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Video Introduction to Degenerative Cultures (Cesar & Lois, 2017)

Degenerative Cultures creates a “bhiobrid” environment in which fungi grow and consume texts that document the human impulse to dominate, control and reshape nature. The project is shown as an interactive networked installation in that physical books are used as the substrate for fungal cultures. The microorganism’s growth is analyzed by a computer vision program that replicates its behavior in a degenerative algorithm that corrupts the digital database. The story of this fungal colonization of human knowledge is documented in readouts of the twitter feed of @HelloFungus and printed onsite. Through the “bhiobrid” network, the bio-digital fungi respond to Internet users’ mentions, engaging people in the spreading of “digital spores”.

Figure 1 Installation view of Degenerative Cultures (image: Cesar & Lois, 2017)

Cesar & Lois facilitate the fungal-digital colonization of human knowledge systems by merging biological networks and Internet-based communications. Through geo-engineering and – long before that – design tomes and philosophical treatises on aesthetics and values, human cultures have long sought to dominate nature, predicating our own doom. This domination can be viewed as a corruption of nature. Based on a similar corruption of data, Degenerative Cultures looks critically at this system of knowledge that elevates human operational models over natural systems.

Degenerative Cultures creates a bhiobrid network in that living microorganisms and artificial intelligence work together. The resulting system makes visible the entropic patterns in human culture that have carried us into the Anthropocene. This bio-digital system maps and corrupts the predatory knowledge frameworks that have consistently driven how humanity deals with nature. The artist team consisting of Cesar & Lois attempts to reinsert nature-based systems within human systems. The goal is to merge microbiological systems with human systems and to challenge concepts of knowledge, which have historically been limited to human cognition.

For most of the timeline comprising the history of modern knowledge, “intelligence" has been relegated to a phenomenon related to the activity of the human brain. More recently, scientists propose that for millions of years, molecules and cells have formed networks that have topologies and dynamics analogous to intelligence, even though they are not located within the brain’s neural networks. In scientific studies, microorganisms have shown characteristics usually associated with neural activities, such as memory, anticipation, and adaptation. This research has demonstrated that microbes are able to make decisions though a hierarchical regulatory network, and that microorganisms can make decisions using complex sensory devices in order to move towards nutrient sources.

These studies reveal what can be understood as technologies that are “alive,” as referenced in Steven Shaviro’s interpretation of Gwyneth Jones’s short story, The Universe of Things. These ideas are important in moving the human-centered understanding of the world toward a post-anthropocentric approach. In Degenerative Cultures, the idea of a bhiobrid network encompasses not only the technical, but also the overall political, ethical and aesthetic frameworks for understanding the world, that trigger other ways of understanding human relationships with (nonhuman) living beings and ecosystems.

Through the merging of fungal networks and human knowledge and social networks, Cesar & Lois anticipate the fungal colonization of human-based systems. In doing so, Degenerative Cultures reverses typical planetary dynamics, with the fungal network inserting itself into and eventually overtaking the human system. The human system incorporates nature’s networks in a human technological system and allows a conduit for fungal tweets. The fungus – a natural agent – analyzes the text and tweets its output: nature inserts itself into technology in order to spread its spores over the digital realm. This intervention by nature asserts the entropic tendencies expressed in the second law of thermodynamics: the degenerating tweets dissemble the original meaning of the text, symbolically and substantially corrupting human knowledge (as opposed to humanity corrupting natural systems).

Since the Industrial Revolution, and exacerbated by a globalized economy, humanity’s actions have contributed to the destruction of nature. Conversely, @HelloFungus corrupts the systems that perpetuate human knowledge. At the same time, Cesar & Lois strive to reframe and learn from nature’s ways of forming networks. This knowledge can be gleaned from the Internet of Natural Things – an Internet that operates outside of human technological systems. Consider the broader planetary network comprised of natural nodes: fungal spores, mycelia, root systems. These nature-based entities communicate. The natural network is one that escapes Internet protocols and evades electronic interventions. It is a global system that evolves through propagation and corruption. The artists are interested in how natural networks connect with the actual Internet and other human systems and in expanding those connections.

