Keywords: art practice, bioart, feminist new materialism, transpecies solidarity, rituals of care
Abstract
I am an environmental designer and bioartist working with living organisms, natural systems, and atmospheric phenomena to explore multispecies entanglements across scales. For the past 5 years I have been developing design prototypes that interrogate the position of the human in our environmental future by catalyzing new rituals that force humans out of their exploitative relationship with the more-than-human world and obligate them to collaborate and thus co-evolve toward more inclusive and ethical models for living.
Titled Transcorporeal Atmospheres, the work celebrates transpecies solidarity by facilitating collaboration between humans and fungi to produce water from the collective exhale of both species. The piece is part of a larger series (collectively called “Near-Extinction Rituals”) that bring humans into intimate and sensate contact with other species (plants, insects, fungi, pollinators, microbes) in order to catalyze new forms of relationality with the multispecies world.
Specifically, the piece presents a designed system consisting of an undulating vessel, enclosing an inner moist environment that enables organisms, especially Shiitake mushroom, to grow and be sustained by human breath. This design prototype asks us to imagine what future forms of coexistence and co-survival might look like if centered around interspecies intimacy and care. While the prototype is functional and was produced in consultation with scientists, it points, more importantly, to critical questions at the intersection of queer theory and ecopolitics – asking what it might mean to share our breath with the multi-species world, among other themes. The entry features the project and elaborates on mentioned themes.
Titled Transcorporeal Atmospheres [1], the following work celebrates transpecies solidarity by facilitating collaboration between humans and fungi to produce water from the collective exhale of both species. The piece is part of a larger series (collectively called “Near-Extinction Rituals”) that brings humans into intimate and sensate contact with other species (plants, insects, fungi, pollinators, microbes) in order to catalyze new forms of relationality with the multispecies world. The series ask us to imagine what future forms of coexistence and co-survival might look like if centered around interspecies intimacy and care.
Within this context, Transcorporeal Atmospheres presents an undulating vessel enclosing an inner moist environment that enables organisms, especially Shiitake mushroom, to grow and be sustained by human breath. Leaning on scholar Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, particularly as framed in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self, the piece explores the “interconnections, interchanges, and transits” between human bodies and nonhuman natures, emphasizing the permeability of bodies as a challenge to the humanist model of discrete individuality. Arriving at the understanding that “‘the environment’ is not located somewhere out there, but is always the very substance of ourselves,” offers us a profoundly altered model of the human self and a foundational concept for this piece [2].
While the prototype is functional and was produced in consultation with scientists, it points, more importantly, to critical questions at the intersection of queer theory and ecopolitics. Environmental philosopher David Macauley reminds us that our “breath is routinely circulated and shared with others... We are conspiring – literally, breathing together – and to contemplate this fact can dramatically change our lives to reveal new ways that human others and nonhuman otherness are woven into the very elemental conditions of our existence” [3].
Transcorporeal Atmospheres thus explores what it means to share our breath and the water it contains with the multispecies world. The word atmosphere comes from the Greek atmos (“vapor”) and sphaira (“ball”). The project creates such a communal sphere of vapor as watershed for the survival and evolution of these fungal symbionts. It welcomes “breath” as a communal action that collects airborne particles of water that we collectively inhale and release with the more-than-human world. The project gathers the waters of this communal exhale for hydration and nourishment of Shiitake fungus which filters the water and magnifies its abundance by its own breath through the production of metabolic water (ability unique to the Shiitake). In response to increasing water scarcity, this amplified breathing system presents a new kind of hydrocommons that ensures co-survival. The designed system is not meant to create a closed loop but over time will extend to supply water to other organisms that would become the co-inhabitants of this new emergent ecosystem.
By tying oneself into networks of mutual exchange and co-dependence, this human-fungal assemblage inspires us to imagine a more intimate, compassionate and collaborative form of earthly inhabitation.
Liquid Breath, an instalation and demonstration of Transcorporeal Atmospheres exhibited at SOLO-la, Santa Monica, CA 2023. [4]
An appendage of Transcorporeal Atmospheres, Communal Exhale is a scaffolding structure containing the water collected over 60 days of interspecies breathing.
Communal Exhale, a scaffolding structure containing liquid breath co-produced by humans and fungi exhibited at Pier 17, South Street Seaport, NYC 2023. [5]
References
[1] “TRANSCORPOREAL ATMOSPHERES.” Foreground Design Agency, www.foreground-da.com/TRANSCORPOREAL-ATMOSPHERES.
[2] Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.
[3] David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas.
State University of New York Press, 2010.
[4] “LIQUID BREATH.” Foreground Design Agency, www.foreground-da.com/LIQUID-BREATH.
[5] "COMMUNAL EXHALE." Foreground Design Agency, https://www.foreground-da.com/COMMUNAL-EXHALE
About the Artist
Aroussiak Gabrielian is an environmental designer and bioartist working with living organisms, natural systems, and atmospheric phenomena to explore multispecies entanglements across scales. Her work aims to torque our imaginaries to help us rethink our interactions with both human and non-human agents on this planet.
Aroussiak’s work has received numerous design recognitions including the Emerging Designer Awards from the Design Futures Initiative, the Tomorrowland Projects Foundation Award administered through the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Word Changing Ideas Awards recognized by Fast Company, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She has exhibited internationally at various institutions, including SXSW, Ars Electronica Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, the Eli & Edith Broad Museum Art Lab, A+D Museum Los Angeles, the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York City, Science Gallery Detroit, among others.
Aroussiak is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the School of
Architecture at the University of Southern California, where she teaches design across ecologic and biologic scales. She is an Affiliate Faculty of Media Arts Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts and Founding Director of the Landscape Futures Lab, which is focused on expanding the climate imaginary. Outside of academia, Aroussiak is a member of NEW INC, the arts and technology incubator of the New Museum in New York City, and Founding Design Principal of foreground design agency, a critical design practice based in Los Angeles that aims to dismantle structures of power and privilege that render specific humans, species, and matter silent.
Citation
Aroussiak, Gabrielian. 2024. “Transcorporeal Atmospheres.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. http://www.tsqnow.online/post/transcorporeal-atmospheres
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