Co-Corporeality of Humans, Machines, & Microbes (Edition Angewandte) 9783035625851, 9783035625882, 3035625859

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Co-Structuring New Corpo-Realities
Co-Corporeality: Responding, Observing and Sharing Knowledge
Microbial Communication with Humans
Co-Corporeality of/with Cyanobacteria
A [Micro-]Companion to Symbiosis
Visualising Microbial Activity: Colorimetric Signalling Using E. coli with pH-Indicators and Chromogenic Substrates
Living Material Systems
Bacterial Cellulose Experiments
Intelligence of Living and Artificial Systems
Facial Expression Recognition
Eye-Gaze Tracking Technology
E-Feed/er
Degrees of Life
Survival Perspectives on Cohabitation by Design
GROVE: Open Systems for Living Architecture
Rethinking the Common from Its Biological Roots
Quo Vadis? Towards a More-Than-Human World
Biographies and Acknowledgements
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Co-Corporeality of Humans, Machines, & Microbes

Barbara Imhof, Daniela Mitterberger, Tiziano Derme (Eds.) Co-Corporeality of Humans, Machines, & Microbes Birkhäuser Basel

06

Co-Structuring New Corpo-Realities

Foreword by Jens Hauser

14

Table

Co-Corporeality: Responding, Observing and Sharing Knowledge

Introduction by the Editors

26

Microbial Communication with Humans

Heribert Insam

33

Co-Corporeality of/with Cyanobacteria

Judith Ascher-Jenull, Carolin Garmsiri, Heribert Insam

52

A [Micro-]Companion to Symbiosis

David Berry

59

Visualising Microbial Activity: Colorimetric Signalling Using E. coli with pH-Indicators and Chromogenic Substrates / Andi Heberlein

66

Living Material Systems

An Interview with Alexander Bismarck

75

Bacterial Cellulose Experiments

82

Intelligence of Living and Artificial Systems

An Interview with Robert Trappl

CO-CORPOREALITY

Neptun Yousefi

91

Facial Expression Recognition

Martin Gasser

96

of

Eye-Gaze Tracking Technology

Martin Gasser

102

E-Feed/er

Co-Corporeality Team

112

Degrees of Life

Co-Corporeality Team

142

Survival Perspectives on Cohabitation by Design

Petra Gruber

154

GROVE: Open Systems for Living Architecture

170

Rethinking the Common from Its Biological Roots

Alex Arteaga

178

Quo Vadis? Towards a More-Than-Human World

Rachel Armstrong

196

Biographies and Acknowledgements

Contents

Philip Beesley

CO-CORPOREALITY

Jens Hauser CURATOR AND MEDIA STUDIES SCHOLAR, PARIS/COPENHAGEN

Co-Structuring New Corpo-Realities

CO-STRUCTURING NEW CORPO-REALITIES

Addressing issues of ‘our’ and other-than-human habitats and post-anthropocentric forms of the oikos understood as ‘householding’ is a pressing issue today that occurs conjunctly, across disciplines and scales. Increasingly, we are aware of and acknowledge humankind’s entanglement with multiple living systems; but also climate change, ecocides and loss of biodiversity. In order to stage and reflect upon the potential that performative architectures generate, art, architecture, bio(techno) logy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, new materialist cultural theory, ecofeminism and performance theory – all traditionally dealing with genuinely different types of preoccupations and agencies – cross-fertilise in an unprecedented manner around the concept of Co-Corporeality.

1. Even a term like ‘con-struction’ conveys different connotations: beyond putting artificial structures together, the dynamic act itself of structuring together reveals its inherent performativity.

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The concept itself deserves some etymological and epistemological scrutiny. Despite at first sight the hypocoristic suggestion by the prosody of its reduplication, Co-Co’s two components relate to two distinct and complementary facets. The first prefix ‘co’ comes from Latin, where it means ‘joint’, ‘shared’ or ‘auxiliary’, resulting in a kind of togetherness, something that different entities have or perform in common. As such, it melts into supposedly self-­ evident terms such as ‘cohabitation’ but is also present, adapting to its lexical context, in ‘communication’, ‘conversation’, ‘construction’ or ‘correalism’. The second ‘co’, corporeality, is reported to originate in Sanskrit krp and Proto-Indo-European krep, standing for ‘appearance’ and ‘form’, giving rise to the Latin corpus, ‘body’ but also ‘matter of any kind’. The term thus denotes organised physical substance but does not per se imply any scale or nature and is not anthropomorphic by definition. This twofold terminological ‘construction’ prompts various questions:1 First, which bodies are called to engage in ­togetherness? And second, what is a body today? We currently witness multiple attempts to escape standardised scale such as that represented in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man, in which the human body and its supposedly ideal proportions establish analogies with architecture, other disciplines and the universe at large.

FOREWORD BY JENS HAUSER

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In this sense, Co-Corporeality parallels current trends in aesthetics, media and performance theory, which can also be described as microperformativity – a concept that questions the human scale as the crucial point of reference and contextualises other-than-human agencies, biological and technical ones alike. These in turn, challenge and subvert the mesoscopic tradition within which human phenomenological considerations are, philosophically, politically and aesthetically, still rooted. With regards to space and time, microperformativity allows for an analysis of techno-science inspired artistic practices that aim at increasing awareness for the invisibility of the microscopic and the incomprehensibility of the macroscopic.2 In these practices non-human agencies are staged in relation to techno-scientific or algorithmic systems, thus addressing contemporary dynamics linking the organic and the machinic – thus resulting in moist media, “comprising bits, atoms, neurons, and genes in every kind of combination” and in which “the dry world of virtuality and the wet world of biology” merge.3 The Co-Corporeality research project, its public exhibition and hybrid performative displays as well as this publication propose a challenging and materialised scenario of what experimental architecture and art can contribute to visions of trans-species interaction and living and adapting materials. It stages pigment choreographies and phototactic movements of microorganisms as a prospect for responsive architectures with flexible structures that adapt to bacterial change and future self-organising building techniques including biopolymers and 3D printing. With regards to the hype of ‘intelligent materials’, here a systemic and critical approach prevails in which intelligence may not just refer to the mimicking of human cognition but rather to the decentralised intelligence of ecosystems, systems which are even capable of cleaning up human-kind’s mess in times of major ecological and atmospheric crises. The research project compares and connects different modes of sensing in biological and technical systems, and confronts the contemporary fashion of artificial intelligence with biological intelligence; such hybrid constellations could be coined “naturally artificial intelligence” (NAI).4 Human presence becomes entangled with microbial ecologies via micro-movement observation such as eye tracking and face recognition. Here, in web-based displays of human/microbe interaction, principles of cognition defined as a general biological feature are being questioned and extended beyond the human realm, echoing Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana’s remark that “the observer is a human being, that is, a living system, and whatever

2. Hauser, J. (2020) ‘Microperformativity and Biomediality’, in Performance Research issue On Microperformativity, edited by J. Hauser and L. Strecker,25(3): 12. 3. Ascott, R. (2001) ‘Arts Education @ the Edge of the Net: The Future Will Be Moist!’, in Arts Education Policy Review, 102(3): 9–10. 4. ‘NAI?’ was been a neologism introduced at the occasion of the 4th International Open Fields Conference for Art-Science Research organised by RIXC in Riga in 2019

CO-STRUCTURING NEW CORPO-REALITIES

applies to living systems applies also to him.” Therefore, not only ‘an understanding of cognition as a biological phenomenon must account for the observer and his role in it’ but, as such, “living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system.” 5

The focus on bacteria as the oldest, smallest, structurally simplest but ubiquitous organisms vital for all other life forms becomes plausible as an antecedently hidden link between art, architecture, bio(technolo)gy and ecology, since they are pervasive in en-vironments and in-vironments alike; they constitute “two ecologies … the environment we inhabit [and] the microbiome: the one that inhabits us. Both of them are critical to our survival” and thus “we have yet to understand microorganisms as potential collaborators or partners …. The micro-logical scale must be integrated into the activity of designers and in order to do so we must shift our definition of our task from the creation of objects to the crafting of systems that include a significant biological component. Microbes are material, but not the passive and inert stuff that many are used to working with.” 8

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Previously, the notion of co-corporeality has been used – as I did myself in 2008 – to describe a central characteristic for the perception of bio media based art: the crucial importance of an actual organic presence, in its spatial Latin sense of ­prae-esse, “with which the viewer comes into contact and with which he can sensually or multi-sensorially accomplish an affective corporeal projection.” 6 These ‘presence effects’ (as opposed to ‘meaning effects’) produced by corporeal substantiality, along with the impact of the non-hermeneutic on senses and bodies in cultural phenomena7 were then emphasised – however, first and foremost in an unidirectional sense, as an effect for the viewer. In contrast, today Co-Corporeality is conceptualised in a bi- or multidirectional sense, e.g. when the E-feed/er’s Zoom web interface allows for the tracking and algorithmic analysis of human facial expressions and translates the results into physical-chemical inputs that impact the specific behaviour of E. coli bacterial colonies. The question of for whom performative modes of non-human agencies are actually staged and whether human audiences should ultimately not be the only targets, becomes a matter of concern. Beyond speech acts and symbolic language, human visitors’ bad mood can potentially have a lethal impact on their microbial audience … What is at stake here is less the ‘performance’ – with the term’s emphasis of presenting something to a (human) audience – but the ‘performativity’ – highlighting the execution of whichever action or process via the inherent performative qualities of manifold bio(techno)logical agencies: cultured cells or tissues, growth media, or … in this case, bacteria.

FOREWORD BY JENS HAUSER

5. Maturana, H. R. (1970) Biology of Cognition. Biological Computer Laboratory Research Report BCL 9.0. Urbana IL: University of Illinois, pp. 2 and 4; emphasis in the original. 6. Hauser, J. (2008) Observations on an Art of Growing Interest. Towards a Phenomenological Approach to Art involving Biotechnology. In: Da Costa, Beatriz & Philip, Kavita (ed.): Tactical Biopolitics. Art, Activism, and Technoscience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008, p. 89. 7. Gumbrecht, H.U. (2003) Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford University Press: Stanford, IL. 8. Krueger, T. (2017) ‘Microecologies of the Built Environment.’ In: C. N. Terranova and M. Tromble, Meredith (eds.): The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. Routledge: New York, NY. pp. 241–242. 9. Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthuman performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’, in Signs: Journal of women in culture and society. 28(3). pp. 826–827. 10. Barad, K. ibid, p. 822; emphasis in the original. 11. Caneva, G., Nugari, M. P. & Salvadori, O. eds. (2008) Plant Biology for Cultural Heritage. Biodeterioration and Conservation. Getty Conservation Institute: Los Angeles, CA. 12. Ranalli, G. & Sorlini, C. (2008) Bioremediation. In: Plant Biology for Cultural Heritage. Biodeterioration and Conservation. In: G. Caneva, M. Nugari and O. Salvadori (eds.), Getty Conservation Institute: Los Angeles, CA. pp. 340–46. 13. Kacunko, S. (ed.) (2016): Sabine Kacunko: Bacteria, Art and other Bagatelles. Verlag für moderne Kunst: Vienna, Austria. 14. Krueger, T. (2017) ‘Microecologies of the Built Environment’. In: C. N. Terranova and M. Tromble (eds.): The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. Routledge: New York, NY. p. 245. 15. S+T+ARTS Centers EU Green Deal Challenge n°8, (2022) ‘Microorganism Cities’. Available at: https://starts.eu/ starts-regional-centresrepairing-the-present/ src-microorganism-cities/. Accessed 4 April 2022.

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As such, Co-Corporeality’s research agenda also ­fruitfully resonates with feminist science scholar Karen Barad’s broader postulate of “a posthumanist materialist account of performativity that challenges the positioning of materiality as either a given or a mere affect of human agency” when now “agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit.” 9 ­Architecture’s materials in general tend to appear as ‘passive’ matter, whereas, as Karen Barad objects, “matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming – not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of a ­ gency.” 10 An interesting case, in this sense, is also the role that microorganisms play in cultural heritage, confusing sharp distinctions between biodeterioration and bioremediation. Conservation studies may complain about bacteria, algae, fungi, cyanobacteria, mosses and plants since they cause stains, crusts, cracks, patinas, biofilms or corrosion. But at the same time microorganisms assist in cleaning, biore­moval of unwanted substances, and what’s more, help conserve cultural heritage to consolidate supports such as ­limestone.11 For example, the building material of the Colosseum in Rome consists dominantly of travertine, a terrestrial sedimentary and porous rock, solidified by bacteria via bio-­ calcification,12 and microorganisms such as the Gram-negative Bacillus cereus which in combination “protect the monument from destruction caused by harmful environmental influences and thus secure the transmission of our cultural memory.” 13 It is now largely assumed that “microbes could become an immune system for the built environment, purifying air, water, or occupying surfaces … some might support a rich interior ecology of commensal plants and animal life that we would find delightful. Perhaps the opening of a new facility would include inoculation by an architectural probiotic.” 14 Currently, EU supported art and science initiatives suggest “Repairing the Present” by enriching the urban microbiome, fostering ­better ecological interactions in order to “increase biodiversity in the city and improve the health of its inhabitants, human and non-human.” 15 Biologists themselves have started to address bacteria as “ancient architects” capable of building “highly

CO-STRUCTURING NEW CORPO-REALITIES

Today we witness a desire to deconstruct the alleged ­exclusiveness of human beings as tool-building agents and to counterbalance human prowess with unicellular ­organisms’ quality to be organised and organising, adapting, evolving, moving, sensing and processing information. Within an ecological account of natural agency, they partake in a “cognitive turn in microbiology, considering that bacteria are purposive agents, and purposive agency is the mark of cognition.” 17 Affirmations of bacteria’s cognitive ability consider that “bacteria are analogous to complex human-made cybernetic systems”, because “the colony of individuals, the social group, gleans information from the environment. They ‘talk’ with one another, distribute tasks and convert their collective into a huge ‘brain’ that processes information, learns from past experience, and, we suspect, creates new genes to better cope with novel challenges.” 18 It appears that issues and practices between art, architecture and biology in the Co-Corporeality project take up, continue and upgrade a longer history that has started to question ocular-centrism and anthropocentric aesthetics, functionality and durability of built environments in the 20th century. Let’s think of Austrian born Friedrich (Frederick) J. Kiesler’s ‘correalism’ as an early proposal for an organic and healthy architecture, expressing “the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments” 19 via “an investigation into the laws of the inter-relationships of natural and man-made organisms.” 20 Consider the 1960’s Japanese Metabolism avant-garde movement which was in favour of a new urbanism according to the principle that “architecture and cities should be organic, growing through metabolic changes of change and renewal.” 21 The multi-sensory

16. Krumbein, W. E. & Asikainen, C. A. (2011) Ancient Architects. In L. Margulis, C. A. Asikainen & W. E. Krumbein (eds.) Chimeras and Consciousness. MIT Press: Cambridge MA. pp. 63–65.

17. Fulda, F. C. (2017) ‘Natural Agency: The Case of Bacterial Cognition’, in Journal of the American Philosophical Association. 3(1):70–71.

18. Ben-Jacob, E., Shapira, Y. & Tauber, A. I. (2011) Smart Bacteria. In L. Margulis, C. A. Asikainen and W. E. Krumbein (eds.) Chimeras and Consciousness. MIT Press: Cambridge MA. pp. 56–57.

19. Kiesler, F. J. (1939) On Correalism and Biotechnique. A Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design.’ Architectural Record 86(3): 61. Emphasis in the original. 20. Kiesler, F. J., ibid. p. 59. 21. Fumio, N. (2011) Metabolism’s Current Significance, Contribution to Disaster Recovery, and Future. In: H. Mami, S. Hitomi, M. Naotake. et al. Metabolism, the City of the Future. Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan. Mori Art Museum: Tokyo.

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patterned dwellings” via “interspecific sensory and co­ ordinated physiological activity (‘consciousness’ ... and ‘design’) to challenge the preconceived idea that conscious human architecture constitutes an exceptional feature.” 16

FOREWORD BY JENS HAUSER

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dimension of architecture was called for by Juhani Pallasmaa’s pamphlet to promote an “architecture of the senses” beyond “retinal pictures … in its fully integrated material, embodied and spiritual essence.… Qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, noise, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle.” 22 At the same time, biomorphic and biomimetic bubble shapes e.g. by British postwar avant-garde group Archigram, were followed by a general blobism, however with later work being reliant on concrete-based constructions as in the 2003 ‘blobitecture’ of Kunsthaus Graz. ­Meanwhile pioneers like Polish artist and architect Zbigniew Oksiuta created gelatin and agar based counter-architectures. These replaced biological metaphors by their very metabolisms and set free the inherent agency of organic matter to self-organise in the most advantageous shapes, attempting to “analyse unstable, liquid phenomena in order to determine what conditions can give rise to autonomous self-organising processes and the creation of new biological forms” both in earthly and non-gravitational architectures.23 After integrating ephemeral abiotic and biotic parameters in his physiological and meteorological architectures, Philippe Rahm finally comes to the conclusion that a “natural history of architecture” 24 needs to be established, based on the assumption that architecture is born from the need to maintain human body temperature at 37°C by providing shelter and taking into account the impact of epidemics, vaccines and antibiotics, but also the generalised access to (geological, plant based) fossil energy sources that led to replacing biological constructors by mechanical ones, up to the ­biology-based development of new CO2 ‘free’ building materials and lighting techniques. 22. Pallasmaa, J. (2005) The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Wiley-Academy: London. 23. Oksiuta, Z. (2007) Breeding Spaces. Exhibition catalogue Arsenal Gallery, Białystok, and Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle; Warsaw. 24. Rahm, P. (2020) Histoire naturelle de l'architecture – Comment le climat, les épidémies et l'énergie ont façonné la ville et les bâtiments. Éditions du Pavillon de l’Arsenal: Paris.

