Slime Contamination 

„Knowing is not a capacity that is the exclusive birthright of the human. (…) There is no res cogitans that inhabits a given body with inherent boundaries differentiating self and other. Rather, subjects are differentially constituted through specific intra-actions. The subjects so constituted may range across some of the presumed boundaries (such as those between human and nonhuman and self and other) that get taken for granted.“ (cf. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning)

 

The prototype of the virtual reality application „Slime Contamination“ shows a sensual-aesthetic experience of slimy rhythms on a damaged planet. This damaged planet is represented by an old, dilapidated factory in which abstract yellow shapes float around that, upon closer inspection, resemble the slimy plasma of the slime mold. These shapes move to the rhythms of the real slime mold, which are measured by electrodes in the prototype Sympoiesis. Thus, that experience offers the recipient the opportunity to contaminate himself with the rhythmic frequencies of the slime mold and to entangle his unconsciousness with another variety of non-human matter. In this way, the conventional ways of thinking about individual creativity are broken down and a different perspective of collaborative creation with more-than-human matter is proposed. This collaborative creation takes place on a path through the synchronization of the rhythms of external and internal matter by means of unconscious incubation.

 

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