I had a chance to turn into slime mold, and I was stoked.
Slime mold is a somewhat mysterious and wonderful creature, a being both singular and multiple: many slime molds exist as single-cell organisms that can, when needed, join with others to form a unified body that moves en masse in search of food.
What might we learn from something seemingly so unhuman? Might it teach us about how to live simultaneously as individuals and as populous but interconnected social beings, coordinating on the most intimate levels? And how might we go about learning that from it?
I knew the tiniest bit about slime molds, but it was enough that when an art exhibit claiming the ability to allow one to see from their perspective—and the perspective of other symbiotic entities—announced its U.S. premier at the Portland Art Museum, I grabbed a ticket. Me and plenty of others; the event sold out quickly.
So, a few days into the new year, I found myself at Symbiosis. The exhibit is an effort from a Dutch-based art collective named Polymorf to push our imaginations beyond the violent apocalyptic narratives around climate disaster and ask if cooperation—with other species, not just other humans—might be a better option, or at least as possible as destruction, though maybe just in ways we have yet to conceive, in a world we can’t quite picture.
Polymorf’s describes their work as an attempt at creating a “multi-sensory extended reality” experience. What’s that mean, exactly? In practice, it looks like having each participant strapped into an elaborate haptic bodysuit, VR headset, and headphones, all of which are synced so that the soundtrack of one’s given character (mine was a straightforward internal monologue) aligns with movement through an animated world as well as with pressure from the suit (mostly by means of air inflating or deflating at different amounts and rates) to mimic the motion of the body you are ostensibly inhabiting. On top of that, museum staff move about spraying scene-specific scents into the air and serving you items to eat that you stumble upon in this new world. This wasn’t meant to be a theoretical exercise, but a truly embodied one.
The excessive setup required for all this means that in the piece’s current iteration, each participant wears only one suit and so plays only one character during a given viewing. I must sadly report that, in our group, I did not end up as the slime mold (which the staff claimed was the most ‘psychedelic’ of the various simulations).
If only that were my sole or even my main disappointment with the piece.
I’ll cut to the chase and let you know that the whole Symbiosis experience was a lot like playing a fussy videogame with an overly long voiceover intro, in which, as soon as the voice stopped talking and you thought you might be able to actually do something, the game ends.
If, indeed, during that voiceover narration one had a physical experience so unlike our normal human day-to-day that it altered one’s notion of being in the world, it could have been worth it. Or if, perhaps, the VR world appearing inside my headset had been vivid and compelling enough to transform my vision of what a post-Anthropocene world might look like—then, yes, maybe all the fuss would have purpose. But it was not to be so.
Why bother telling you about it then? Because I think it’s worth reflecting on the specific blunders Symbiosis makes, as they illuminate particular attachments, blinders, and failures of imagination that are quite common. And because the questions they raise are still potentially good questions, which we might find other ways to answer.
So I wasn’t a slime mold. I was, instead, a butterfly. Or rather, a butterfly-orchid-human ‘symbiont’. This, too, was exciting; maybe I wasn’t a teeming throng of tiny cooperative organisms, but I was willing to swap that for the chance to experience flying like a monarch with the delicacy of a flower.
My ‘creature’ was named Camille, and largely inspired by and modeled on a series of characters with that name as developed by Donna Haraway in her “Children of the Compost” stories from her book Staying With the Trouble: Make Kin Not Babies. Those stories document the interwoven efforts of humans to stay alive by becoming more integrated with other species and doing habitat-specific conservation that benefits both the original monarch population and the new human-monarch symbiont.
The limits of the technology deployed by Polymorf to capture such a character, however, became immediately evident. Monarchs and orchids are, of course, light beings: delicate and fluttery, wispy and thin and graceful. Yet the tool chosen to encapsulate this experience—the haptic bodysuit—was a monstrosity of heavy fabric and velcro weighted down with all manner of tubing to provide ‘feedback,’ mostly in the form of pressure via inflation. (The pressure didn’t seem to be in response to anything I did, more like a programmed pattern than genuine ‘feedback.’) In the scant time in which I wore the suit, I never forgot that I had it on, and all its awkward weight remained more present and real than anything happening in the animated land in front of me.