What the concept of Co-Corporeality adds to this evolutionary line is a resolutely interdisciplinary and integrative research agenda, with its ambition to progressively extend in vitro lab scales to in vivo scales of living environments for microbes, where cyanobacteria, E. coli and bacteria cellulose can live. Rather than conceptualising responsive architectures with an anthropocentric and techno-fetishistic mindset, the human as a holobiont here humbly coalesces with prokaryotic organisms considered as agents, material medium, ­motives, metaphors and models of knowledge production. Art and architecture contribute to the change of guiding tropes, from individual entities to cellular cities and societies, from programmable workhorses to complex ecologies where bacterial forms of organisation serve as role models and agents in a larger bio-semiotic web of relationships. ●

CO-CORPOREALITY

Co-Corporeality:

Responding, Observing and Sharing Knowledge

The Editors

CO-CORPOREALITY: RESPONDING, OBSERVING AND SHARING KNOWLEDGE

How does one answer when the languages spoken and the temporality of the other is at odds with your own? When we communicate with one another, speech is accompanied by nuances of gesture and expression. If we do not speak the same language it is often gestures alone that enable us to understand the point of the other in a simplified sequence of physical

CO-CORPOREALITY

Co-Corporeality is an artificial word composed of ‘Co-’ a ­Latin prefix that creates a togetherness or mutuality in its neighbouring word Corporeality, the state of being or having a body. Corporeality when reliant on ‘Co’ means a mutual state of being is produced when two bodies are joined. The bodies of Co-Corporeality are not only human but of humans, machines and microbes. Co-corporeality examines the built environment as a “biological entity” and attempts to change the ways we understand, observe and communicate with it. The aim of the research is to discover a meaningful engagement and possible trajectories between two biological systems – humans and microbes. Which prompts the question – how can a mutual state of being be produced between veritable strangers? Theorist of education, Gert Biesta, suggests the presence of others who are initially strange to us demands a response.1 In the joining of humans with machines and microbes “what is done, what needs to be done, and what only I can do, is to respond to the stranger, to be responsive and responsible to what the stranger asks from me.” 2 The mutual state of being suggested by Co-Corporeality is not dependent on a shared experience but rather on the transference of understanding through a responsive and responsible language and environment. Biesta’s ‘I’ is possible to attach to all beings in the project. In other words, we are all strange to one another and in this strangeness demand/depend upon response. The mutual state inherent to the basis of the project is contingent on the presence of all three bodies [human, machine and microbe] to enable communication. These dynamics of continual interaction taking place between the human and his natural and technological environments is what Kiesler (1939) called “correalism”.3 In the development and implementation of biological systems made responsive through technological systems, Co-Corporeality challenges the idea of how “correalism” can be experienced by the individual.

INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITORS

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actions. When we step outside we may be welcomed by sharp gusts of wind, torrential rain soaking through our clothes or the ­feeling of warm sun on the face, the environment around us sensorially c­ ommunicating the weather through changing temperature, levels of precipitation and pressure. When traversing through cities the audio landscape is often interrupted by the alarm of emergency vehicles sounding to ­ensure drivers and pedestrians make way. Communication often takes place beyond speech and is reliant on our other ­senses to come to an ­informed understanding. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in P ­ henomenology of Perception wrote there is “an immanent or ­incipient significance in the ­living body [which] extends … to the whole sensible world … our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will ­discover in all other ‘objects’ the miracle of expression.” 4 Highlighted as key communicators during the course of the project, both gaze and e­ xpression were relied upon as the nexus of communication between human and ­microbes. The living bodies of the project extend into the sensible world of the other via the state of mutual observation of the other. How human, machine or microbe express is dependent on the n ­ etwork of relations in each interaction; a subjective sequence of variables ­a ffect mood, subsequent reaction and response of each stranger in the creation of a wider discursive environment. This developed from the consideration of the observer in relation to the observed in the third order of cybernetics, with the knowledge that each ‘I’ will be changed in their inclusion in the system. The question of how to “become better observers” runs like a red thread through the research project.5 In line with contact improvisation, where bodies move together, anticipating each other’s m ­ ovements and sensitively adapting and reacting to unprogrammed situations, ­Co-Corporeality creates environments that enable these spontaneous situations. Improvisation as a mindset can instigate as acceptance of or a way of living that is what Fred Moten calls “consent not to be a single being.” 6 Because we are never really only ‘I’. As Lynn Margulis notes in Symbiotic Planet, “we, the beleaguered citizens of Earth, are intertwined with our host biosphere and its visible and ­invisible organisms. We thrive only via sustained interconnectedness. Like mobile forests, each of us is a self-contained ecosystem with deep integrations to other living beings. Billions of years of co-evolutionary collaboration mean that we can no sooner part company with Earth than we can with our brains. We are always woven of and woven in our environments, including the built environment.” 7

CO-CORPOREALITY: RESPONDING, OBSERVING AND SHARING KNOWLEDGE

The theoretical aspect of the project began with Maturana’s – ­paper ‘The Biology of Cognition’ in which he writes “… o ­ bserving is both the ultimate starting point and the most fundamental question in any attempt to understand reality and reason as ­phenomena of the human domain. Indeed, everything said is said by an observer to another observer that could be him- or herself.” 9 In Co-Corporeality all bodies mix into one. Similar to political theorist Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things the wider Co-Corporeality project has generated “an awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies.” 10 This intervention between humans, machines and microbes materialises how theories and technologies can ­activate a meaningful engagement between two biological systems and how this can change our perception of architectural space. Through the design of prototypical architectural machines

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With advances in machine intelligence, synthetic biology, bioart and neuroscience, we have new tools that can be integrated into our environment and thus change our perception of how we d ­ esign and perceive space. Designers, architects, programmers and scientists can now create a living and augmented ­architecture. This shift is strengthened when we define humans, ­machines, biomaterials and microbes as co-corporeal agencies in terms of interaction, cognition and relational realms, opening up new possibilities for architectural systems. With the integration of architecture with biology and machine intelligence and the ­integration of biotechnological approaches the work questions our conservative notions of ‘natural systems’. The growing conditions of the microbes and living entities we worked with were affected by technological interventions. This merging of artificial methods and natural systems defines the characteristics of biofacts, which sits in opposition to artefacts – human-made objects.8 Biofacts are partially human-made and can be found in nature showing a hybrid character. This hybrid character is a result of the nurturing of life in laboratories. The observable dynamics of interaction on the part of the microbes were characterised by involving factors such as growth, environmental response, homeostasis and metabolism. C ­ o-Corporeality combined biofacts and the concept of performative spaces as discursive environments to expand the idea of architecture as a solely inert and passive entity.

INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITORS

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and responsive environments, Co-Corporeality questions the meaning behind perceivable coexistence and the implications of a human-microbe relationship. By combining the field of architecture with microbiology, art and artificial intelligence research, Co-corporeality proposed new aesthetic and technological approaches. This interdisciplinary collaboration supports the development of new domains of description that redefine our definitions of natural and artificial, organic and mechanical, ­behaviour and consciousness through coexistence. Method • The Co-Corporeality methodology is defined by

working methods in the fields of materials science, chemistry, microbiology, machine learning, architecture and art. Within the project Co-Corporeality we accessed and worked in different laboratories, such as the University of Vienna Chemistry Department, the microbiology department at the University of ­Innsbruck and one in the University of Applied Arts Vienna called the ‘clean room’. Here, the studio served as an additional production space for 3D-printed structural elements and for the development of the sensing systems (facial recognition and eye tracking), it also functioned as the knot which tied the disciplines together. As Rolf Hughes said architecture is a laboratory of thought. And so, the laboratory functioned as a location, a method and as a platform to create an understanding of the matter and materials the team was working with. It functioned as a place to translate, communicate and learn an interdisciplinary methodology.11 The laboratories were part of a new model of interdisciplinary practice supporting the laboratory as a meeting place and space for knowledge transfer for all team members. The hands-on collaborative work built a relationship of trust between disciplines. This knowledge transfer was a cornerstone in becoming better participants and better observers in the C ­ o-corporeality ­research.12 The lab set-ups served for the development of ­larger set-ups in different contexts and architectural scales. The E-Feed/er was created through a sole online interaction in the midst of the pandemic and exhibited at the Angewandte Festival in 2020, while physical pieces were exhibited the following festival in an exhibition titled Excavations. These installations grew over time and culminated in the final exhibition Degrees of Life. All work produced was informed by conversations and panels with the advisory board members and other guests.

CO-CORPOREALITY: RESPONDING, OBSERVING AND SHARING KNOWLEDGE

These panels or workshops were used as tools to test the ­development stage of the project with outside experts from the field, to bring in new insights and topical connections and to create stimulating exchange. “Stories about humans, machines and microbes” was initiated as Co-Corporeality board member workshop to investigate the potential of narratives in ­a rchitectural themes beyond the usual building project. “Alien Life – ­between brains, bacteria and matter” and “Embodied and ­extended sensing” involved international practices relevant to the topics of ­Co-Corporeality. Contents • The book Co-Corporeality: On Humans, M ­ achines, & Microbes lays out the systems developed throughout the duration of the project – microbial, material, technological – contextualising them in a meeting of the fields of materials ­science, chemistry, microbiology, machine learning, architecture and art. The project team and its advisory board describe and speculate on the interaction of humans with living material systems and microbes in a series of essays and papers.

Microorganisms • Microorganisms are critical to our survival, but as Judith Ascher-Jenull writes in the second piece of our microbial series, we are not critical to theirs. Two model-bacteria, Synechocystis PCC 6803 (Cyanobacteria) and Escherichia coli were selected for the Co-Corporeality project due to being representative of key-bacteria outside and inside the human organism. Researchers in the Center for Environmental Research and Biotechnology at the University of Innsbruck worked with Synechocystis PCC 6803 (Cyanobacteria). Ancestral cyanobacteria was responsible for the first mass extinction event, otherwise known

CO-CORPOREALITY

The book is split into four sections: Microorganisms, Material Systems, Sensing Systems and Architecture. We begin in the laboratories of Innsbruck and Vienna. Each research laboratory of the project presents a pair of texts, the first introduces the reader to a consideration of the head scientist in relation to the research and the second, scientific, text outlines how the bacterial, material or sensing systems developed specifically in the context of the Co-Corporeality project. A final set of four texts consider the wider realities of Co-Corporeality within the discipline of architecture – our final laboratory.

INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITORS

21

as The Great Oxygenation, and now can be found in almost every environment on our planet. The Department of Microbiology and Ecosystem Science at the University of Vienna experimented with the capacities of Escherichia coli, a microbe commonly found in our gut. It is frequently used as a model-bacteria in the development of vaccinations and as a host for DNA sequences in biotech developments. Recent developments suggest that if they could survive on the Martian surface cyanobacteria and E. coli could be used in combination with local resources to create fuel on Mars. The microbial section begins with a consideration of how ­humans communicate with microbes in their every day. Professor Heribert Insam illuminates the multifarious sensory cues that microbes use to tell us about where we are, to warn us what not to consume and reveal how we are feeling. Judith Ascher-Jenull, apart from stressing our reliance on the microbial world and echoing Heribert’s insistence on how they make their presence known to us, describes in green-blue detail the use of “growth and photosynthesis-governing factors: light, temperature, ­nutrients, CO2 supply, pH and temperature as variables, to observe and interpret the related responses of cyanobacteria in terms of microbial ­activity.” In her state-of-the-art ­report she outlines the growth and photosynthetic performance of C ­ yanobacteria in three ­different settings – photosynthetic pigmentation, ­phototactic movement and photosynthetic activity. From Innsbruck to Vienna: David Berry, Professor in the ­Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science, asks “What is symbiosis?” Comparing and contrasting the use of language in science and the arts and situating our understanding of the microbial world historically, David writes “There is a broad and conserved vocabulary in the microbial world, encoded by the genes, proteins and reactions of the cell. Communication was defined in a cybernetic framework by Claude Shannon in the mid-20th century as a process involving a sender and a ­receiver and a message.” A paper follows from the laboratory where Andi Heberlein experimented with the visual capacities of E.  Coli, ­recognising that a detectable sensory signal was needed to ­establish a foundation for communication. Visual signalling was selected due to its easy detectability and the possibility of using it as an interface for digital processing.

CO-CORPOREALITY: RESPONDING, OBSERVING AND SHARING KNOWLEDGE

Material Systems • Architecturally, living materials introduce material properties such as wetness, unpredictability and growth that are usually recognised to be detrimental to the life of a building. The architecture of Co-Corporeality is not only protection for humans but also protection for the microorganisms through the combination of novel material systems with specific sensor and image processing systems. The applied material systems must be able to support and integrate living functions. In an interview with Alexander Bismarck, head of the Polymer & Composite Engineering (PaCE) Group at the University of Vienna we ask – “Can we use living systems to actually create these things that we cannot incorporate from a mechanical or molecular perspective?” Answering with examples from his portfolio of work as well as the portfolio of nature Alexander discusses what living materials are, how we can better develop them in transdisciplinary circumstances and what he believes would be the best way to integrate living materials into our built environment. His recurring example of ­ acterial an oak tree leads into Neptun Yousefi’s experimentation with b cellulose. Within the scope of Co-Corporeality Neptun Yousefi was asked to “develop a biological and living material that involves bacteria with the potential to interact with humans and to react to their actions through their metabolic processes or metabolic products.” Neptun details the PaCE-groups development of an interactive system involving bacterial cellulose, which grows on a structure or object at a scale suitable for exhibition.

material systems the human in Co-Corporeality is dependent on a sensor system which was developed in collaboration with the A ­ ustrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Co-Corporeality ­developed a computational interface to connect the physical reality of humans with the physical reality of the microorganism. The field of artificial intelligence enables the project team to create an intelligent and adaptive interaction platform between human and non-human agents on different scales. In an interview with Robert Trappl, head of the ­Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Professor Emeritus of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Brain Research at the Medical University of Vienna, we learn different interpretations of intelligence, how to differentiate ­between biological and artificial intelligence and the relationship b ­ etween ­observing, sensing and intelligence. Robert asks “Would ­intelligence be possible if there was no sensing? Do microorganisms really observe ­human

CO-CORPOREALITY

Sensor systems • In order to communicate with the microorganisms and

INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITORS

23

beings?” And “Do robots have personalities?” In two reports following this, software developer and media artist Martin Gasser introduces the reader to the sensing systems developed – Facial Expression Recognition and Eye-Gaze Tracking Technology. In the scope of the project, we focused on facial expression as a mode of non-verbal communication that can enable interaction with machines and relied on eye gaze as an important cue to demonstrate the importance of a visual impression or ‘noticing’. The algorithms developed were designed to recognise human emotions and familiar faces and to predict the direction of gaze. All these elements are interwoven in the interaction concept of the project. Architecture • Before the final section of the book two visual chap-

ters document the outputs of the Co-Corporeality project. The E-Feed/er and Degrees of Life exhibition are a culmination of the transdisciplinary collaboration of ­Co-Corporeality. During the E-Feed/er installation, visitors to the virtual space could affect the responsive growth and decay of bacteria through facial expressions. Degrees of Life interconnected microbial activity through a pupil movement detection system connected to a human visitor. Oxygen producing Cyanobacteria, metabolising E.Coli and bacterial cellulose were stimulated and changed by visitors in the midst of a living architecture and spatial installation. Broader context of Co-Corporeality • Co-Corporeality was guided by an advisory board who in the final section of the book reflect on the larger meaning of the project in a series that covers the integration of biology into architecture, designing buildings as open systems, a piece that materially feeds the growing body of research of ­Co-Corporeality and finishes with why we should be working towards architecture for more-than-human worlds. Petra Gruber in ‘Survival Perspectives on Cohabitation by Design’ suggests how with the reintegration of biology into architecture comes “the requirement to investigate our capacity to face ‘decay and limitation’ and to also accept the unknown and unpredictable into our lives.” The changes proposed by living in living systems does not only demand changes from the architect or the biologist but also changes from those who inhabit the spaces and changes in what they expect to do in terms of mainte­nance and care of their environment. Philip Beesley’s piece follows, complementing Gruber’s arguments with the physical

CO-CORPOREALITY: RESPONDING, OBSERVING AND SHARING KNOWLEDGE

Co-Corporeality continues to reflect on the desire of ­“being in contact with the things of the world.” Being more sensitive to the things of the world as responder, observer and sharer of knowledge enables us to recognise the value “distance” can hold.13 ●

1. Biesta, G. J. J. (2006) Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future. Routledge: New York. 2. Ibid. 3. Kiesler, F. J. (1939) On Correalism and Biotechnique. A Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design. Architectural Record. 86:3. pp. 60–75. 4. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. D. A. Landes. Routledge: London & New York. 5. Co-Corporeality (2021) [podcast] Stories of humans, machines and microbes. Available at: https://cba.fro. at/507827. Accessed 28 March 2022. 6. Moten, F. (2017) Black and Blur. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. 7. Lynn Margulis (1998) Symbiotic Planet. Basic Books: New York. 8. Karafyllis, N. C. (2003) Biofakte. Versuch über den Menschen zwischen Artefakt und Lebewesen. Ethik in der Medizin. 17(1):73–75. 9. Maturana, H. R. (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. D. Reidel Publishing Co.: Dordrecht. 10. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. 11. New Books in Architecture (2021) [podcast] Rolf Hughes and Rachel Armstrong, "The Art of Experiment: Artistic Research in Experimental Architecture" (Routledge, 2020). Available at: https:// podcasts.apple.com/at/ podcast/rolf-hughes-andrachel-armstrong-the-art/ id425210498?i=1000534785634. Accessed 28 March 2022. 12. Co-Corporeality (2021) [podcast] Stories of humans, machines and microbes. Available at: https://cba. fro.at/507827). Accessed 28 March 2022. 13. Gumbrecht, H.U. (2004) Production of Presence – What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA. CO-CORPOREALITY

realisation of the biological architectural environment devel­ oped by the Living Systems Architecture Group for the 2021 Venice Biennale. Alongside intricate descriptions of the Grove installation, Beesley’s chapter offers “a meditation on closed and open boundaries; arguing that in the face of planetary environmental shifts, buildings should be designed as open systems. By viewing the open system as not in opposition to but embracing of current closed system approaches to architecture, it can be understood as flexible and porous in any circumstance.” Each approach to architecture reflects the wider message of Co-Corporeality, of integration in spite of common ways of being and knowing, of responding to the needs of wider ecological systems through the merging of disciplines and creating new open systems in architecture. In a poetic, living text Alex Arteaga inhabits a ­Co-Corporeal environment for the purposes of an inquiry into “organic matter, communication, construction, material, environment, anthropocentrism and aesthetic action/aesthetic cognition”; each facet of the environment builds into the next giving a visually rich exploration of separate but interrelated areas of the project. The book ends with a historical reflection from Professor of Regenerative Architecture, Rachel Armstrong, that leads the reader towards an imaginary image of what the approach of Co-Corporeality means for the making and accepting of more-than-human worlds. Rachel Armstrong convincingly suggests that the methods developed within the scope of the project, i.e. the development of knowledgeable material systems in the frame of communication “produces present and future knowledge, which develops along with the living realm. Going beyond innovation, Co-Corporeality suggests whole new ways of living by negotiating our terms of existence, which include: ethics, synthesis, legitimisation and valorisation.”

INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITORS

25

E. coli exhibited at the ‘Degrees of Life’ exhibition in Vienna, Austria, February 2022. Photo © Zita Oberwalder.

MICROBIAL ECOLOGY — SYMBIOSIS, CO-EXISTENCE, INTERACTIONS

“Evolution has taught humans to understand microbial messages.”

CO-CORPOREALITY

Microbial Communication

DAVID BERRY

27

with Humans

Heribert Insam DEPARTMENT

OF

MICROBIOLOGY,

UNIVERSITY

OF

INNSBRUCK,

AUSTRIA

MICROBIAL COMMUNICATION WITH HUMANS

When the human eye looks at microorganisms, the responses we hear tend towards the extreme. On the one hand witnessing the worlds of microorganisms provokes inquisitive delight, and on the other, profound disgust. Macro photography of the Co-Corporeality microorganisms seen throughout this book show microbial patterns that resemble vast, otherworldly landscapes. These worlds occur at the microscopic level of bacterial or fungal colonies and can otherwise be found in bioreactors or photobioreactors. Such extreme responses to the visual make-up of microorganisms represent only one possible sensing response.

We have studied microbial communication with humans by triggering different sensory reactions. The first set of examples shows how pigmentation of a bacterium or unicellular alga can trigger human responses to an unexpected extent with significant ­implications for society. The presence of the bacterium S ­ erratia marcescens and prodigiosin – the red pigment it produces – has captured people’s imaginations for centuries. By growing on ­Eucharistic communion wafers and colouring them red, the real flesh of Christ was apparently made visible. This change of colour was often considered a miracle and strengthened the power of the church. As early as 332 BC, soldiers in the army of Alexander the Great sometimes found their bread dyed red.2 The soldiers ­interpreted this bizarre phenomenon as a sign that soon blood would flow and victory would be won. The visual presence instigated by the growth of prodigiosin possibly further encouraged their devastating conquests. In 1818 when British sailors sailed along the shores of Baffin Bay, in search of a northwest passage, they were amazed at the snowfields of “dark crimson colour”. As Captain Ross described, the

1. Insam, H. & Seewald, M. S. A. (2010) Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in soils. Biology and Fertility of Soils 46. pp. 199–213.

2. Gillen A.L. & Gibbs, R. (2012) Serratia marcescens, the miracle bacillus. Faculty Publications and Presentations, 138. Available at: https:// digitalcommons.liberty.edu/ bio_chem_fac_pubs/138. Accessed 1 April 2022.

CO-CORPOREALITY

Following sense-based research, olfactory sensing of volatilomic signals appears to be much more important for microbe-human interactions.1 Communication by the microorganism is ­usually unintentional, whereas human perception takes advantage of involuntarily emitted visual or chemical signals. While communication is frequently bidirectional, communication between ­microorganisms and humans is mostly unidirectional. Very often this interaction ends fatally for the microorganism which is eaten, or killed by disinfection or the use of antibiotics.

© Birgit Sattler

HERIBERT INSAM

29

dye penetrated the snow to a depth between ten and twelve feet. The ship’s officers examined samples under a microscope and found dark red, seed-like structures in them. The algae – Chlamydomonas nivalis – use chlorophyll for photosynthesis, which suggests they should appear green, but their astaxanthin turns them red. Astaxanthin is used for UV-protection of the cells, telling us that in this environment they are often exposed to ultraviolet radiation. Microbial misinterpretation and surprise are common responses when first encountering red snow algae. When the snowfields in the Alps turn red, the colour used to be thought to originate in the Saharan desert but these red slopes were the product of a microbial shift, not a geographical one. You may never have found the colour red during your encounters with the microbial world, but there are sensory scenarios where you may unknowingly be experiencing microbial changes. Close your eyes and walk down a path and suddenly you notice that you are in a forest. It is geosmin, a volatile organic compound (VoC), that conveys this message to you. Microbial actinobacteria thrive in the humus of the forest, synthesising geosmin. This compound also conveys the typical smell of fresh summer rain. However, when it emits from a glass of water, this molecule can indicate that the water is stale and warns us not to consume it. The sophistically nuanced interpretation of stimuli is a great achievement on the part of the human receiver. We owe many of the smells in this world to microorganisms. Evolution has taught humans to understand microbial messages. Take, for example, the typical stench of human faeces, triggered by Escherichia coli, which degrades the amino acid tryptophan to indole. Since E. coli is the guinea pig of microbiologists, we also encounter the smell when we stick our noses into a Petri dish. Can smelling faeces be vital for survival? Faecal contamination can cause disease, so our nose advises us to avoid it. Scent, created by microbes, can help us understand what is safe and what may be harmful. On the other hand, many foods lure us with their scent. Very often these are of microbial origin, like the characteristic yeasty smell from a glass of beer, swirled up and released by the buzzing carbon dioxide bubbles. These metabolic products of brewer’s yeasts such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae are aromatic compounds (e.g. acetaldehyde or ethyl acetate) which are formed during the breakdown of sugars and amino acids. The tantalising smell of

MICROBIAL COMMUNICATION WITH HUMANS

bread can also be attributed to yeast or bacterial sourdough. Fermentation, preservation and ageing of food are environments that encourage the growth of microbial life. These live cultures produce the smells and in some cases the mouthfeel we associate with these foods. Microbial scents can attract our olfactory sense as much as deter it. What may be mistaken as bad due to its age became the norm in traditional food making methods as ways to preserve food and develop flavour. Roquefort and Gorgonzola in essence are just particularly striking examples of how metabolic products of fungi increase the attractiveness of ‘spoiled’ milk for culinary enjoyment. Incidentally, this is an example of a fine microbial succession, which initially begins with fermentation by lactic acid bacteria. The fact that we find odours produced by the activity of lactic acid bacteria appealing probably reflects that lactic acid fermentation prevents food from spoiling due to malfermentation. It makes the formation of toxins less likely. Europeans know that from yoghurt or sauerkraut, Koreans know it from their hundreds of traditional fermented food products. Our nose has become a good judge when it comes to deciding whether a food is spoiled or not.

We not only sense olfactory changes, we also omit them. As in many areas of communication, interpretation of signals is paramount. If your counterpart smells, don’t blame it on him! ­Staphylococcus hominis is probably responsible, which resides in the armpit and feeds on odourless compounds secreted by the

CO-CORPOREALITY

The human senses are more aware than we think and are also selective. Important gases produced by microorganisms are carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. How well our sense of smell is able to block out this unimportant, unavoidable background! It would be evolutionary nonsense to waste our sensors on these gases. However, some other trace gases serve as valuable indicators of microbial activity. Smelling the highly toxic hydrogen sulphide can save your life. Hydrogen sulphide is produced primarily under anaerobic conditions during the breakdown of sulphur-containing organic matter such as meat and raw eggs. We need to be able to smell that because it allows us to identify spoilage. Spoiled meat could be toxic, poisoned by Clostridium botulinum. The botulinum toxin, also known as Botox, being one of the most potent neurotoxins of all, is used in beauty surgery to give the lips more expression and eliminate wrinkles from the face. Thus, microbes may make you smile!

HERIBERT INSAM

3. Martin, M. (2011) A Microbe By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet… Available at: https:// schaechter.asmblog.org/ schaechter/2011/08/a-microbeby-any-other-name-wouldsmell-as-sweet.html. Accessed 1 April 2022.

4. Thibault, C., Le Piver M. & Péron A. C. et al. (2021) Strong effect of Penicillium roqueforti populations on volatile and metabolic compounds responsible for aromas, flavor and texture in blue cheeses. International Journal of Food Microbiology. 354: 109174. 5. Reiss, C. (2018) Roquefort Is the Blue Cheese that Tastes Like an Unshowered Crust Punk. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/ article/ywe9y7/how-toserve-roquefort. Accessed 11 April 2022.

6. Archer, S. D., Suffrian, K., Posman, K. M. et al. (2018) Processes That Contribute to Decreased Dimethyl Sulfide Production in Response to Ocean Acidification in Subtropical Waters. Frontiers in Marine Science 5, 245.

31

sweat gland.3 The bacterium converts C-T lyase into thioalcohols. Soap and water might help. Likewise, the ammoniacal odour caused by various bacteria, such as Gardnerella or yeast, can compromise the natural desire for wild sex. The fishy smell indicates an imbalance in the vaginal microbiota, which should be dominated by lactic acid bacteria that acidify the habitat, protecting it from unwanted bacterial or fungal colonisers. The smells we produce notify us of microbial imbalances. Evolution has made our instincts natural. One natural instinct tells us to never eat anything that looks or smells like mould. Roquefort cheese is therefore the culinary equivalent of wild sex, fiercer and more desirable than other cheese varieties.4, 5 ­Penicillium roqueforti drives the ripening of this French sheep’s milk cheese. This mould normally thrives in the soils around the moist caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in southern France. The “king of cheese”, as it was called by Diderot, is characterised by its various bouquets and does not have a distinct taste of mould. Chemically, the scent is due to a certain mixture of metabolites such as methyl ketone and secondary alcohols typical of certain strains of P. roqueforti. We are also familiar with these metabolites from the typical odour of vomit where proteolysis and lipol­ ysis play an important role. Again, the exact composition, dose and context of chemical signals make the difference in whether we feel we are attracted or repelled. I hope I have been able to change your mind about microbes ­enriching our most intimate and even most distant atmosphere with all sorts of messenger molecules. If any of the readers are bothered by the multitude of odour-producing microbes, I’ll make one last attempt for reconciliation. Microalgae in the open ocean produce the precursor molecule dimethylsulphoniopropionate (DMSP), an organosulfur compound. Bacteria convert it into ­dimethyl sulphide (DMS), the scent of the Sea. It can give you a feeling of home or vacation. Because DMS serves as a nucleus for atmospheric cloud formation, it is important as a negative feedback loop for climate warming.6 However, due to ocean w ­ ater acidification caused by increases in atmospheric CO2, DMS emissions from the oceans could decrease, climate warming could further be accelerated, and the ocean of the future may smell less like the ocean breezes we know. ●

© 2022 Zita Oberwalder

MICROBIAL COMMUNICATION WITH HUMANS

CO-CORPOREALITY

Cyanobacteria at the ‘Degrees of Life’ exhibition in Vienna, Austria.

33

Co-Corporeality of/with Cyanobacteria We are living in a Bacterial World. There are 5 n ­ onillion microbes on Earth, 40 trillion of which are harboured by humans. All life evolved from microorganisms and all biological processes are based and depend upon interactions with microorganisms. Nothing works without microorganisms whereas everything would work without humans.1 When looking more closely and considering what we are composed of, the question arises: who are we? The human holobiome is made up of 1013 human cells plus 1.3 × 1013 microbial cells. This complex biological unit has to be ­preserved in order to not lose ‘the us’.

Judith Ascher-Jenull, Carolin Garmsiri, Heribert Insam

A,B

A

A

A. DEPT. OF MICROBIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA B. INST. OF ARCHITECTURE, UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED ARTS VIENNA, AUSTRIA

CO-CORPOREALITY OF/WITH CYANOBACTERIA

Microorganisms provide us with the air that we

only prokaryotes capable of producing oxygen.3

breathe, the water that we drink and a multitude

They have existed for more than 3.5 billion years

of culinary subtleties in the foods we eat. They

and are still the most important ­photosynthetic

are equally important in digesting and providing

organisms on the planet.4 They contribute

us with external (skin microbiome) and internal

­largely to global primary production and bio-

(gut microbiome) protective shields. Is there

logical n ­ itrogen fixation, with key roles in many

any closer interaction between humans and

ecosystems.5 Their evolutionary ­relevance lies in

bacteria than breathing, drinking, eating and

the endosymbiotic establishment of the eukary-

metabolising?

otic organelles for photosynthesis, the chloroplasts, allowing the evolution of higher plants.6, 7

Contextualising Cyanobacteria • Within the

framework of Co-Corporeality, we conceptually

The current estimate of the total number of cya-

performed a ‘closing the loop’ research with

nobacteria ranges from 4000 to 8000 species.8, 9

­focus on two model-bacteria: Synechocystis

Their morphological plasticity, ecological flexi-

PCC 6803 (Cyanobacteria) vs. Escherichia coli

bility and heterogeneity are responsible for the

(see work by A. Heberlein [p. 59]). These were

complex and often confused cyanobacterial

selected due to being representative of key-bac-

taxonomy.10 They are unicellular, colonial or fila-

teria outside and inside the human organism.

mentous and reproduce by binary fission in one plane or multiple planes, or multiple fissions.11

The dispute about the affiliation of cyanobacteria within the Tree of Life, formerly known as

Cyanobacteria have a slimy surface, which

blue-green algae, has been solved by molecular

promotes their motility, as they do not have

tools.2 Cyanobacteria are now classified as pro-

flagelli or pili, like the E. coli bacterium. Our

karyotes, whereas algae, including ­micro-algae,

­Co-Corporeality strain Synechocystis sp. PCC

are classified as eukaryotes. In both cases, the

6803 secretes a slimy mixture of polysaccha-

prefix blue-green derives from the photosyn-

rides to facilitate motion, while their type 4 pili

thetic pigments phycocyanin (blue) and chlo-

allow them to attach physically to each other.

rophyll (Chl) (green), as we observed during our

The directionally influenced phototactic move-

cultivation-experiments by air-drying liquid

ment towards (positive phototaxis) or away

cultures of cyanobacteria (Fig. 1).

from a source of light (negative phototaxis) is a phenomenon for many cyanobacteria, such as

Cyanobacteria are an enormously diverse phy-

Synechocystis sp.

lum of Gram-negative bacteria, representing more than 20% of all known prokaryotes (bac-

Their astonishing adaptive capacity and ­ability

teria and archaea). They are photoautotrophs,

to tolerate even extreme conditions makes

­ hotosynthesis, obtaining their energy through p

them ubiquitous and omnipresent in many hab-

using light as the sole energy source and

itats on Earth. They occur in aquatic, ­marine

­atmospheric CO2 as the sole carbon source.

and freshwater; from extremely cold (polar)

The correctly balanced equation of photosyn-

to extremely hot (thermal springs) environ-

thesis is 6 CO2 + 12 H2O + visible (sun) light →

ments; and in terrestrial habitats, especially

C6H12O6 + 6 O2 + 6 H2O. Cyanobacteria are an

soil, ­including saline ones and biological soil

ancient lineage of photo-oxygenic b ­ acteria, the

crusts in arid regions. Further extreme habitats

JUDITH ASCHER-JENULL, CAROLIN GARMSIRI, HERIBERT INSAM

Fig. 1. Dried out liquid culture of the cyanobacterial strain Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 at the bottom of an ­ Erlenmeyer flask, ‘the’ symbol of classical microbiology, revealing the eponymous photosynthetic pigments phycocyanin (blue) and chlorophyll (green). Furthermore, the embedded oxygen bubbles reflect the potential of cyanobacteria to perform oxygenic photosynthesis. Credit: Co-Corporeality (J. Ascher-Jenull).

are snow and ice, cryoconites, volcanic ash and

35

Of growing interest is also the photosynthetic production of bioplastic raw materials, polyhydroxyalkanoates,20 being polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) the most important material thereof,21 with the potential to replace the commodity polymer polypropylene (PP) in many appli-

anthropogenically disturbed areas.12 They also

cations, yielding a bio-based, biodegradable

occur as symbionts with different hosts.