In the feedback loop between the Internet of Natural Things and the technological interface of the Internet, the growing microbiological colony tweets text from digital documents and from the physical book that acts as a substrate. A bio-digital transducer transfers digital information to biology and back. The paths created by the fungus on the book determine the content of the tweet. A sensing system tracks the fungal growth, and the resulting tweets devolve to reflect the fungal censoring of the text. As the microbiological culture advances and the physical text becomes illegible, the tweets also degenerate. The text dissembles, making less sense as the fungal colony grows: “For know that the stylobate to the been said to be due to curved, But the landscape architect sees another aspect; the Parthenon s.”

Figure 2 Microbiological culture growing on the page of a book (image: Cesar & Lois, 2017)

Within the fungal redaction and tweeting system there is cooperation between nature, technology and human agency. The fungus cooperates with a bot, the automation of which determines the corruption of digital files in response to the fungal redaction of the physical book. The growing microorganisms cover letters and words, and the fungus tweets. These tweets become a timeline of the death of the book. At the same time, the fungus exists in a physical space and interacts with the digital network. There is information coming in and coming out. As a result, the exchange of human knowledge and knowledge from nature takes place in this bhiobrid system.

Figure 3 Illustration of the integrated bhiobrid system (image: Cesar & Lois, 2017)

By incorporating Twitter to send information consumed by the fungus, the project integrates the analog and the digital. The fungus degenerates information, disrupting the data laws of the book and also the information of digitally accessed text files. Microorganisms eat an old book, and an algorithm destructs digital documents within fungal tweets. The inherent growth algorithm of fungi becomes the operating logic for the bot that tweets excerpts of texts on humanity’s inclination to reshape nature. The digital database pulls from philosophical treatises from before the common era, centuries-old classic writings on applying order and design to landscape, as well as contemporary texts on geoengineering that anticipate a new era. Examples of these follow:

... we alone have the power of controlling the most violent of nature's offspring, the sea and the winds … we confine the rivers and straighten or divert their courses. In fine, by means of our hands we essay to create as it were a second world within the world of nature.
Cicero, De Natura Deorum, year 45 BCE

... sulphate aerosol particle injections, are global in impact, and ... technically feasible ... Solar Radiation Management a reflective particle layer in the middle atmosphere or deploying mirrors in space.
Low, S.; Schäfer, S.; Maas A. , Climate Engineering, 2013

As the fungal colony consumes the physical text, the bot-based twitter handle @HelloFungus tweets this obfuscated text and degenerates excerpts from the digital database. The resulting twitter feed becomes a basis for interacting with and observing fungal redactions of human knowledge, with tweets that reflect – or at least originate from – a natural growth pattern. This pattern, apparent in the twitter feed’s degeneration of the text, points to a source of knowledge derived from nature.

Figure 4 Screenshot of @HelloFungus twitter feed (image: Cesar & Lois, 2017)

If one considers human societies as a biological culture on Earth, our substrate is the global ecosystem. Incongruously, human societies consistently destroy this substrate, resulting in a massive cumulative loss of data in the form of species extinctions and environmental devastation. This behavior has been conceptualized, planned and justified through ideas such as progress, beauty, domestication, profit and the superiority of human beings throughout the ages, proliferated through religion, science, art, philosophy, economy and in other contexts of society. The departure point of the project is a critical examination of these old and new texts, searching for patterns that could direct humanity to disinformation and corrupt the logarithms of Modernity.

The story of this fungal colonization of human knowledge is documented in the twitter feed that results from the fungi’s growth and the fungal “reading” of the text, with @HelloFungus responding to Internet users’ mentions. Completing the loop from humanity to nature and back, Cesar & Lois turned to literature and writing professor Sandra Doller and her students at California State University San Marcos to engage in a text-based analysis of the fungal tweets.

Figure 5 Photo still from the analysis of the twitter feeds within a literature workshop with Sandra Doller at CSUSM (image: Cesar & Lois, 2018)

The project reveals a cycle of knowledge: first, the fungi colonizes human knowledge in a physical sense, as the organism grows on the text; next, the fungal reading becomes digitized by a duo of coordinated bots, with the output rendered as tweets; in the subsequent layer, literature students interpret the twitter feed. The class examines which words the fungus eats, asking what the microorganism might be saying through its tweets. In their analysis, the literature students seek to humanize nature’s output, finding meaning in which words are consumed and which remain unobscured by the organism’s growth.

