entities that ventured beyond the platitudinous anti-humanist rhetoric of what I have lately come to call the ‘Slimegeist’, that pop-nihilist tendency that similar but less-clever practices have of bluntly ‘de-centering the human’. Sutela’s biological systems work both computationally and poetically, and it is worth thinking about the decisions she makes as to how her organic subjects are made to enunciate their identities and actions as instances of manipulation and subjugation, as complicated ‘kinship’. Nam-Gut’s voice betrays vulnerability. It implores you to listen to its tale, and in doing so evokes an empathic relationship between disparate agents.

‘Shift the seat of identity from brain to cell and the nature of the subject radically changes,’ suggests the philosopher of cybernetics N Katherine Hayles. By rewiring her organic co-conspirators, or swallowing Physarum before poetry readings as a paranoid-critical agent, imagining that the mould is reprograming her human ‘code’, Sutela’s works rewrite the boundaries of the human by way of an imaginative interspecial programming. It’s a terrifying but nonetheless fertile and prescient prospect.