­alternative solution.22

As revealed by molecular tools, the ecology and

Many freshwater cyanobacteria, among them

diversity of cyanobacteria is impressive in both

our Co-Corporeality target strain Synecho-

time and space.13 Their enormous application

cystis PCC 6803, accumulate PHB under

potential 14 includes the use as biofertilizer, e.g.

stress conditions, especially nitrogen and/or

to remediate semi-desert soils 15 and to man-

phosphorus deprivation.23 Nutrient depriva-

age rice crops,16 generally improving stability

tion, a very common natural stress faced by

and fertility of soils.17, 18 Large-scale cultivation,

cyanobacteria, induces metabolic reorgani-

e.g. of Arthrospira, is commercialised for the

sation, such as chlorosis (loss of chlorophyll),

production of health food. In particular interest

or a decrease in protein levels and increase in

is currently focused on their potential use in

storage polymers like glycogen and PHB in a

bioremediation and as a source of biofuels.19

time-­dependent manner.24, 25, 26 Next to their

CO-CORPOREALITY OF/WITH CYANOBACTERIA

­beneficial ­applications, some cyanobacteria

and under different light conditions (natural vs.

are responsible for the formation of harmful

­artificial light).

blooms, resulting from an overabundance of planktic forms typically occurring in eutrophic habitats such as freshwater lakes, characterised by elevated levels of N and/or P and accompanied by unfavourable phenomena such as extreme pH fluctuations, anaerobic conditions and cyanotoxins.27 These secondary metabolites of cyanobacteria exert a negative impact on the environment, animals and human endeavours such as fisheries, potable water production and recreational usage of aquatic habitats.28 The principal aim of the ­C o-Corporeality ­experiments with cyanobacteria was to use the growth and photosynthesis-governing factors: light, temperature, nutrients, CO2 ­supply, pH and temperature as variables, to observe and interpret the related responses of ­cyanobacteria

Fig. 2. Cyanobacterial test strains (40 mL BG-11 medium inoculated with 1 mL mother culture) cultivated under conditions optimised in the pilot experiments: 7 days incubation at constant room temperature, Plant Growth Light (PGL; T8 GroLux, Silvania 36W); 12 h/12 h light/dark regime (natural photoperiod). From left to right: Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 (PGL); Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 (Natural Daylight); Synechococcus sp. ‘G’ (green chlorophyll); Synechococcus sp. ‘R’ (red phycoerythrin); Microcystis sp. Credit: Co-Corporeality (J. Ascher-Jenull). ­

Cyanobacterial strains • Synechocystis, a unicellular freshwater cyanobacterium, belongs to

in terms of microbial activity. Our focus was on

the family of Merismopediaceae and is char-

growth- and photosynthetic performance in

acterised by floating or matrix-embedment.

three different settings:

Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 is the model cyanobacterium for photosynthesis research, with

PHOTOSYNTHETIC PIGMENTATION:

focus on C- and N-dynamics. It grows best in

Xty Shades of Pigments

BG-11 medium,29 performing best among other

PHOTOTACTIC MOVEMENT:

lowed by a two-week log phase, until it stabi-

Cyanobacterial Light-Choreography PHOTOSYNTHETIC ACTIVITY:

Weird Photoperiod in a Microcosm Materials and Methods • We tested four differ-

ent cyanobacteria belonging to the class of

model-strains with a three-day lag phase follises in the stationary phase. Optimal growth conditions include a pH of 7.0–8.5, a temperature between 20–25°C and light intensity of 50 µmol photons m-2 s-1.30 This strain exhibits phototactic movement and is able to switch from photo-autotrophic growth in presence, to heterotrophic growth in absence of light.

Cyanophyceae and the order of ­Chroococcales: Synechocystis PCC 6803, two strains of Syn-

Two strains of Synechococcus, unicellular cya-

echococcus sp. and Microcystis sp. (Fig. 2).

nobacteria widespread in the marine and fresh-

The aim was to identify the most appropriate

water environment, were tested. The photosyn-

protagonist for the Co-Corporeality Experi-

thetic colloid cells vary in size ranging from 0.8

ments in terms of growth performance (liquid

to 1.5 µm. Its main photosynthetic pigments

medium vs. solid medium) at different scales

are chlorophyll a, while its main accessory

JUDITH ASCHER-JENULL, CAROLIN GARMSIRI, HERIBERT INSAM

37

Ingredients

Chemical name

Concentration mM

Stocks g in 100 mL

mL Stocks in 1 L-1

NaNO3

Sodium Nitrate

17.65

17

8.8

Dipotassiumphosphate

0.18

3.1

1

MgSO4 *

7

H 2O

Magnesiumsulphate Heptahydrate

0.30

7.4

1

*

2

HO

K2HPO

CaCl

4

Calciumchloride Dihydrate

0.25

3.7

1

Na2CO3

Sodium Carbonate

0.38

2.0

1

Na2Mg EDTA

Magnesium Disodium EDTA

0.003

0.11

1

C 6H 8O 7

Citric Acid

0.03

0.6

1

Ammoniumiron(III)citrate

0.03

0.6

1

2

2

Citric FeNH3 *Trace Metal Mix (A +C0)

1

Deionised water

to 1 L

5

*Trace Metal Mix (A5+Co) H3BO3

g L-1 Boric acid

2.86

Table 1. Composition of cyanobacteria growth medium BG-11 (modified from PCC-Manual based on Rippka et al., 1979).

MnCl2*

4

H 2O

Manganese Chloride

1.81

ZnSO4*

7

H 2O

Zinc Sulphate

0.222

Sodium-Molybdate

0.390

Copper Sulphate Pentahydrate

0.079

Cobalt Nitrate

0.0494

Na MoO * 2

CuSO4*

4

5

2

HO 2

H 2O

Co(NO3)2*

6

H 2O

pH after autoclaving and cooling: 7.4

pigments are phycobiliproteins, with different

the necessary buoyancy. M. aeruginosa is cul-

diagnostic pigments. One strain was charac-

turable in BG-11, at a pH of 7.0–8.0 and at a tem-

terised by its green pigmentation (chlorophyll

perature ranging from 24°C–34°C.32

a), hereafter referred to as Synechococcus ‘G’ and one characterised by its red pigmentation (phycoerythrin), hereafter referred to as

Growth medium (liquid vs. solid) and condi-

tions • Since cyanobacteria are photoauto­

­Synechococcus ‘R’. Synechococcus sp. grows

trophs, they can be grown in mineral media; for

best in BG-11 medium with a pH of 7.5–8.0 and

specific isolates, the addition of supplements

prefers a temperature around 20°C.31

is required.33 The medium BG-11 (Tab. 1),34 modified by Allen,35 was chosen as it is widely used

Microcystis aeruginosa is a toxic species of

for the isolation and maintenance of a wide

freshwater cyanobacteria, responsible for the

range of cyanobacteria.36 All strains were cul-

most common harmful cyanobacterial blooms

tivated in liquid BG-11 medium (pH 7.0), testing

in eutrophic freshwater, producing neurotox-

different scales for upscaling (1:10, 1:20, 1:50 v/v),

ins and hepatotoxins. The small cells (few µm)

at room temperature (21°C).*

organise themselves into colonies visible to the naked eye. The cells are light blue-green ­coloured, appearing dark or brown due to opti­ rovide cal effects of gas-filled vesicles, which p

*Note: Stock cultures of cyanobacteria should never be stored in a dark refrigerator!

CO-CORPOREALITY OF/WITH CYANOBACTERIA

In addition, the strains were cultivated on solid BG-11 medium (agar plates); agar (Agar-Agar Kobe I, Roth, Germany) and the BG-11 solution were autoclaved separately and subsequently mixed (1:1 v/v) after cooling to 50°C.37 To allow for motility, the agar concentration was kept low, maintaining just enough firmness to permit streaking. To prevent the agar plates from drying upon long incubation, they were prepared with 40 mL of medium per standard dish (8.5 cm diameter).38 For standard plates, 100 µL of stock cultures were plated and incubated (21°C; 12 h dark/12h light photoperiod; daylight or artificial light, see below). Growth performance and development of pigmentation was checked on a regular basis. The growth performance was tested as a function of different light sources. For successful growth- and photosynthesis-performance,

Fig. 3. Pilot growth experiments with different cyanobacterial strains in liquid medium and cultivation on agar plates, to check for the ideal target strain for the Co-Corporeality experiments in terms of growth- and photosynthetic performance. Credit: Co-Corporeality (C. Garmsiri).

the amount of photosynthetic active radiation (PAR) is key, with red (610–660 nm) and blue light (410–460 nm) being the most important fractions. Under lab-conditions, cyanobacteria usually grow best at light intensities from 10–75 µmol m-2 sec-1 supplied by warm- or cool white fluorescent lamps. For our strains, a photon flux density of approx. 5 µmol m-2 sec-1 is recommended (PCC). We compared natural light vs. plant growth light (Sylvania GroLux F36W) vs. bulb light (60W, Osram; for phototactic movement experiment) simulating a 12/12 photoperiod. For the maintenance of our strains, the pure liquid cultures were refreshed every 14 days (1:20 v/v in BG-11) and incubated at constant room temperature under plant growth light in a light-dark cycle. Spectrophotometric assessment (Growth

Performance vs. Chlorophyll Concentrations) •

Spectrophotometer measurements give information about the concentration of particles

Fig. 4. Cultures of the Co-Corporeality target cyanobacterial strain Synechocystis PCC 6803 grown in liquid BG-11 medium (upper left; after 7 and 20 days of incubation at RT, respectively) and solid BG-11 medium (upper right and lower left) and imaged via Stereomicroscopy (250 fold magnification) (lower right). Credit: Co-Corporeality (J. Ascher-Jenull).

JUDITH ASCHER-JENULL, CAROLIN GARMSIRI, HERIBERT INSAM

(cells) in a solution, the so-called absorbance or optical density (OD). With increased cell density, the light absorption increases, while

39

1. PHOTOSYNTHETIC PIGMENTATION: Xty Shades of Pigments

the transmission of light decreases. We used

Synechocystis PCC 6803 produces different

a double-beam spectrophotometer (Hitachi

pigments: green (chlorophyll a), red (phyco-

U-2001, Inula, Vienna) and the wavelengths

erythrin) and blue pigments (phycocyanin) and

specific for the chlorophyll content (665 nm),

shades thereof. 40 The factor light was used as

cell density (730 nm) and Synechocystis sp.

the variable, to generate different pigmenta-

PCC 6803 (800 nm).

tion patterns. In cyanobacteria the regulation of changes in chlorophyll a (mostly in PSI) and phy-

The pilot experiments (Fig. 3) revealed Synecho-

cobilins (mostly in PSII) under oscillating light is

cystis sp. PCC 6803 as the most appropriate

very complex. 41 We assessed photosynthetic

protagonist for the Co-Corporeality experi-

performance in terms of colour and intensity

ments in terms of growth performance, suitable

of specific pigmentation (visual monitoring/

for performing tests with growth- and photo-

digital documentation vs. spectrophotometric

synthesis governing variables, i.e. incubation

assessment) as a function of source and inten-

time, light source/intensity, photoperiod (dark/

sity of light supply (Fig. 5).

light) and CO2 supply (Fig. 4). The experiments confirmed: 39 – fast and robust growth – also under semi-sterile conditions – at temperatures from 20–25°C and at a pH of 7.0–8,5, in both liquid and solid medium – intense green pigmentation (chlorophyll a), fluorescence at room temperature and complex pigmentation patterns as a function of light source/intensity – good upscaling (1:20 v/v) from small (20 mL) to large scale (> 10 L) – positive phototaxis at macroscopic scale (naked eye) – photosynthetic activity apparent at macroscopic scale (naked eye) through production of chlorophyll and O2 bubbles and measurable as concentrations of dissolved O2 (DO) and related changes in pH – photoautotrophic (light period) and heterotrophic growth (dark period) – production of biomass (filamentous growth)

Fig. 5. Experimental set-up of ‘Photosynthetic Pigmentation: Xty shades of pigments’, being the light quality – source (natural light vs. Plant Growth Light 36W vs. light bulb intensity (distance from the top light; Fig. 6) 60W) and ­ – the variable for the growth- and photosynthetic performance of Synechocystis PCC 6803 cultivated in liquid BG-11 medium; the setting with the bulb-light as sole light source is shown. Left: Two piles (test pile vs. reference pile) of 10 flasks (40 mL), each containing 20 mL of BG-11 medium inoculated with 1 mL of Synechocystis PCC 6803, were built up, so to expose the cyanobacterial cultures to different intensities of light because of different distances from the light source. Right: Immediately after inoculation, the piles were covered with a non-translucent tube and the light was placed over them. The cultures were incubated at constant 21°C and simulating a natural photoperiod (12 h/12 h dark/light cycle) for a total of 20 days. On a daily basis, the test-pile was removed and aliquots sampled for visual and spectrophotometric analyses, while the reference pile was left undisturbed as control. Credit: Co-Corporeality (J. Ascher-Jenull).

CO-CORPOREALITY OF/WITH CYANOBACTERIA

4 DAYS INCUBATION

PLANT GROWTH LIGHT (36W)

LIGHT BULB (60W)

pile was left undisturbed (Fig. 5). Data were cap-

NATURAL LIGHT

tured for a total incubation period of 20 days (RT; 10–12 cm 12–14 cm 14–16 cm 16–18 cm 18–20 cm 20–22 cm 22–24 cm 24–26 cm 26–28 cm 28–30 cm

12/12 dark/light). 1.1 Principal results and discussion An assemblage of the scenarios showing major differences as a function of light source and

7 DAYS

incubation times are presented in Fig. 6. Both ‘light-source’ and ‘-intensity’ effects became evident, the fastest pigmentation was observed under the light bulb, followed by plant growth light and natural daylight. Concerning 14 DAYS

the ‘light-intensity’, diverse pigmentation patterns were observed as a function of distance to the light source and this phenomenon, also attributed to potential filtering of the light by passing through the stacked flasks, was highly

20 DAYS

‘light-source’ specific. The growth curves according to OD strongly correlated with the chlorophyll concentrations, reflecting the relation between bacterial growth and photosynthetic activity. The spectrophoFig. 6. Selection of digital imaging of the test piles, representative of the ‘Photosynthetic pigmentation: Xty shades of pigments’-experiments. Synechocystis PCC 6803 revealed complex and parameter-specific photosynthetic pigmentation patterns as a function of i) light source, ii) light intensity (decreasing intensity with increasing distance from the sole top-light source) and iii) incubation time (4, 7, 14 and 20 days) at constant 21°C and 12 h/12 h light/dark cycle (photoperiod). Credit: Co-Corporeality (C. Garmsiri).

tometric data supported the visual data to describe the specific impact of the light quality on the growth and photosynthetic activity of Synechocystis as a function of time. The data (Fig. 7) suggest the light bulb (60W)

For each setting, a series of ten liquid cultures

to be the best-suited light source for the ‘Xty

were prepared in culture flasks (40 mL), each

shades of pigments’ experiment, having de-

filled with 20 mL of BG-11 medium and inocu-

monstrated to be i) strong enough to have the

lated with 1 mL of mother culture of Synecho-

light pass through the entire pile, ii) to induce

cystis sp. PCC 6803. The flasks were stacked

growth and photosynthetic activity very fast,

on top of each other and laterally covered with a

only 3 days after incubation and iii) to yield a pig-

non-translucent PVC tube, allowing the light to

mentation pattern, including chlorophyll a and

enter only from the top. Two identical piles were

phycobilins like phycoerythrin and phycocyan-

set up: a test pile was to be removed on a daily

in and shades thereof. The other light sources

basis at the same time for photo documentation

yielded good results – in terms of intense, flu-

and aliquots (1 mL) were taken for spectropho-

orescent chlorophyll – but this was obtained

tometric measurements, while the reference

only for the upper flasks (10–20 cm) and when

JUDITH ASCHER-JENULL, CAROLIN GARMSIRI, HERIBERT INSAM

41

Fig. 7. Spectrophotometric assessment coupled with empirical evaluation of light source/intensity triggered growth kinetics (OD800) and photosynthetic pigmentation patterns (665 nm) of Synechocystis PCC 6803 ‘Photosynthetic pigmentation: Xty shades of pigments’ on a daily basis over the 20 days trial during incubation at constant 21°C and 12 h light/12 h dark cycle (natural photoperiod). Parameter specific pigmentation patterns as a function of i) light source (natural daylight vs. plant growth light 36W vs. light bulb 60W), ii) light intensity (decreasing intensity with increasing distance from the sole top-light source; top-bottom, 10–30 cm) and iii) incubation time (1–20 days) became evident. Credit: Co-Corporeality (C. Garmsiri).

starting was delayed by 7 days in the case of

high temperatures caused by the bulb.42 With

plant growth light and by 14 days in the case

increasing distance from the top light, the

of natural daylight (Fig. 7). The concept of the

irradiation decreased to an intensity enabling

‘Xty shades of pigments’ experiment becomes

cyanobacterial life, as reflected by intense

evident by ‘zooming’ into a scenario, where the

pigmentation (Fig. 8) and respective OD data

hypothesised ‘shades of pigments’ were most

(Fig. 7). However, using intense green pigmen-

pronounced (Fig. 8).

tation (Chl a) as proxy for photosynthesis, those conditions were still not optimal, as reflected

The impact of the intense radiation and the

by the reddish-brownish-yellowish colour of

prompt response of cyanobacteria to extreme

the pigments (red phycoerythrin and shades

conditions became evident. In fact, in the up-

thereof), characterising those cultures (14–16

per two flasks closest to the light, pigmentation

cm; 16–18 cm). This may be due to accessory

was hardly observed, suggesting conditions

pigments within the photosynthetic apparatus,

unfavourable for growth-and photosynthesis,

produced in conditions not optimal for chloro-

either due to too intense radiation and/or too

phyll a, for the purpose of protecting cells

CO-CORPOREALITY OF/WITH CYANOBACTERIA

against damage. In the context of protection mechanisms, the phenomenon of chlorosis could be attributed to our findings: chlorosis is an adaptive long-term protection strategy of

1.2 Conclusion Strength • In Xty shades of pigments we ‘choreographically’ demonstrated the complex

cyanobacteria to harsh conditions (e.g. ­extreme

mechanisms behind photosynthesis with light.

radiation; nutrient deficiency), a low-level

Our findings provide ‘visual insights’ into the

photosynthesis characterised by brownish

impact of light quality on the development of

pigments. With increasing distance from the

specific pigments. The colour and intensity

top-light conditions became more favourable,

of pigments also indicated stress conditions

in the range of 50 µmol photons m−2 s−1 (Fig. 8).43

(e.g. excess or lack of required light supply;

On the electromagnetic spectrum chlorophyll a

too high temperature) and related responses

absorbs light within the orange – red and blue –

of cyanobacteria to withstand those by survival

violet ranges, transferring energy to the reac-

strategies, e.g. chlorosis. To further share our

tion centre and donating two electrons to the

observed phenomena with the wider public, an

electron transport chain, which will then convert

advanced design is in progress.

photonic into chemical energy. In fact, starting at a distance around 20 cm from the light, the growth curves revealed that the logarith-

Weakness • The approach using different light

sources was empiric. The exact flux and PAR oc-

mic phase was reached starting from day 7–14

curring in the single ‘scenarios’ (distance from

(Fig. 7). Similar ideal conditions and exponential

the light source) were not determined. Likewise,

growth were observed under the less intense

the exact type of different pigments was not

plant growth light (36W) for the cultures in vicin-

assessed, as we focused on the kinetics (spec-

ity to the light source (Fig. 7), while the natural

trophotometric assessment) of chlorophyll.

day light was not strong enough to sufficiently/ entirely penetrate the flask-tower from the top and consequently, the lag phase was delayed,

Research outlook • The observed phenomena

warrant scientific specification, i.e. characteri-

starting from day 16 and only for the two upper-

sation of the single scenarios at each height of

most flasks (Fig. 7).

the ‘flask-pile’ (Fig. 8) in terms of exact flux and related PAR; temperature of the liquid culture; microscopical analysis of the stressed cyanobacterial cells (cell damage, deformation); and quali-quantitative assessment of the different pigments.