A land in which, incidentally, I did nothing physical to move through: it simply progressed, regardless of my own action, as the narration in my headphones told me what was happening. Even when I thought I ought to be doing something, it turned out I was wrong. I wasn’t supposed to reach out at the moments food was offered, for instance; that resulted, instead, in my awkwardly grabbing the museum staff member in front of me, who I couldn’t see as she was trying to spoonfeed me. And I wasn’t supposed to try and walk while grasping the strange leg/antenna appendages sprouting from my abdomen. “You’re not really supposed to try and move in that suit,” they kept telling me. What was I supposed to be, a dead butterfly? You tell me I can fly and then tell me not to move?
Maybe if the graphics were more enticing—truly inspiring belief in a future world rather than harkening back to the 1980s—I wouldn’t have been so aware of my own body, its own presence, and the inability of the cumbersome but intense effort about me to make it feel like something else. Or perhaps if the storytelling were more compelling. But, though the details had been transferred into a first-person narrative, what played through my headphones felt more expository in nature, much like the original source material (Haraway may be a skilled and inventive theoretician, but she remains steadfastly an academic).
All of these blunders, as I’ve said, are actually interesting. The suits and the emphasis on scent and taste, for instance, suggest that embodiment is being taken seriously, and recognizes that calling forth new worlds must be more than theoretical incantation and in fact requires more embodied imaginings. Yet rather than relying upon our naturally embodied state to take us there, it falls into a common trap, one that sees machines and programs as the way to help us achieve that which, purportedly, we have yet to achieve on our own.
In this way, despite all its content and focus on other-than-human creatures, Symbiosis gets stuck in a very human tendency—a very modern human tendency at that, something we might crudely state as “more tech is better” and also “more complicated tech is even better.” Additionally, the tech-focused structure of the piece requires top-down decisions and implementation, eschewing rather than using the abilities and capacities of participants. Polymorf may talk about cooperation and ‘engagement,’ but viewers of Symbiosis stay in a realm of passive receiving, the vision of the world to come provided by an artistic elite. Thus they also remain stuck in another common modern tendency, one that confuses consuming a pre-determined product (be it of an art piece or a commodity) for participation in co-creation of our common reality.
Let me get more concrete about all this. A fair amount of what my character, Camille, did during the 15-minutes Symbiosis played out, was to travel along, observing the landscape, while reflecting on what had brought per there and per present connection to it.1 The attempt, I think, was at a meditative walk/flight through a changed world, grounded in senses to which we do not always consciously attend while in motion—smell, taste.
Might we state the obvious and suggest that this kind of experience can already be had, and without all the fuss? The future of our world continues to unfold in the present. The harm of the Anthropocene can be witnessed clearly on nearly any bit of land, for one who knows how to look. For that, what’s needed isn’t teleportation by animation: it’s actual presence, taking a walk or a hike in which we opt to tune into our many senses rather than tuning out via headphones or distracting onself by constantly conversing with others. It’s gentle movement—somewhere between the slow leaning of a plant and that drifting exploration of a butterfly. One might even call such steady but grounded movement our natural human pace, to which we clearly have access.
A walk through any forest will tell you about the struggle for life amidst destruction as much or more than any VR vision. Once damp moss now smells like straw. Touch your palm against a burned tree; feel the charcoal crumble, the scent of ash arise. Catch a hint of diesel while crossing a logging road and know that fuel is finding its way through the soil at the same time the trees come down. That is already the world we are surviving in. And our bodies are already equipped to know it, to both taste the present and sense the future.
Likewise, human bodies are in many ways also equipped to radically intuit the experience of other beings and imagine the world from their vantage point. We do this, both instinctually and physically, as children, pretending to be everything from cats and dogs to birds and frogs or sleeping bears driven into a frenzied state of attack (“Mr. Bear, Mr. Bear, are you awake?”)
We do this through stories, visible in the vast trove of stories worldwide about animals, or told from their viewpoint, or representing all the human-animal symbionts and changelings populating the human imagination throughout history (and these are not all horror, not all werewolves).
And we do this, of course, in our very interactions with other animals. Is that not the lesson of the Jane Goodalls of the world, those who have actually taken the time to sit and watch and empathize with other species? And Goodall didn’t need nearly such a complicated technical apparatus to make her many impactful observations.
But can one really know what it’s like to be a butterfly? Or is such an experience too “other”? Must we conclude, as Thomas Nagel famously does, that we must remain ignorant of the sense experience of other creatures, that we can never know what it’s like to be a bat?
