Gently whisper to your oral microbes
This performative installation touches upon the millennia-old question about the materiality of language and the creation of the world through it. It incorporates the current research on the holobiont, which shows our dependency on the living microbes that form our inner ecosystem.
Microbial Keywording / Klaus Spiess (AT), Lucie Strecker (DE), Credit: vog.photo
Microbial Keywording / Klaus Spiess (AT), Lucie Strecker (DE), Credit: vog.photo
Microbial Keywording / Klaus Spiess (AT), Lucie Strecker (DE), Credit: vog.photo
Can we train this system by speaking certain words? The installation explores this in showing the mutuality of the phonemes and oral flora of the visitors through speech-induced variation in salivary acids. In the resulting ecolinguistic system, the visitors are “spoken by their microbiome.” This system is trained by pheromone addition based on spectrogram patterns until it is epigenetically anchored in the visitors’ oral microbiome and finally output as a speaker-generated designer probiotic.
Project Credits:
- Medical University Vienna
- University of Applied Arts Vienna
- Austrian Science Fund
- Jürgen Ropp (Interface design)
- Joseph Knierzinger (Media-Arts)
- Katherina T. Zakravsky (Ecolinguist)
- Mark Rinnerthaler (Cell Biology)
Biographies:
Klaus Spiess (AT) runs the Arts and Science program and is LASER chair at the Medical University Vienna, where he is an associate professor. He has developed performances/installations on the subject of biopolitics for many international venues. Awarded with a Prix Ars Electronica. He has published on the subject of his work in Leonardo, The Journal of Performance Research and The Lancet.
Lucie Strecker (DE) is a fellow of the Berlin University of the Arts and holds a senior postdoc position at the Art & Science department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her works and performances have been shown at many international venues (House of World Cultures, Berlin, Click Festival for Art, Science and Technology, Onassis Cultural Center, Athens and Ars Electronica Linz, ao).