Fig. 8. Example of the experimental set-up of ‘Photosynthetic Pigmentation: Xty shades of pigments’. Two piles, reference pile (at the front) vs. test pile (at the back) of 10 flasks (40 mL) containing liquid cultures of Synechocystis PCC 6803 after 20 days of incubation (room temperature, 12 h/12 h photoperiod; light bulb 60W). The colour gradient of the photosynthetic pigments clearly shows the effect of light intensity – due to different distances from the light source (Fig. 6) – on the type and intensity of photosynthetic pigments. Those cultures showing intense green pigments (chlorophyll a) can be interpreted as those finding ideal conditions in terms of light quality. Credit: Co-Corporeality (J. Ascher-Jenull).

JUDITH ASCHER-JENULL, CAROLIN GARMSIRI, HERIBERT INSAM

43

2. PHOTOTACTIC MOVEMENT:

Cyanobacterial Light-Choreography

The robust growth of Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 and its phototaxis were ideal features to explore ‘Light-Choreography’. 44 We hypothesised to macroscopically observe this light-­ triggered phenomenon in liquid medium, while the observation of movement on solid medium was supposed to be challenging due to slower growth. 2.1. Phototaxis of Synechocystis PCC 6803 in liquid medium

A plexiglass cylinder (diameter 10 cm, 90 cm high) was filled with 5 L of BG-11 medium leaving a 1 L headspace, inoculated with Synechocystis PCC 6803 (1:20 v/v), covered with PVC tubes and illuminated by a spotlight (60W Osram) positioned on the top. The incubation was done at 21°C and a 12/12 photoperiod and the growth was visually checked daily. 2.1.1. Principal Results (Selection) Within the first day from inoculation, the cyanobacterial culture had already developed a slight green tint, releasing small oxygen bubbles. After three days of incubation, a remarkable filamentous structure had formed in the upper part of the cylinder filled with BG-11 medium, showing dense finger-like projections. 45 Similar formations were floating on the surface, suggesting favourable conditions in terms of light intensity and PAR (Fig. 9). Five days after inoculation, the floating filamentous structure was transformed into a bigger aggregation. In fact, while cyanobacteria such as Synechocystis sp. secrete slimy polysaccharides that facilitate cell motion, their type 4 pili

Fig. 9. Phototactic movement of Synechocystis PCC 6803 was evident already three days after inoculation. Cyanobacterial colonies formed filamentous structures close to the surface, triggered by the sole light source at the top of the plexiglass cylinder. Next to the phenomenon of phototaxis, well defined oxygen bubbles reflected high oxygenic photosynthetic activity of the Co-Corporeality protagonist. Credit: Co-Corporeality (J. Ascher-Jenull).

CO-CORPOREALITY OF/WITH CYANOBACTERIA

(T4P motility) allow them to physically attach to each other. 46, 47 Even though cells can respond individually to light, colonies are often observed to move collectively (Fig. 9; Fig. 10; Fig. 11, Fig. 12). After two weeks, the cell mat showed an assemblage of dark and light green pigmentation with entrapped oxygen bubbles (Fig. 10), perfectly Fig. 10. After 5 days of inoculation, thick mats of aggregated cyanobacterial colonies (Synechocystis PCC 6803) floated at the surface of the BG-11 medium in the plexi-cylinder (2 m high). This strong evidence of positive phototaxis towards the light source at the top of the cylinder was supported by the observation that the initially very homogeneously green coloured liquid culture (chlorophyll a) turned to be almost transparent. Furthermore, the dense mat of entrapped O2 bubbles reflects the strong oxygenic photosynthetic activity. Credit: Co-Corporeality (J. Ascher-Jenull).

illustrating oxygenic photosynthesis. Further support of positive phototaxis comes from the observation of less strongly green coloured liquid culture with respect to previous days. This phenomenon of bleaching as a function of ­incubation time might be in part attributed to the deposition of heavy biomass, accumulated at the bottom of the cylinder (Fig. 12A). 2.2 Phototaxis of Synechocystis PCC 6803 on solid medium (agar plates)

To visualise phototactic movement on solid medium, BG-11 agar plates were inoculated in a defined section of the plate with 100 µL Fig. 11. Positive phototaxis of Synechocystis PCC 6803 observed also in up-scaled settings (10 L BG-11) already 3 days after inoculation. Credit: Co-Corporeality, Angewandte Festival 2021, (J. Ascher-Jenull).

­Synechocystis culture. The Petri dish was then illuminated from a defined angle with full spectrum white plant growth light or under natural daylight. We expected positive phototaxis of the cyanobacterial colonies. 2.2.1 Principal results (selection) Overall, evidence of the hypothesised growth/ movement of cyanobacteria on solid medium were obtained under PGL (36W) (Fig. 13), while

Fig. 13. Evidence of phototactic movement/orientation of Synechocystis PCC 6803 on solid medium (BG-11 agar plates). Left: The intense chlorophyll pigmentation along the border of the Petri dish, almost closing the loop of 360°, suggests an occurred positive phototactic motility towards the light (PGL 36W). It is assumed that condensation water accumulated at the borders facilitated the gliding of the cells. Credit: Co-Corporeality (C. Garmsiri). Right: Finger-like aggregated cell formation patterns observed after 21 days of incubation (21°C; 12 h/12 h photoperiod for 21 days, characterised by intense chlorophyll a pigmentation. Credit: Co-Corporeality (J. Ascher-Jenull).

the natural daylight was too weak to trigger ­positive phototaxis (not shown). First cyanobacterial plaques appeared within four days of incubation. These plaques initially appeared white/transparent, because the chloroplasts were not yet ‘loaded’ with photosynthetically produced chlorophyll a (or other pigments). After 7 days, the agar plates developed intense green chlorophyll pigments and displayed a

JUDITH ASCHER-JENULL, CAROLIN GARMSIRI, HERIBERT INSAM

45

remarkable positional advancement in their growth, following the plating pattern. After 14 days, the pigmentation of the cyanobacterial colonies turned highly saturated, dark green and transformed into a dense aggregation of colonies after 21 days (Fig. 13). Although the movement of Synechocystis on agar plates was not that pronounced as in liquid culture (Fig. 9, Fig. 11, Fig. 12), clear phototactic trends were observed (Fig. 13, Fig. 14). Recent studies on the molecular mechanisms of the phototactic motility of Synechocystis sp. have revealed that a number of genes are responsible for its pilus-­dependent motility and phototaxis. Complex positive phototactic motility toward light ranging from yellow to red (560– 720 nm) and negative phototaxis away from light in the UV region (360 nm) was reported for

A

Synechocystis sp., whereas high intensity blue (470 nm) and red light (600–700 nm) triggered negative ­phototaxis.  48 2.3 Conclusion Strength • Our light-induced choreography

B

C

D

E

with Synechocystis PCC 6803 was generally

successful. We demonstrated the prompt positive taxis of cyanobacterial colonies in liquid medium and, in a different manner, on solid medium, confirming an intricate dependence of the motility on various light inputs, contributing to the understanding of phototaxis under dynamic light environments. Furthermore, we gained evidence about the collective social behaviour of the unicellular cyanobacterium, moving ‘together with others’ towards better life conditions. Weaknesses and research outlook • In the

case of phototactic movement on solid medium, optimisation of the experimental set-up is

Fig. 12. Different stages of phototaxis of Synechocystis PCC 6803 in liquid medium. B.) Filamentous colonies migrating towards the top light; A.) biomass deposit at the bottom of the column; C, D.) filamentous structures floating at the surface; and E.) dispersing biomass mat. Credit: Co-Corporeality, Angewandte Festival 2021 (J. Ascher-Jenull).

CO-CORPOREALITY OF/WITH CYANOBACTERIA

Fig. 14. Although the phototactic movement could not be induced in a distinct way on solid medium, trends of occurred light-oriented growth (left) and general dynamic formations (right) were observed for Synechocystis PCC 6803 on BG-11 agar plates, suggesting the response of colonies as a function of the light exposure. Credit: Co-Corporeality (J. Ascher-Jenull).

JUDITH ASCHER-JENULL, CAROLIN GARMSIRI, HERIBERT INSAM

47

required in terms of focusing and tuning flux, wavelength (phototaxis-promoting green light vs. phototaxis inhibiting blue light), direction and timing of the light input. To unravel the phenomenon of how cells transduce multiple or dynamic light inputs – occurring in natural environments – these experiments should be performed with both single cells (microscopic scale) and populations (micro- and ­macroscopic scale). 3. PHOTOSYNTHETIC ACTIVITY: Weird Photoperiod in a (Cyanobacteria-)Microcosm

Synechocystis sp. fixes atmospheric CO2 as the sole C source and gains energy from light via photosynthesis, producing glucose and oxygen. In the absence of light, the photosynthetically produced glucose is oxidised via respiration, the conceptually reverse process of photosynthesis. These two life-strategies, switching from photo-autotrophy (light period) to hetero­ trophy (dark period) within a photoperiod allow the establishment of a microcosm – a self-sustaining, radiation-driven, auto-supplying closed system. The aim of this part of Co-Corporeality was to monitor these alternating processes, in terms of changes in oxygenic photosynthetic activity, assessed as concentrations of produced dissolved oxygen (DO kinetics) and photosynthesis-related changes in pH within the photoperiod. The reaction was very intense and very fast, i.e., within 10 minutes after having received light, leading to an increase in DO concentration, as we have confirmed in a series of experiments at different scales, ranging from 50 mL (Schott flasks) to 5 L (glass tank). The observed DO ­kinetics over a total of 4 photoperiods correlated with the changes in pH (Fig. 15), also under natural daylight-conditions at low intensity.

CO-CORPOREALITY OF/WITH CYANOBACTERIA

The observed prompt responsiveness of Syn-

photoperiod-trial would further support our ­

echocystis PCC 6803 has driven us to construct

findings. Further questions on the promptness

a fully automated system of parallel monitoring

of responses and how many times these may be

pH and DO (Fig. 16), to continuously measure its

repeated are currently being addressed.

photosynthetic activity in a liquid microcosm, representing a closed biological system, as a function of different dark/light regimes. The

General conclusion

principal aim is to simulate a ‘weird photoperiod’

Our Co-Corporeality experiments with Syn-

by interrupting the natural photoperiod (12/12)

echocystis PCC 6803 generally succeeded in

by switching the light off/on in given intervals

visualising bacterial activity at a macroscopic

and measuring the photosynthetic activity pa-

scale! This was possible by taking advantage

rameters DO concentrations and related pH.

of the multiple features of our cyanobacterial target strain. We provided evidence – which could be assessed by the naked eye – on the light-supply dependent responses governing its lifestyles (photoautotrophic vs. heterotrophic growth), oxygenic photosynthesis based on different light-harvesting systems (pigmentation patterns) and phototaxis. The visualisation of all these complex processes provides insights into the daily life of (cyano)bacteria, with their prompt response to changing conditions, attraction by stimuli, socialisation and adaptation to changing environments. In view of this, the question arises: do bacteria behave

Fig. 16. Ad Hoc designed, fully automated system for parallel measurement of ´Dissolved Oxygen & pH´, to continuously moniMicrocosm tor the photosynthetic activity in a Cyanobacteria-­ over time as a function of the photoperiod. Credit: Co-Corporeality (M. Dvorak).

3.1 Conclusion Strength • This experiment was able to visual-

like us, or are they even more human? Acknowledgements Special thanks to R. Kurmayer (Synechocystis), R. Sommaruga and G.B. Larsen (Synechococcus ‘R’ and ‘G’) and. C. Pointner (Microcystis)

ise the different lifestyles (photoautotrophic vs.

for their courtesy in providing the cyanobac-

heterotrophic growth) of Synechocystis in liquid

teria strains; E. Mandolini for cyanobacterial

culture, by simulating ‘natural vs. weird photo-

brain-storming; R. Lackner and T. Pümpel for

periods’ via continuous measuring/monitoring

their precious support regarding ­photosynthetic

DO and pH kinetics.

activity measurements; M. Dvorak for the development and set-up of the fully automated

Weakness and research outlook • A contin-

DO-pH-facility; and B. Weinmayer (http://www.

uous monitoring of the changing light con-

weinmayer.at) for the design-adaptation of

ditions (flux, wavelength spectrum) in the

the ‘Xty shades of pigments’ concept for the

Synechocystis microcosms throughout the

planned glass-object. ●

JUDITH ASCHER-JENULL, CAROLIN GARMSIRI, HERIBERT INSAM

49

Fig. 15. Photoperiod (12 h dark/12 h natural daylight) of the experimental small-scale Microcosm (500 mL liquid culture of Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803). Immediately at the edge of switching from dark to light regime (arrows), cyanobacteria started to perform oxygenic photosynthesis, leading to a strong increase in dissolved oxygen (DO, green line). The pH of the bacterial culture medium (black line) changed as a consequence of CO 2 fixation during photosynthesis, nicely correlating with the DO data. In line, also the fluctuation in the temperature of the liquid medium (red line) perfectly correlated with pH and DO-kinetics during the 4 photoperiods (4 days of incubation at ambient temperature).

CO-CORPOREALITY OF/WITH CYANOBACTERIA

1. Insam, H., Ascher-Jenull, J., Garmsiri, C., Imhof, B., Mitterberger, D. & Derme, T. (2021) Mikroorganismen im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft und Kunst – Ein Potpourri. Conference MediaKnowledge-Education: Critical ecologies and Ecologies of criticism, 21–22.09.2021, Claudiana, LFU, Innsbruck. 2. Govindjee & Shevela, D. (2011) Adventures with cyanobacteria: a personal perspective. Frontiers in Plant Science. 2:28. 3. McAdam, B., Brennan Fournet, M., McDonald, P. & Mojicevic, M. (2020) Production of Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) and Factors Impacting Its Chemical and Mechanical Characteristics. Polymers. 12(12):2908. 4. Nutman, A. P., Bennett, V. C., Friend, C. R., Van Kranendonk, M. J. & Chivas, A. R. (2016) Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year old microbial structures. Nature. 537:535–538. 5. Whitton, B. A. & Potts, M. (2012) Ecology of Cyanobacteria II: Their Diversity in Space and time. In: B. A. Whitton (Ed.) The ecology of cyanobacteria, their diversity in time and space. Springer: Dordrecht. 6. Abed, R. M. M., Dobretsov, S. & Sudesh, K. (2008). Application of cyanobacteria in biotechnology. Journal of Applied Microbiology. 106:1–12. 7. Dvořák, P., Casamatta, D. A., Hašler, P., Jahodářová, E., Norwich, A. R. & Poulíčková, A. (2017) Diversity of the Cyanobacteria. In: Hallenbeck P. (Ed.) Modern Topics in the Phototrophic Prokaryotes. Springer: Cham. 8. Nabout, J. C., da Silva, R. B., Carneiro, F. M. et al. (2013) How many species of cyanobacteria are there? Using a discovery curve to predict the species number. Biodiversity and Conservation. 22:2907–2918. 9. Dvořák, P., Casamatta, D. A., Hašler, P., Jahodářová, E., Norwich, A. R. & Poulíčková, A. (2017) Diversity of the Cyanobacteria. In: Hallenbeck P. (Ed.) Modern Topics in the Phototrophic Prokaryotes. Springer: Cham. 10. Gaysina, L. A., Saraf, A. & Singh, P. (2019) Cyanobacteria in Diverse Habitats. In: A.K. Mishra, D.N. Tiwari & A.N. Rai (Eds.) Cyanobacteria. Academic Press: Cambridge, MA. pp. 1–28. 11. Waterbury, J. B. (2006). The Cyanobacteria—Isolation, Purification and Identification. Prokaryotes. 4:1053–1073. 12. Gaysina, L. A., Saraf, A. & Singh, P. (2019) Cyanobacteria in Diverse Habitats. In: A.K. Mishra, D.N. Tiwari & A.N. Rai (Eds.) Cyanobacteria, Academic Press: Cambridge, MA. pp. 1–28. 13. Whitton, B. A. & Potts, M. (2012) Ecology of Cyanobacteria II: Their Diversity in Space and time. In: B. A. Whitton (Ed.) The ecology of cyanobacteria, their diversity in time and space. Springer: Dordrecht. 14. Abed, R. M. M., Dobretsov, S. & Sudesh, K. (2008). Application of cyanobacteria in biotechnology. Journal of Applied Microbiology. 106:1–12. 15. Whitton, B. A. & Potts, M. (2012) Ecology of Cyanobacteria II: Their Diversity in Space and time. In: B. A. Whitton (Ed.) The ecology of cyanobacteria, their diversity in time and space. Springer: Dordrecht. 16. Mishra, U. & Pabbi, S. (2004). Cyanobacteria: A potential fertilizer for rice. Resonance. 9:6–10. 17. Singh, J. S., Kumar, A., Rai, A. N. & Singh, D. P. (2016) Cyanobacteria: A Precious Bio-resource in Agriculture, Ecosystem, and Environmental Sustainability. Frontiers in Microbiology. 7. 18. Chamizo, S., Mugnai, G., Rossi, F., Certini, G. & De Philippis, R. (2018) Cyanobacteria Inoculation Improves Soil Stability and Fertility on Different Textured Soils: Gaining Insights for Applicability in Soil Restoration. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 11. 19. Whitton, B. A. & Potts, M. (2012) Ecology of Cyanobacteria II: Their Diversity in Space and time. In: B. A. Whitton (Ed.) The ecology of cyanobacteria, their diversity in time and space. Springer: Dordrecht. 20. Costa, J. A. V., Moreira, J. B., Lucas, B. F., da Silva Braga, V., Cassuriaga, A. P. A. & de Morais, M. G. (2018). Recent Advances and Future Perspectives of PHB Production by Cyanobacteria. Industrial Biotechnology. 14:249–256. Dutt, V. & Srivastava, S. (2018). Novel quantitative insights into carbon sources for synthesis 21.     of poly hydroxybutyrate in Synechocystis PCC 6803. Photosynthesis Research. 136(3):303–314. 22. Markl, E., Grünbichler, H. & Lackner, M. (2018) Cyanobacteria for PHB Bioplastics Production: A Review. In: Y. K. Wong (Ed.) Algae. IntechOpen: London. 23. Dutt, V. & Srivastava, S. (2018). Novel quantitative insights into carbon sources for synthesis of poly hydroxybutyrate in Synechocystis PCC 6803. Photosynthesis Research. 136(3):303–314.