The text is destroyed in a physical sense, and this destruction is visible through the redaction or disappearance of legible text on the surface of the pages. The computer-based interface analyzes the living microorganisms’ growth and feeds a degenerative algorithm linked to cellular automata and natural language analysis. This bio-digital agent searches the Internet for texts that follow similar predatory patterns. Just as the physical book is consumed by the microbiological culture, the digital database is corrupted by the degenerative algorithm.

Fungi disperse spores and expand. These spores drift across terrain and through the atmosphere, sending messages as the fungus grows. By tapping into the mycelial network and algorithmically scaling a biological culture’s growth digitally, we tap into a bhiobrid system comprised of these natural and technological networks. Such a system permits a feedback loop between humanity and nature, one beyond the current system in which the encroachment of human systems produces negative feedback across ecosytems. This could be considered an update of human culture, through disinformation – or an eco-hack.

Figure 6 Laboratory preparations of microbiological culture growth (image: Cesar & Lois, 2018)

With fungal tweets, Cesar & Lois insert hybridity into existing networks and societal structures, asserting an ecosystemic approach. Cesar & Lois advocate a nature-based disruption of the systems that underlie societal knowledge structures and human networks. The artists seek an updating of societal systems through a return to nature – a natural reboot, of sorts. Human cultures produced the Anthropocene, severing human systems from nature’s input while permanently imprinting onto the planet. The reverse process, where nature imprints onto human cultures, advances the techno-natural evolution of human cultures. Cesar & Lois advocate for societal evolution, when nature imprints itself indelibly in human systems.
 
Notes:
1. Cesar Baio is funded by Capes/Brazil Scholarship Program / Post-Doctoral Research / Process 88881.120168/2016-01.
2. LOIS is the acronym for the artist collective, the League of Imaginary Scientists.
3. Westerhoff, et al. “Macromolecular Networks and Intelligence in Microorganisms.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 5 July 2014,
4. van Heeswijk, W. C., et al. “Nitrogen Assimilation in Escherichia Coli: Putting Molecular Data into a Systems Perspective.” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, vol. 77, no. 4, 2013, pp. 628–695.
5. Jarrell, Ken F., and Mark J. Mcbride. “The Surprisingly Diverse Ways That Prokaryotes Move.”Nature Reviews Microbiology, vol. 6, no. 6, 2008, pp. 466–476.
6. Shaviro, Steven. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
7. Fricker, M., et al.: “Network Organisation of Mycelial Fungi.” Biology of the Fungal Cell, Richard J. Howard and Neil A.R. Gow, Springer Ed., Berlin, Heidelberg, 309–330 (2007).
8. Babikova, Z. et al.: "Underground Signals Carried through Common Mycelial Networks Warn Neighbouring Plants of Aphid Attack." Ecology Letters 16, n. 7, 835-43 (2013).

References

Babikova, Z. et al.: "Underground Signals Carried through Common Mycelial Networks Warn Neighbouring Plants of Aphid Attack." Ecology Letters 16, n. 7, 835-43, 2013.

Fricker, M., et al.: “Network Organisation of Mycelial Fungi.” Biology of the Fungal Cell, Richard J. Howard and Neil A.R. Gow, Springer Ed., Berlin, Heidelberg, 309–330, 2007.

Jarrell, Ken F., and Mark J. Mcbride. “The Surprisingly Diverse Ways That Prokaryotes Move.”Nature Reviews Microbiology, vol. 6, no. 6, 2008, pp. 466–476., doi:10.1038/nrmicro1900.

Shaviro, Steven. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

van Heeswijk, W. C., et al. “Nitrogen Assimilation in Escherichia Coli: Putting Molecular Data into a Systems Perspective.” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, vol. 77, no. 4, 2013, pp. 628–695., doi:10.1128/mmbr.00025-13.

Westerhoff, et al. “Macromolecular Networks and Intelligence in Microorganisms.” Frontiers, 5 July 2014, www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2014.00379/full.