When we say “really know” we might mean “know with certainty,” and certainty in most things tends to be elusive. But we can get closer to knowing without yet being certain, and it’s in this way that I think we have a much wider array of capacities than we generally recognize, when it comes to accessing the experience of other beings. I think of how I once, quite unintentionally, used some of our (by which I mean humans’) oldest and best tools for altering our own conscious experience to imagine the bodies of other animals.
It happened like this: I was, at that time, studying individually with a yoga instructor in the Hatha tradition, working not only on sequences of asanas but also on breathing and meditation techniques. I was, however, struggling when practicing independently. I was caught up just then in some ongoing conflict at work that I had trouble not thinking about rather constantly. So each morning, when I should have been trying to pay attention to my breath and body, I’d come to find myself stuck in a pose, unsure of how long I’d been there and hardly breathing at all as I played over in my mind whatever drama or grievance had most recently occurred. My typical tools for returning back to my meditative practice weren’t working; I might do one or two deep inhales, but then my mind would scurry off again into worry or rage.
When this had been going on for some time, I began to look for other options to interrupt the cycle, and wondered if making myself laugh wouldn’t do the trick. I began thinking of funny words to chant when I caught myself in unhelpful patterns of thought. This, it turned out, was surprisingly effective, at least for a time.
One morning, the word was “elephant,” and it occurred to me next that it would be even funnier to imagine myself doing asanas as an elephant, to see what that might be like. Which poses would an elephant enjoy, and which might they despise? (I decided that, like me, elephants might struggle with Utkatasana, or chair pose.) Somehow from there I moved to other animals, and my practice was slowly populated with an imaginary bestiary. How might a parrot do something like cat-cow? (Now my new and potentially distracting thoughts were ones like, “do birds have joints?: Or, “Why didn’t I think to do this before—we use animal names for so many of these!”)
Challenges arose especially for anything without limbs, and I found myself flopping and sliding into position in new ways. But as I turned my focus to my breath and other sensations, I could begin changing these as well. My skin tingled as I imagined humming like a bee. My muscles grew heavy with weight as I thought of moving slowly as the elephant. And I once event felt as buoyant and light as a butterfly, altering my breathwork until I thought I might just flutter away.
Some of this was just childlike play; yet some of it was tapping old, old techniques for manipulating our own experience. I’m just an unskilled occasional student of such things, and still—a couple weeks of doing this a little each morning, and I was getting much closer to seeing the world from the perspective of our animal relatives—or as some strange human-animal symbiont—in a way I don’t think months stuck in a haptic body suit could ever achieve.
Flawed though it may be, projects like Polymorf’s Symbiosis prompt us to consider: how might we go about sampling or tasting the experience of perspectives very different from our own? In the stories we tell about our future selves, can we not only empathize with other-than-human beings, can we truly imagine ourselves as other than we now are? Can we use that as a starting point to consider other narratives of survival in a climate-changed world that go beyond the post-apocalyptic hero-centered stories typically served up by Hollywood? If we must inhabit a post-apocalyptic landscape, can we imagine doing so in one populated by humans and butterfly and their strangely interwoven kin, and not merely with brawny men and their guns?
Somehow, though, the artists fail to ask similar questions about the present: can we imagine such symbiosis and deep cooperation taking place without all the status-seeking tech? Might we see it happen instead with our already pre-existing biological selves, which are already attuning and in relationship with the more-than-human world? Are flashy tech tools—be it AR or VR or XR or what have you—the best option for taking on new viewpoints in our present moment, or are there different, more effective methods?
As currently implemented, a project like Symbiosis is self-defeating, the form mismatched to the content and undercutting its own goals. Such a project may speak of our senses and our bodies but denies their true uses; it promises to transport us, and yet strangely binds us in space, hinders our own movement, and restricts our vision.
Maybe what we’re short on—when it comes to preparing for the strange future to come, or understanding the true multi-species experience of the present—is not special visualizations and expensive gadgetry, but the time-worn tools of presence and attention.
So let’s not outsource all our imaginative work of the future to the professional artists just yet; the rarefied practices of that realm may no longer be the best tools for the job.
They’re probably right about the slime mold, though. There’s something there to learn, once we figure out how.
Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg
“Per” is the pronoun Haraway uses for Camille.