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24. Sauer, J., Schreiber, U., Schmid, R. et al. (2001) Nitrogen starvation-induced chlorosis in Synechococcus PCC 7942. Low-level photosynthesis as a mechanism of long-term survival. Plant Physiol. 126:233–243. 25. Depraetere, O., Deschoenmaeker F., Badri, H. et al. (2015). Trade-off between growth and carbohydrate accumulation in nutrient- limited Arthrospira sp. PCC 8005 studied by integrating transcriptomic and proteomic approaches. PLoS ONE. 10:e0132461. 26. Damrow, R., Maldener, I. & Zilliges, Y. (2016) The multiple functions of common microbial carbon polymers, glycogen and PHB, during stress responses in the non-diazotrophic cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. Frontiers in Microbiology. 7: 966. 27. Oliver, R. L. & Ganf, G. G. (2000) Freshwater blooms. In: Whitton, B. A. & Potts, M. (Eds.) The ecology of cyanobacteria, their diversity in time and space. Springer: Dordrecht. pp. 149–194. 28. Dvořák, P., Casamatta, D. A., Hašler, P., Jahodářová, E., Norwich, A. R. & Poulíčková, A. (2017) Diversity of the Cyanobacteria. In: Hallenbeck P. (Ed.) Modern Topics in the Phototrophic Prokaryotes. Springer: Cham. 29. Rippka, R., Deruelles, J., Waterbury, J. B., Herdman, M. & Stanier, R. Y. (1979) Generic assignments, strain histories and properties of pure cultures of cyanobacteria, Journal of General Microbiology. 111:1–61. 30. Patel, V. K., Sundaram, S. Patel, A. K. et al. (2018) Characterization of Seven Species of Cyanobacteria for High-Quality Biomass Production. Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering. 43:109–121. 31. Allen, M. M, (1968). Simple conditions for the growth of unicellular blue-green algae on plates. The Journal of Phycology. 4:1–4. 32. Omidi, A., Esterhuizen-Londt, M. & Pflugmacher, S. (2019). Interspecies interactions between Microcystis aeruginosa PCC 7806 and Desmodesmus subspicatus SAG 86.81 in a cocultivation system at various growth phases. Environment International. 131: 105052. 33. Waterbury, J. B. (2006). The Cyanobacteria—Isolation, Purification and Identification. Prokaryotes. 4:1053–1073. 34. Hughes, E. O., Gorham, P. R. & Zehnder, A. (1958) Toxicity of a unialgal culture of Microcystis aeruginosa. The Canadian Journal of Microbiology. 4:225–236. 35. Allen, M. M, (1968). Simple conditions for the growth of unicellular blue-green algae on plates. The Journal of Phycology. 4:1–4. 36. Rippka, R. (1988). Isolation and purification of cyanobacteria. In: L. Packer and A. N. Glazer (Eds.). Methods in enzymology. Academic Press: Cambridge, MA. 167:3–27. 37. Allen, M. M, (1968). Simple conditions for the growth of unicellular blue-green algae on plates. The Journal of Phycology. 4:1–4. 38. Waterbury, J. B. (2006). The Cyanobacteria—Isolation, Purification and Identification. Prokaryotes. 4:1053–1073. 39. Garmsiri, C. (2021). Co-Corporeality: Architects in motion – A phototrophic choreography under the spotlights of science. Bachelors Thesis, Dept. of Microbiology, University of Innsbruck within the framework of the Co-Corporeality-Project. 40. Sukenik, A., Zohary, T. & Padisák, J. (2009) Cyanoprokaryota and Other Prokaryotic Algae, In: G. E. Likens (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Inland Waters. Academic Press: Cambridge, MA. 41. Govindjee & Shevela, D. (2011) Adventures with cyanobacteria: a personal perspective. Frontiers in Plant Science. 2:28. 42. Patel, V. K., Sundaram, S. Patel, A. K. et al. (2018) Characterization of Seven Species of Cyanobacteria for High-Quality Biomass Production. Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering. 43. pp. 109–121. 43. Patel, J. G., Nirmal Kumar, J. I., Kumar, R. N. & Khan, S. R. (2016). Biodegradation capability and enzymatic variation of potentially hazardous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons— anthracene and pyrene by Anabaena fertilissima. Polycyclic Aromatic Compounds. 36: 72–87. 44. Varuni, P., Menon, S. & Menon, G. (2017). Phototaxis as a Collective Phenomenon in Cyanobacterial Colonies. Scientific Reports 7(1): 1–10. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Kim, M. (2017). Phototaxis of cyanobacteria under complex light environments. mBio 8(2):e00498–17. 48. Yoshihara, S. & Ikeuchi, M. (2004) Phototactic motility in the unicellular cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences. 3:512–518.

MICROBIAL ECOLOGY — SYMBIOSIS, CO-EXISTENCE, INTERACTIONS

“Is there a danger of romanticising the microbiome?”

CO-CORPOREALITY

A [Micro-]Companion to Symbiosis

DAVID BERRY

53

DEPT. OF MICROBIOLOGY AND ECOSYSTEM SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA, AUSTRIA

David Berry

A [MICRO-]COMPANION TO SYMBIOSIS

An introduction to symbiosis • What is symbiosis? The word

may bring to mind a nourishing, positive relationship between two individuals, brimming with synergy and perhaps also love. The biological definition is, however, much broader and stubbornly indifferent to affection. The term was coined by the 19th century naturalist Anton de Bary, who defined it rather unspectacularly as “the living together [zusammenleben] of differently named [ungleichnamiger] organisms.” 1 Interestingly, and perhaps contrary to the suggestion amassed from common usage of the word in the world outside of the natural sciences, this broad definition of symbiosis specifies only two criteria: (1) distinguishability of the participants, and (2) their coexistence. Regarding distinguishability, this has traditionally been interpreted as the implication of different species. However, this line of reasoning opens up the question of the definition of a biological species, a concept that, particularly in the field of microbiology, remains vaguely defined and actively disputed.2

*Facultative and obligate are often contrasted in biology. Facultative as capable of but not restricted to a particular function or mode of life. Obligate as restricted to a particular function or mode of life. CO-CORPOREALITY

So, if we are liberal in our interpretation, differently named organisms can be any two uniquely identifiable cells. This view is consistent with the various usages of the term symbiosis outside biological sciences (e.g., “a symbiotic relationship” in psychology). The second criterion – coexistence in time and place, is also generous with regards to the nature of specific associations and their consequences on the participating actors. This affords a spectrum of ecological interactions that can have positive or negative consequences in bilateral relations: mutualism (+/+), commensalism (+/0), amensalism (0/-), competition (-/-) and parasitism/predation (-/+). The stringency of the association can also range from obligate to facultative.* Even more loosely, it can be interpreted as being the effects of relatively independent organisms on each other via how they change their common environment – processes termed niche construction and modification. In the cellular world, these interactions are mediated by the agents of chemical communication – metabolism and molecules.

DAVID BERRY

55

Communication at different levels of biological organisation • Physico-chemical

communication – embodied by atoms and molecules – is the currency of the various cellular and ecological interactions in the living world. This chemical communication can take place on intra-cellular, intra-population and inter-species levels. As in human communication this may take different forms, such as to announce, persuade, dominate, reply, or reciprocate. Chemical communication can also evolve – it may carry a new meaning in a novel context or become an intercepted cue for another species. Chemical communication can be hijacked or even destroyed. Signals can be broad or specific. Broad signals could be modifications of pH that affect all cellular life in the vicinity (like turning up the thermostat in a crowded room). Specific signals could be the secretion of specialised communication molecules like quorum sensing molecules and narrow-spectrum antibiotics, whose message is only felt by a select group of cells. There is a broad and conserved vocabulary in the microbial world, encoded by the genes, proteins and reactions of the cell.3 Communication was defined in a cybernetic framework by Claude Shannon in the mid-20th century as a process involving a sender and a receiver and a message.4 Interestingly, the mathematics of Shannon’s theory are identical to that used in the quantification of ecological diversity. This parallel is suggestive of the inscribed information borne by the diverse structures and processes in biological systems. The rise of symbiosis • Where did these differently-named, unique

types of organisms come from? Cellular evolution that is driven largely by genetic mutation and natural selection, when allowed to act over geologic time can create a diversity of types of organism with an impressive array of functions/attributes. By this logic, turning back the clock we would expect to find a convergence of these types of organisms as we approach the dawn of the Earth. Travelling deeper into the past we would be confronted eventually with a single-celled analogue to the biblical Adam and Eve. Our microbial Adam-Eve is named LUCA – the Last Universal Common Ancestor.5 Many efforts have been made at reconstructing an image of LUCA, often with widely varying outcomes. Are we heir to a totipotent progenitor, capable of a dazzling array of feats, many of which have been lost over time in its many various daughter tribes? Or did LUCA live in the ocean depths in dark hot environments like hydrothermal vents, breathing dissolved minerals instead of oxygen and largely self-sufficiently producing all the needed organic building blocks for its cell? 6

A [MICRO-]COMPANION TO SYMBIOSIS

Or is the idea of a single ancestor flawed, a simplifying fable, perhaps subconsciously given weight by the various creation stories in religion and culture? Is there any reason to believe that life arose only once? Perhaps rather, we are descended from a communal mass of primordial cells – the protogenotes – that had no unique identity, but rather experimented with themselves and each other, swapping pieces of information and gaining and ­losing functions so rapidly that the concept of an organismal identity is meaningless.7 The beginnings remain shrouded in mystery, but it is clear that cellular mitosis led to the rise of p ­ opulations and the opportunity and need for intracellular communication. Populations eventually produced cell subtypes (persisters, virulent invaders, altruists), collective social behaviours and multicellularity – from slime moulds to primates. Diversification and evolution of populations brought about distinct genetic types. Furthermore, with increasing divergence, barriers to horizontal gene transfer and the resulting genomic mixing, it resulted in distinct species.

*An autopoietic system is a system that produces and reproduces its own elements as well as its own structures.(8)

types, the reliable presence of others can lead to specialisation of and dependencies between types. These dependencies may take the form of either facultative, context-dependent interactions, or more extremely, to the selective loss or transfer of traits. This is the stage on which symbiogenesis performs. Once an endosymbiont has been isolated from other organisms in its host, it progressively and irreversibly reduces its ­genome, discarding genes necessary for life in the outside world in a one-way evolutionary path termed Müller’s ratchet. This may be a one-sided dependency or it can function as a mutual dependency in the case of the endosymbiotic events that led to rise of the eukaryotic organelles, the mitochondria and chloroplasts. It is in this state of mutual dependence and benefit that the two types have merged into an autopoietic unit * – a singularity acted upon by the forces of evolution.9 The result is the holobiont. In its grandest form, the holo­ biont concept has even been applied to the entire planet. The Gaia hypothesis imagines the entire world behaving as a self-­ regulating biological entity.10

CO-CORPOREALITY

Symbiogenesis and the autopoietic unit • In the world of distinct

DAVID BERRY

57

Humans and microbes • Society’s perspective on the relationship b ­ etween

humans and microbes was powerfully shaped by Louis Pasteur and the development of germ theory.11 The identification of microorganisms as agents of disease was incredibly important to the development of the hygiene measures and vaccination therapies that eradicated diseases such as polio and smallpox. The field of immunology was profoundly affected by this view. Immunologists presented their system as the body’s sentry and border police, guided by a hawkish us vs. them mentality. The immune system was on a search-and-destroy mission for microbes. For the first time, around the turn of the millennium, ­advances in sequencing technologies that had been driven by the race to sequence the human genome allowed a deeper view into the diversity and genetic content of the human microbiome i.e. microbes living on and in the human body. This lens revealed an unexpectedly vast and diverse community of organisms roughly equal in cell numbers to those present in the human body. The extensive organism community was found to collectively encode roughly one hundred times more genes than the human genome. Experimental evidence accumulated showing that these microbes participated in important metabolic interactions with the body and were important partners in not only immunological development, but also in human metabolism, endocrine and nervous system function. The immune system was not only involved in killing, but also in ‘soft’ measures, coercing microbes to be in a certain place and have a certain behaviour. It is more manager than mercenary. We find ourselves in this more nuanced, ecological, view of the human-­ microbe condition today. Humans as holobionts • The view of humans as multi-organismal animals has now been established in the scientific view.12 The importance of the microbiome is filtering into the popular mindset as well. That the human microbiome has co-evolved with its host and that it is engaged in a Red Queen race, or is an ecosystem on a leash, appears to be widely accepted and believed.13 Evidence of developmental and autoimmune diseases due to the absence of microbial cues at the proper time has led to the idea that we live in an over-sterilised environment (the hygiene hypothesis) and that the dietary and hygiene practices in our modern world have eradicated important beneficial microbes (the old friends hypothesis). Inevitably these hypotheses led to a rash of popular science books implying that the solution to this problem is to let your children eat dirt.14

A [MICRO-]COMPANION TO SYMBIOSIS

In this excitement, is there a danger of romanticising the microbiome? Microbes are neither friends nor sworn enemies. They are simple organisms with their own evolutionary agenda, on whom we depend and with the capacity to affect us positively or negatively. Forgetting this and idealising an imaginary past ideal can lead to dangerous and misguided practices such as vaccine refusal and self-performed faecal transplantations by neo-primitivist fanatics wanting to restore a microbiome from a long-lost better time.15 As with any thing in life, a middle road of respect for the complexities seems prudent. What is the meaning of symbiosis? It can be a source of appreciation for life, its messiness and elegance, its inventiveness and its lack of prejudice. It can be a tool for expression and a source of metaphors.16 Symbiosis offers us a way of seeing that values relations as much as units and thereby is an invitation for a re-integration and harmonisation of the human psyche and the world. ●

1. Oulhen, N., Schulz, B.J., & ­ Carrier, T.J. (2016) English translation of Heinrich Anton de Bary’s 1878 speech, ‘Die Erscheinung der Symbiose’ (‘De la symbiose’). Symbiosis. 69:131–139.

9. Guerrero, R., Margulis, L., & Berlanga, M. (2013) Symbiogenesis: the holobiont as a unit of evolution. International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology. 16(3):133–143.

2. Achtman, M. and Wagner, M. (2008) Microbial diversity and the genetic nature of microbial species. Nature Reviews Microbiology. 6:431–440.

10. Doolittle, W.F. (2017) Journal of theoretical biology. 434:11–19.

4. Shannon, C.E. (1948) A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal. 27: 379–423.

12. Douglas, A.E. and Douglas, A. (2018) Fundamentals of Microbiome Science. vii–x. & Douglas, A. E. (2018) Fundamentals of Microbiome Science: How Microbes Shape Animal Biology. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.

5. Doolittle, W.F. (2000) The nature of the universal ancestor and the evolution of the proteome. Current Opinions in Structural Biology. 10. pp. 355–358.

13. Foster, K.R., Schluter, J., Coyte, K.Z., & Rakoff-Nahoum, S. (2017) The evolution of the host microbiome as an ecosystem on a leash. Nature. 548. pp. 43–51.

6. Weiss, M.C., Sousa, F.L., Mrnjavac, N., Neukirchen, S., Roettger, M., Nelson-Sathi, S., & Martin, W.F. (2016) The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor. Nature Microbiology. 1(9):16116.

14. Finlay, B. B. (2017) Let Them Eat Dirt. Penguin Randomhouse: London and New York.

7. Woese, C. (1998) The universal ancestor. Proc National Acad Sci. 95:6854–6859.

8. Luhmann, N. (2012) Theory of Society, Volume 1. Trans. R. Barratt. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

15. Kolata, G. (2021) You’re Missing Microbes. But Is ‘Rewilding’ the Way to Get Them Back? The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/ health/human-microbiome-hadza-rewilding. html. Accessed 23 November 2021.

16. Hauser, J. (2020) Rehabilitating Bacteria; in Shifting Interfaces: An Anthology of Presence, Empathy, and Agency in 21st Century Media Arts. H. Aldouby (Ed.) Leuven University Press: Leuven, Belgium.

