Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia / Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art / May 19 – July 31 /
Curator: Zane Cerpina / Co-curator: Espen Gangvik
Aquadisia / 2022
Stephanie Rothenberg [US]
Soft, fleshy and resourceful, the oyster is a magnificent and extremely talented creature of the sea. It was almost extinct by the mid 20th century due to industrial pollution and massive overfishing. One tiny 2-inch organism can filter up to 50 gallons of polluted water per day. Its home created from its own layered shells combine with others to form natural reef systems that protect coastlines against rising sea levels and provide habitat for other species to thrive. And legends speak wonders of its euphoric powers as an aphrodisiac.
Imagine if we could bioengineer this magical species to convert toxic water into an even more transformative formula and pipe it into public drinking water? Could we create a public sentient machine of more perceptible humans? A perception that enables a more sensual interconnection with the cycle of life that leads to a better handling of this ecological crisis? One that transforms energy into an agential sensual power?
Aquadisia, part of a larger body of work called Aphrodisiac in the Machine, is an environmental science fiction that manifests in a variety of formats online and offline including installations, videos and performances. It explores the ethical and economic contradictions within the desire to be more sustainable, both individually and on a global scale. The project focuses on the neoliberal concept of natural capital and what is known as ecosystem services, the provisioning and regulating of natural resources for human benefit and furthermore, survival. Drawing on innovations in genetic engineering and marine science, the project explores one area of ecosystem services that has received much development known as aquaculture. It is a form of sea farming that has been gainfully employed to more sustainably secure future food resources and offset the environmental degradation of land-based industrial farming. Yet as these systems scale up they become another extraction machine presenting a new set of environmental problems.
Inspired by black feminist writer Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic as a power of feeling, Aquadisia posits more-than-human sentience as a lubricant to speculate a new kind of eco-machine. The project plays with the libidinal myth of the oyster, a hermaphroditic organism, being bioengineered in a futuristic aquaculture farm. Technology is eroticized as intersexual bioengineered cyborg oysters convert toxic water into a magical fluid called Aquadisia Water given out freely to the public. Lorde challenges the patriarchal overtones in how the word erotic is used, not only redefining but reigniting the erotic as a physical, psychic and emotional energy that can’t be reduced to a commodified good or systematized affect. Can this new and improved bioengineered oyster push humans past the mere libidinal and sexualized state of capital conquests of other bodies and into a new state of sentience – a Sentience 2.0? We invite you to take a drink!
Project support:
Aquadisia / Aphrodisiac in the Machine is supported through the Department of Art, University at Buffalo and artist residencies at Z/KU Center for Art and Urbanism in Berlin and Xenoform Labs in San Francisco and a fellowship at the Roux Center for Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Laboratory research using CRISPR on oyster DNA is currently being conducted at Coalesce Center for Biological Art at the University at Buffalo, NY.
Sound design by Suzanne Thorpe. Video talking head Shasti O’Leary Soudant. 3D animations created by Gary Jacobs, James LaPlante/Sputnik Animation. Titles created by Brent Patterson, Spencer Kohrt.
Stephanie Rothenberg
Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore symbiotic relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces, she engages a variety of media platforms that include interactive installation, drawing, sculpture, video and performance. Her artworks make visible the terrestrial and digital networks of capital that flow through the bodies of both human and more-than-human entities. Arising from her fascination with techno utopian culture, her multimedia storytelling seeks to reveal the contradictions of its narratives. Topics in her work include the bio politics of digital labor and sustainability myths surrounding the concept of natural capital.
She has exhibited internationally in venues and festivals including ISEA, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art / MASS MoCA (US), House of Electronic Arts / HeK (CH), LABoral (ES), Transmediale (DE), and ZKM Center for Art & Media (DE). She is a recipient of numerous awards, most recently from the Harpo Foundation and Creative Capital. Residencies include ZK/U Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin, TOKAS / Tokyo Art and Space (JP), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace/LMCC (US), Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and the Santa Fe Art Institute (US). Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic. She has been a participant and organizer in the MoneyLab research project at the Institute of Network Cultures (NL), co-organizing the 2018 MoneyLab 5 symposium that took place in Buffalo, NY (US). She is Professor in the Department of Art at SUNY Buffalo (US) where she co-directs the Platform Social Design Lab, an interdisciplinary design studio collaborating with local social justice organizations.
Header Graphics: “Aquadisia” by Stephanie Rothenberg.