CO-CORPOREALITY

3. Caetano-Anollés, G. (2021) The Compressed Vocabulary of Microbial Life. Frontiers in Microbiology. 12: 655990.

11. Latour, B. (1998) Pasteurization of France. Trans. A. Sheridan and J. Law. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

59

Visualising Microbial Activity Colorimetric Signalling Using E. coli with pH-Indicators and Chromogenic Substrates Andi Heberlein

DEPT. OF MICROBIOLOGY AND ECOSYSTEM SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA, AUSTRIA UNIVERSITY OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND LIFE SCIENCES BOKU VIENNA

VISUALISING MICROBIAL ACTIVITY

Although we are constantly interacting with the

usable nutrients such as glucose and lactose.

microbial world in and around us, often these

Consumption of these nutrients by E. coli leads

interactions are not perceptible to our ­senses.

to metabolic products with different properties,

When, for example, bacteria in our gut produce

which we will take advantage of as a method of

beneficial compounds that we use as a source

visualising change and communication within

of nutrients, these can be measured by lab tech-

the framework of the Co-Corporeality project.

niques yet are not perceptible to the eye. For this project, a detectable sensory signal was

1. Schaechter, M. (Ed.) (2009) Encyclopedia of Microbiology (Third Edition). Academic Press: Cambridge, MA.

needed to establish a foundation for commu-

Visualisation through colour change

nication. The available options included visual

Acidification is one of the mechanisms we make

signals, olfactory signals (production of smells)

use of in the Co-Corporeality project for visuali-

or electric signals (production of a current). In

sation purposes. With the help of pH-indicators

the scope of Co-Corporeality, visual signalling

we visualise acidification by means of a colour

was selected because of its easy detectability

change. When choosing a suitable pH-indicator

and the possibilities to use it as an interface for

it is important to consider the point at which

digital processing.

the colour changes and also when there is a change in toxicity. Visualisation is also possible

Bacterial selection: E. coli

to track with nutrients: for example X-Gal, an

By nature, E. coli is a universal and commensal

produces a blue colour when E. coli mistakes

analogue of lactose and colorimetric substrate

member of the human gut. As a facultative an-

it for galactose, a sugar. Alternatively, the

aerobic it can tolerate the presence of oxygen,

use of neutral red allows for the detection of

growing best at 37°C and surviving at a limit of

lactose-­fermenting bacteria by turning lactose-­

pH 3.6. Although widely understood to cause

fermenting bacterial colonies a bright red colour.

disease by the general public only a few of the

We are repurposing long-established tech-

known members of the E. coli species, such as

niques from microbiology to establish a means

enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC), are patho-

for communication.

genic. E. coli is the best known of all cellular forms of life.1 As a model organism, its structure, biochemical functions and genetics have been widely studied. This knowledge has been vital for the development of molecular biology

Methods Chromogenic substrates • Chromogenic substrates are used in microbiology to detect the

as we know it today. E. coli helped to decipher

presence of certain indicator species. These

the genetic code and unravel the mechanisms

substrates are mostly analogues of disaccha-

of DNA replication. In genetic engineering,

rides and need to be enzymatically processed

plasmids (circular DNA) are often used with

by the bacteria to create a colour reaction. One

E. coli to study the influence of genetic modifi-

of best studied substrates of this kind is X-Gal

cations. Using techniques like electroporation,

(5-Brom-4-chlor-3-indoxyl-ß-D-galactopyra-

these plasmids can be readily inserted into

noside). It is an analogue to lactose, a sugar

the cell. For microbiologists, E. coli is a well-

that is processed by the enzyme ß-galacto-

known workhorse because of its fast growth

sidase. When cleaved by ß-galactosidase, it

and ­because it can consume a wide range of

produces a blue-coloured product, thereby

ANDI HEBERLEIN

61

allowing the visualisation of the presence of

has a distinct purple colour that changes to

ß- galactosidase activity.

yellow below pH 5.2. Fig. 1. Bromocresol purple at pH 5.8 (left) ranging to pH 8 (right).

pH Indicators • For many bacteria, metabolic

processes result in a change of pH in the culture medium, which can be easily detected using pH-sensitive dyes. When E. coli utilises lactose as a carbon source, the resulting acetate and lactate lower the pH of the medium. By adding a pH-sensitive dye as an indicator in the medium,

Escherichia coli • As noted earlier, E. coli is

this change can be visually detected by a colour

one of the most studied bacteria and besides

change. Since there are hundreds of indicators

being a common gut bacteria it is widely used

available, we focused on those with a colour

in microbiology and genetic engineering as

change between pH 4 and pH 8, as this is the

a model organism. Since it possesses both

range in which bacteria thrive and the pH drop

ß-galactosidase for cleavage of X-Gal and the

occurs. Another advantage of working with pH

ability to lower pH by metabolising lactose, it

indicators is the reversibility of the reaction: the

is particularly suited for this project. It is widely

indicator is not used up in the reaction. With

available and easy to grow.

chromogenic substrates, the reaction is one way and irreversible.

Media

Neutral red • Neutral red is eurhodin dye that

Liquid and solid media possess different prop-

has been used in microbiology since 1905

erties and have therefore been investigated

when MacConkey proposed its use to detect

separately.

lactose-fermenting bacteria in faeces. It is particularly useful because of its pH range. In the presence of lactose-fermenting bacteria, the lowered pH results in a distinct red colour change at pH 6.8. Over the decades, MacCon-

Solid media X-Gal & MacConkey Agar • For the E-Feed/er

project, a solid media approach was chosen.

key’s medium has been improved by changing

Two different media and interactions were used

the pH indicator, as neutral red has been shown

for the visualisation of bacterial processes. For

to have inhibitory effects on E. coli. Today, Bro-

the X-Gal reaction, standard M9 media with

mocresol purple is used in MacConkey media.

15 g/L Agar was prepared. 2g of X-Gal were di-

Bromocresol purple • Bromocresol Purple

The petri dishes were inoculated with E. coli

(BCP) is a dye of the triphenylmethane family

and plates inserted into the E-Feed/er setup.

and used in various disciplines such as med-

Upon activation, drops of X-Gal solution were

icine or photography (see use in Fig. 1). Over

pipetted on the plates, resulting in a blue colour

the decades it has replaced Neutral Red as

reaction after about 30 minutes.

luted in ~ 80mL of Dimethylformamide (DMF).

the pH indicator in MacConkey broth because it has less of an inhibitory effect on the growth

The MacConkey Agar was prepared according

of E.coli. At neutral or alkaline pH levels, BCP

to a standard recipe and inoculated with E. coli.

VISUALISING MICROBIAL ACTIVITY

By metabolising lactose, the orange media changed to red as a result of the lowered pH. Experiments to reverse this colour reaction by addition of NaOH were not successful because the agar prevents distribution of the base within the medium. We selected MacConkey-Agar and X-Gal as suitable media to affect the reaction of E. coli. When using pH-indicators in liquid media, reversibility and cycling of the colour reaction

Fig. 2. Polysiloxane print fused to glass petri dish using surface plasma treatment, checking if leak proof with resazurin solution.

by use of sodium hydroxide (NaOH), a base, are of interest. When we interpret the colour reac-

E. coli was grown in a shaken flask overnight

tion as a message that means critical environ-

in M9 media and injected into the microfluidic

mental conditions have been reached, we can

channels the next morning. To start the colour

intervene and restore hospitable conditions in

reaction, 100µ L of 40mg/mL X-Gal in DMSO

order to enable E. coli to thrive again.

was injected into one of the channels. After 60 minutes at room temperature, no visible

The use of MacConkey-Agar or processing

reaction occurred. The bacteria were trans-

of X-Gal usually takes up to 48 hours and

ferred to a 37°C incubator. After 72h, a faint

requires incubation at 37°C. Our goal was to

blue colouring could be detected at the point

reduce reaction time to 8 hours and more

of injection (Fig. 3). The small diameter could

importantly, manage to get a colour change at

be a limiting factor for colour intensity, so a new

room temperature without the use of an incu-

prototype with a larger channel diameter was

bator. To process X-Gal, E. coli must express

prepared for the second experiment. In par-

the enzyme ß-Galactosidase. How long this

allel we performed experiments with IPTG to

sensing and expression takes is a critical factor

increase reaction speed, as a 72h reaction time

that will be documented and adapted as nec-

was not feasible in the context of an exhibition.

essary when determining if X-Gal is a suitable measure for visual communication between human and bacteria. Liquid media and experimentation 1. Microfluidics & X-Gal First experiment • For the first experiment, a

Polysiloxane 3D-printed object containing the microfluidic channels was fused to a glass petri dish using plasma surface treatment. The resulting channels are leakproof and suitable for the injection of liquids (Fig. 2).

Fig. 3. Channels containing E. coli in M9 media, faint blue colour change 72h after addition of X-Gall and incubation.

ANDI HEBERLEIN

Second experiment • For the second exper-

63

tubes overnight and induced with 0.1mM IPTG.

iment, a new prototype with a larger channel

After incubation for 6 hours, 10 µ L of 40 mg/

diameter was used (Fig. 4). After overnight incu-

mL X-Gal was added. After 60 minutes, no

bation of E. coli and injection into the channels,

colour change was visible and the tubes were

100µ L of X-Gal at a concentration of 40mg/mL

transferred to a 37°C incubator. After 24 hours

was injected into two of the channels. Again,

a colour change was detectable. There was no

after 60 minutes there was no visible colour

substantial increase in either reaction speed

reaction and the object was transferred to a

or outcome.

37°C incubator. After 72h, a clearly visible colour change occurred.

Interestingly, one dilution series with 1–20 µ L of 40mg/mL X-Gal in 5mL M9 media containing E. coli was left in the incubator for 21 days. This series provided the strongest colour reactions, although it was impossible to tell at which time point in these 3 weeks the final intensity was reached. 2. pH Indicators Neutral red & Bromocresol • Purple Two forms

of MacConkey broth were prepared: One containing 75 mg/L of Neutral Red and one containing Bromocresol Purple at 40 mg/L. The Fig. 4. Colour change after 72h incubation with a larger channel diameter.

Third experiment • In genetic modification

pH of the media was adjusted to 8. An alternating series of Hungate tubes containing Neutral Red and Bromocresol Purple was incubated

experiments, X-Gal is used to select posi-

with 300 µ L of an overnight E. coli culture in

tively modified colonies by addition of Isopro-

LB-media. After 48h incubation at room tem-

pyl-ß-D-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG). Genes

perature, a colour change was detectable.

introduced are controlled by a lac-operon which also contains the genetic information

Reversibility of colour reaction • Since in solid

to produce ß-galactosidase. Upon addition of

media the colour change could not be reversed

IPTG as a synthetic inducer, ß-Galactosidase is

due to the use of solid agar, we investigated if

expressed and the addition of X-Gal leads to a

liquid media would enable us to create a cycling

blue colour reaction in those colonies that have

of colour changes. For this, 10 mL of MacCon-

been successfully modified.

key broth Purple was incubated with 300 µ L of an overnight culture of E. coli grown in LB me-

Because of this forced ß-Galactosidase ex-

dium. As in the previous experiment, a colour

pression, we speculated that induction with

change could be detected within 48 hours at

IPTG could lead to a faster expression of ß-

room temperature (Fig. 5). Reversibility was

Galactosidase to speed up the reaction. 1 mL of

achieved by addition of 1 mol NaOH solution in

E. coli in M9 medium was grown in Eppendorf

steps of 100µ L until the colour changed back

VISUALISING MICROBIAL ACTIVITY

from yellow to blue. Since this is a process gov-

this would not be suitable for real-time r­ eactions

erned by chemical interactions and not growth

in an exhibition setting.

behaviour, the reversion occurred instantly. To investigate if E. coli still remains viable, three

In solid media using X-Gal, we were able to

different approaches were used: Addition of

­reduce reaction time from 48 hours at 37°C

lactose (10 g/L), glucose ( 6g/L) and LB-medium

to about 30 minutes at 22°C. The adaptation

containing glucose (6 g/L). In each replicate,

of temperature and time unfortunately meant

10 mL of aforementioned solutions were added

the reversibility of the colour reaction was not

and flasks were again incubated at room tem-

possible for either the X-Gal or the pH-indicator

perature. Within 96 hours E. coli cultures were

experiments.

able to lower pH enough to produce a repeated colour change (Fig. 5). The best results were

In liquid media combined with ­pH-indicators,

obtained from addition of LB-media with 6 g/L

only a reduction of around 6 hours was achieved

of glucose.

at room temperature and the X-Gal experiments showed a very slow reaction time.

Conclusion

Using the colour change as a visual signal, a

In the context of Co-Corporeality, reaction time

next step in visualising communication could

is the most important followed by detectability.

be the implementation of a genetic reporter

Communication by microbes could occur at a

that would allow E. coli to send a visual signal

much slower speed, potentially affecting the

(e.g. expression of a green fluorescent protein)

behaviour of the bacteria through a change in

directly to indicate that its environment was be-

the parameters of experimentation, although

ing acidified and needs to be re-equilibrated. ●

Fig. 5. Incubation of MacConkey broth with E. coli. Repeated colour change after 96h incubation.

ANDI HEBERLEIN

65

Fig. 6. E. coli in different growth stages, as shown by change of pH indicator from purple to yellow. Photo © Zita Oberwalder.

MICROBIAL ECOLOGY — SYMBIOSIS, CO-EXISTENCE, INTERACTIONS

An

Interview

with

CO-CORPOREALITY

Living Material Systems

DAVID BERRY

67

“How can we use a living organism to produce materials that work for us?”

Alexander INSTITUTE

OF

MATERIALS

CHEMISTRY,

POLYMER

&

COMPOSITES

Bismarck

ENGINEERING,

UNIVERSITY

OF

VIENNA,

AUSTRIA

LIVING MATERIAL SYSTEMS

Barbara Imhof

Alexander Bismarck

What are living materials? What is the criteria for a material to be understood as alive? When we consider a living material it is nature, all nature that surrounds us. Only, if we consider living materials, does it ­become more specific. Living materials are for instance – a tree, a living seashell, a whale swimming through the ocean, a bird flying through the sky. Living materials are always composites that consist of at least two distinct materials, which, when combined, exceed the properties of the individual constituents. These properties are needed to fulfil the function it needs for the species to live. A tree can only grow up to around 120 metres. The tallest California Redwood on record was about 115 metres. That is only possible due to the structural properties of cellulose fibrils and lignin, which holds them in place. Nature is always clever, it distributes material where it is needed. Nature can adapt. Consider a tree swaying in the wind with a wind load more on one side than the other – on the compression side the cellulose will be laid down differently than on the tensile side as it requires different microarchitectures than a tree that is not as exposed to the wind. In a whale you have the bones, you have the blubber, the fat, ­insulating it from the temperatures and it works. ­Everything we work with (when developing “living” better renewable mate­ rials) comes from nature and is only recombined using biomimetic ­approaches inspired by nature but is never living. If you consider Bacterial Cellulose – it is cellulose that is excreted by bacteria (nobody really knows why they do that). Cellulose helps to protect against UV, it also helps to keep predators or other microorganisms away from competing for the same food resources but it helps these aerobic bacteria to stay close to the surface of the medium they are growing in.

CO-CORPOREALITY

Alexander Bismarck is the head of the Polymer & Composite Engineering (PaCE) Group at the University of Vienna. His work with artists and designers has introduced living materials into textile design, furniture, large scale art installations and architecture. During the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project he has consulted the team on the abilities and restrictions of living material systems and their integration within larger scale architectural settings.

AN INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER BISMARCK

Barbara Imhof

Alexander Bismarck

Tiziano Derme

Alexander Bismarck

69

Can you tell us about one of the more artistic projects you have been involved with with living materials? For instance when working with Suzanne Lee we were trying to answer the question: how can we utilise waste materials to produce something wearable? Suzanne initially thought of waste sugars; so we began by using bacteria to ferment sugars to produce bacterial cellulose. In essence, you ferment the sugars, produce bacterial cellulose films, or gels, and these can then be processed like a textile into any form. Suzanne for instance made jackets and shoes. However, when you let a living thing become dormant (by removing its water content) the bacteria still remains along with residues of sugars. Then, under normal wear conditions, it becomes rather unpleasant because you start sweating and the sugars dissolve and then the bacteria start living again or die off and rot. It’s not nice. So the question then is: how can we use a living organism to produce materials that work for us? That would require killing the living aspect of it – the bacteria – and utilising what they produced – the cellulose. The beauty though, is that you can grow in any form and shape, which we can see in the co-corporeality project too. I remember when we first met and when we first explained co-corporeality to you, you had a completely different idea about what living material was. You showed us this example where an electrical stimulus makes the material behave or perform in a specific way. So, isn’t the feature of living related to performance and dynamic material systems? The biological organism always uses a ‘fuel’ of some sort and turns it into something else. In a natural state, we use whatever we eat and we generate energy, which we store and use to move. Plants absorb sunlight and grow and produce cell walls. Their fuel is carbon dioxide and water and is sufficient to build cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin and everything else powered by sunlight using photosynthesis. So biological systems metabolise, adapt, grow, multiply and die. If we take engineered materials we can produce materials for soft robotics and/or morphing structures, but we try to simulate what nature does in engineered materials by using a stimulus to trigger a change in materials behaviour. What I thought at the beginning of ­co-corporeality was that we would take inspiration from nature and use engineering materials and make them move, adapt or change: colour, shape, softness, hardness or stiffness. In that way – taking inspiration from nature but producing engineered adaptive systems.

Barbara Imhof

Alexander Bismarck

Tiziano Derme

Alexander Bismarck

What is the most challenging part of trying to go beyond the engineering of nature-like systems to the integration of living materials within systems? Is it again what you want and what we can give you or any materials-­ person can give you. So, there are lots of students not only at the ­A ngewandte, or the Kunstuniversität Linz but also Central St. ­Martin’s and the Royal College of Art in London who come along and say, “oh, I need to do this”, or “this material should be able to do that”, thinking we have all material solutions ready in the lab. We have made materials that could be useful for what they intend to design and make but then they want it thin or stiff or the colour to change. Managing expectations is probably the biggest challenge and with that the expected timescale – from today to tomorrow. Artists always think it is possible in “no time”. Is the challenge derived from the questions we ask? Or the challenge is more related to the discipline of material science i.e. from your ­perspective, is the challenge that we don’t have materials to do that? Again, the biggest problem is managing expectations. It’s cool to work with artists and the beauty of it is that you have the imagination, you have an idea and you want it to work now. We might have solutions on the shelf, but they do not work yet, however maybe tomorrow (where tomorrow is somewhat in the future, ill defined). This requires more time and really working together for a longer time rather than in a short burst trying to make things work immediately. It’s transformation right? You take an idea and you need to somehow realise it but this realisation relies on two different things: firstly engineering science, and then, if it has to be something new, or you want to integrate a function that hasn’t been there yet, that requires more transdisciplinarity because you have your conception of what it should be able to do – build a structure, which must be big, should bear loads, should have various additional functions. Whereas in material science so far it has typically been one function, either – electronic, structural, optical and so on, which is in focus. Now you can combine various functions in a single material. For instance, you have a polymer and you make it thinner so it will become transparent, it could be an elastomer or it could be a stiff polymer, but it cannot be both at the same time without changing the environment. These are some of the issues that need to be addressed. But it takes a bit of time. And, it needs a more constant interaction between guys like for instance you and us. It takes forever to build trust.

CO-CORPOREALITY

LIVING MATERIAL SYSTEMS

AN INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER BISMARCK

Barbara Imhof

Alexander Bismarck

Tiziano Derme

Alexander Bismarck

71

To return to Bacterial Cellulose, how would you class that in relation to the living/non-­ living material criteria? How do you see this research progressing? Bacterial Cellulose is the purest cellulose that you can have. Bacterial cellulose is built bottom up by bacteria fermenting (for instance sugars). I only need a suitable carbon source and the right sort of bacteria to produce a big sheet of bacterial cellulose gel in any form or shape possible, like we do in the co-corporeality project. We use a living system to produce it for us but in the use phase, it has to be dead. Otherwise, it would remain a gel and we couldn’t do much with it. The beauty of this cellulose is its purity – it is free from lignin and hemicelluloses. Bacterial cellulose is the cellulose with the highest molecular weight, the highest degree of crystallinity rendering it the strongest and stiffest natural material that we know so far. We should continue with this research. However, at the moment it takes a living system to produce what we want. It is important to always keep the function in mind. The beauty of growing any desired shape with bacterial cellulose is that it is relatively easy if you have a sterile system and you can keep it sterile. Tiziano has shown that we can develop quite big structures, but can we make those structures more structural? I.e stronger, ­stiffer. To do so we would need to integrate different materials into this growing ‘thing’. You mentioned that the problem is integrating different functions into one material. But then the question is, can we use a living system to integrate those functions if materials are substrates? Can we use living systems to actually create these things that we cannot incorporate from a mechanical or molecular perspective? If you need a material that contains electrically conductive paths, then we need some metal or we need a nerve system to transmit information, but this information is only transmitted in a chemical sense, not electrically. If I want to transmit the current I need to integrate metal wires and this is not easy to produce using living organisms. I can use bacteria that reduce ions to metal or produce hydrogen, which I can use to reduce a metal oxide to a pure metal. But, I cannot tell the system to produce a wire for me. Not yet at least in my imagination. Maybe one could use a living system to produce a matrix where the wiring or transport ducts were pre-designed and then integrated into a single structure using a biological process.

Tiziano Derme

Alexander Bismarck

Barbara Imhof

Alexander Bismarck

There is the Complex Materials group at ETH Zurich led by Andre Studart, they use bacterial cellulose to supplement bioluminescence or to implement these varied functions into material systems. Do you see a future there? If I engineer bacteria or living organisms with a function, I ­engineer more robust plants that are less sensitive to drought or less sensitive to certain insects or fungi. The question there is: if we leave it loose in the wild, what does it do in the environment? So far there isn’t a satisfactory answer. If we engineer living ­organisms to do what we want them to do, we start to play evolution, we speed it up by playing God just because we can. And then the danger is: what does it really do in an ecosystem? But we can use what is already there, we can force evolution by depleting certain, or enriching certain environments. For instance, you can use living things to remediate environmental damage, to remove heavy metals out of the soil, to get rid of oil spillages or to decontaminate water. Those are examples of forced evolution, but that’s not using CRISPR to design an organism that combines it all and then let it loose … but this is more for biologists to answer than for a material scientist or chemist. What future applications can you see for the project? Recently some material scientists have taken mycelium from mushrooms, embedded it in a suitable matrix, printed them and said okay, now we can print living materials, we can impart self healing, we can impart toughness, we have the means of printing living structures. But in essence the material is limited to its state as a hydrogel. It’s only living as long as nutrients are available, as long as no other fungus or contaminant comes and overtakes this living thing (in which case it would rot away). The self h ­ ealing only works if there is a nutrient gradient and if that is gone it cannot heal again. I think the beauty will be in using a living system to build engineered materials, which deposits materials in place where they are necessary before we turn into a materials system that performs whatever function we need it to perform; s­ tructurally, with certain optical properties or other physical properties for ­instance, being an insulator, being an electrical conductor etc. And then other properties could be imparted by colonising other living things on top. This would be possible with a mould, which

CO-CORPOREALITY

LIVING MATERIAL SYSTEMS

AN INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER BISMARCK

73

would produce a fluffy surface, or fluorescent bacteria or a material that responds to moisture – releasing moisture when the environment becomes too dry, soaking up moisture when the environment is too humid. It could become optically transparent, or it could release a scent, it could be pure white or pure black. A structure could be comparable to an oak tree, a ginormous living thing that when felled reveals a hollow centre because all the material that used to be there degraded with time while it grew over the past 1000 years. Materials can aid the process of growth and then the living system dies the structure still survives. In Star Trek they have this living spacecraft, that’s more or less what we are aiming for. The system responds to you, it can deal with almost zero Kelvin in space, it can deal with radiation, it lives, it produces its energy, it grows, it’s self healing, it’s stiff, it’s soft, it’s smart, it propels, it’s everything. It is a complex ­organism with a nervous system to respond, react and feel. It would be brilliant if we were able to realise this but it’s currently impossible. The change in terms of making structures, considering producing them with living materials in a sustainable way, is to use a biofabrication process to reach this outcome rather than an engineering process. I think the future is in biofabrication. To keep a system alive as long as possible (this has been trialled in some concrete structures by imparting self-healing properties using bacteria) but to also rely on what nature can deposit itself in terms of new materials. With this concept it would be possible for some parts of a structure to ‘die’ without risking its structural integrity, as I said before, an oak tree. Then by applying the principles of biomineralisation from bone the structural properties that you need would be provided. I think successful biofabrication will rely on the process of transformation. Maybe a living system will use sugars to build cellulose and use other residues of biomass to transfer it into fungal biomass. Instead of creating a complex system that does it all, somewhere in the future we will probably create something that is ‘new’ based on developing stages of material transformation. ●

CO-CORPOREALITY

© 2022 Zita Oberwalder

LIVING MATERIAL SYSTEMS

Bacterial Cellulose Experiments Neptun Yousefi

INSTITUTE OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY, POLYMER & COMPOSITES ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA, AUSTRIA

1. Introduction 1.1 Cellulose Cellulose as a material has been widely used for centuries in all kinds of practical applications, such as the production of textiles, paper, plastics, food additives and propellants. However, the chemical composition, structure and morphology were unknown for centuries. In 1837 Anselme Payen chemically identified cellulose from plants and since then, cellulose has been thoroughly investigated. Multitudinous controversial debates about the chemical and physical structure of cellulose during the modern history of cellulose chemistry reflect the complexity and uniqueness of this biomaterial. 1 Cellulose is the most abundant, renewable, biodegradable and ubiquitous biopolymer on earth and is the primary product of photosynthesis, which forms the skeletal component of green plants. It subsequently constitutes 15–99 wt % of all dried plant matter. 2 In plants, cellulose

BACTERIAL CELLULOSE EXPERIMENTS

is arranged in the cell wall together with poly-

the enzyme cellulose synthase. 13 The enzyme

saccharides, hemicelluloses, lignocelluloses,

­polymerises the diphosphate (UDP) glucose

pectin and lignin. Subsequently, the purity and

into single cellulose chains, which exits the cell

composition of plant cellulose are correlated

as an elementary fibril. The formation of the 3D

with its source. 3 Cellulose is a semicrystalline

network of bacterial cellulose occurs through

homopolymer, with unbranched polymer chains

the aggregation of the elementary fibrils to

consisting of repeating ­D -glucopyranose rings,

­microfibrils and then to ribbons. 5, 14, 15 The

which are uniformly linked via ß (1 → 4) glycosidic

­bacteria strain and the type and composition

bonds. 2, 4 The polymer chains form mechani-

of the growth medium influence the structural

cally strong crystalline ribbons (3–5 nm wide),

characteristics and features of the resulting

which are aligned with each other and give a

bacterial cellulose.

structural bias to the plant cell wall. 3 Cellulose derived from plants and bacteria have 1.2 Bacterial cellulose (BC)

the same chemical formula, nevertheless, they differ in their physical, mechanical and chemi-

Cellulose can also be produced by certain

cal features. In addition to their high degree of

aerobic bacteria strains, such as acetic acid

polymerisation (DP values of 2000–8000) and

bacteria of the genus Komagataeibacter (also

high crystallinity (60–90 %), bacterial cellulose

named Gluconacetobacter and Acetobacter).

is characterised by its extremely high water

In this configuration the cellulose appears as a

content (90% or more) and is not accompanied

white leather-like biofilm in the form of pellicles.

by other substances like hemicellulose, lignin,

This biofilm at the water/air interface does not

or pectin. 5

only help the colonised bacteria to maintain access to oxygen, but also serves as a protective barrier against drying, natural enemies and ra-

1.3 Project introduction

diation. 5 The produced bacterial cellulose (BC)

Co-Corporeality aims to create a responsive

consists of pure crystalline cellulose and grows

architecture, in which the material/environment

as a nanofibrillar network structure. Using bac-

reacts towards the presence or actions of a

teria for cellulose production has manifold ad-

visitor. This new architecture shall establish an

vantages, such as their rapid growth and ability

interaction between the human and the instal-

to be maintained under controlled conditions. 6

lation to develop a responsive environment that

In addition, bacteria often offer unique possibil-

can react and grow in relation to the human’s

ities through mutation, genetic engineering and

behaviour or action. One of the objectives was

hybridisation of strains thus resulting in higher

that the material should be biological, alive

cellulose yields, metabolic specificity (which

and include microorganisms such as different

can lead to reduced by-products) and g ­ reater

bacteria with metabolic processes that can be

tolerance to the composition of the growth

­observed. The goal of the PaCE-group team

–

­medium.  7 12

within the project was to develop a biological and living material that involves bacteria with

Bacterial cellulose is synthesised in the plas-

the potential to interact with and react to the

ma membrane of bacteria cells by a cellulose-­

actions of a human through their metabolic

synthesising (terminal) complex containing

processes or metabolic products. To achieve

NEPTUN YOUSEFI

77

this goal, the PaCE-group aimed to develop an

solid ­surfaces.  16 Moreover, roughening of the

interactive system that involves bacterial cel-

surface of the 3D object before pDA coating

lulose, which grows onto a structure or object,

increases the surface area facilitating a ­better

in a dimension that is suitable for an exhibition.

attachment of bacteria cells. Roughened ob-

To achieve BC growth on an object different

jects are then immersed in pDA and finally

approaches were investigated, e.g. dopamine

dip-coated in a concentrated bacteria solution,

coating of an object and teflon coating of a

for example in a solution with Komagataeibacter

mould and BC growth on a structural net. These

sucrofermentans.

approaches allowed us to grow BC directly on the surface of the objects having different sizes and shapes. We studied these three approaches to connect bacterial cellulose onto a material, which ultimately results in a structural material with the potential to interact towards a trigger or an action. Furthermore, crucial parameters such as oxygen supply, medium/air ratios and incubation temperatures were tested to investigate optimal growing conditions for bacterial cellulose. 1.4 Dopamine coating approach Bacterial cellulose producing microorganisms need access to oxygen, which is why the biofilm is usually produced at the water-air interface. 16 For the direct growth of BC on 3D objects, the bacteria need to be immobilised on the surface of the object. The adhesion of bacteria to the surface of the object can be promoted by surface roughening and functionalisation e.g. with a polydopamine (pDA) coating. The coating can be formed by immersion of ­organic or inorganic substrates in an aqueous alkaline solution of dopamine monomer. The structure of the pDA coating enables a wide range of non-­covalent interactions such as hydrogen-bonding or metal-­ligand coordination and exhibits interaction with nucleophilic amines and thiols. These numerous possibilities of interactions demonstrate why pDA coatings promote a high potential as a primer for adhering ­ cellulose-producing bacteria onto

BACTERIAL CELLULOSE EXPERIMENTS

1.5 Teflon coating approach

cellulose resulting in a seamless film of BC in the shape of the object. After growth, the BC

The dopamine-coating approaches either were

biofilm could be easily separated from PTFE

not suitable for larger scale objects or required

particles by immersion in water. 17

a sophisticated experimental set-up, therefore another approach for BC growth was investigated. As mentioned before, access to oxygen

1.6 Bacterial cellulose layer

is crucial for the successful growth of bacteri-

Since large scale coating of 3D objects is in prin-

al cellulose, so, in this approach, the surface

ciple possible but requires equipment not suit-

of the object was covered with hydrophobic

able for an art exhibition, we aimed for ­another

polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE, “Teflon”) parti-

approach. This set-up aimed to produce a

cles. This was done by first wetting the surface

massive layer of BC that is connected to a net,

with acetone to partially dissolve and swell the

which stabilises the BC and directs the shape of

internal surface yielding adhesion of PTFE par-

the layer. The idea is that the net is interacting

ticles. Upon evaporation of the acetone, the

through Artificial Intelligence with the person

PTFE particles remained on the surface, b ­ efore

and changes the shape, which means strings

covering it with PTFE particles. PTFE on the

attached to the net would either pull inwards

surface of the object stabilises the air-­water

or pull outwards t or move it in X or Y direction.

interface due to bacteria with a specific affin-

To obtain the large BC layers, which are required

ity for this interface synthesising a network of

for the installation on a movable net, BC pro-

cellulose directly on the surface of the ­object. 17

duced with Kombucha substrate were investi-

Furthermore, neither shaking nor an air pump

gated. Kombucha tea is obtained from a sym-

are required to provide sufficient oxygen to the

biotic culture of acetic acid bacteria, lactic acid

culture, which is one of the greatest advantages

bacteria and yeast. This powerful symbiosis is

of this method. For the incubation, the object

able to convert sugar and tea in a period of 7–10

was placed inside the growth medium with the

days in several acids, amino acids, vitamins and

bacteria solution. The hydrophobic PTFE coat-

hydrolytic enzymes and is capable of inhibiting

ing of objects yields the formation of a contin-

the growth of potentially contaminating bacte-

uous air “network” across the particles, which

ria. In addition, the fermentation process yields

enables a high air permeability between the

the formation of bacterial cellulose due to the

polymeric mould and the culture medium. This

activity of acetic acid bacteria. 18 The optimal

access to air promotes the bio fabrication of

growth conditions for bacterial cellulose on a

NEPTUN YOUSEFI

Kombucha tea substrate were investigated as the growth behaviour of BC is highly dependent on parameters such as pH value, temperature, oxygen supply and nutrients. To investigate the

79

2. Methods and experimentation 2.1 Dopamine coating approach

influence of oxygen supply on the growing suc-

A 3D object was roughened coated with a do-

cess, set-ups with different ratios of medium/air

pamine hydrochloride solution for 24h. The

volumes were investigated. Furthermore, these

sterilised object was dipped in a ­concentrated

set-ups were incubated at different tempera-

bacterial suspension of Komagataeibacter

tures from room temperature (20°C) to 30°C.

­sucrofermentans. Subsequently, the object was transferred into a medium with 1 vol% of bacteria suspension. The object was shaken for 4 weeks, in a sealed environment. A nutrient rich medium (LB) was used. 2.2 Teflon coating approach The object (mould) was immersed in acetone and PTFE particles were dispersed onto the surface. After evaporation of acetone, the object was placed in a container filled with

BACTERIAL CELLULOSE EXPERIMENTS

­autoclaved growth and 1 vol% of bacteria sus-

for a larger scale set-up. However, the BC film

pension. The object was incubated for 5 days

did not grow in a 3D shape because the PTFE

and the BC film was separated from the mould

particles did not adhere to the entire surface of

by immersion in water. A nutrient rich medium

the object. For the creation of a 3D object, the

(LB) was used.

method of attaching PTFE particles to the surface of the object would have to be amended, as

2.3 Bacterial cellulose layer approach The bacteria strain from Kombucha tea was in-

by default, this approach yields in a 2D BC sheet. Furthermore, care must be taken that the object is not damaged by the acetone treatment. The

cubated in a flat container with a basic growth

use of acetone excludes several polymers from

medium. A net was placed on the surface of

being used.

the medium. The incubation time was 6 weeks.

Our last approach resulted in a thick layer of

Furthermore, the effect of temperature during

BC layer, attached to a network. The experi-

incubation (20 vs. 30°C), medium/air ratio (1:3,

ment showed that the bacterial cellulose can be

1:5 and 1:10) and medium composition (black vs

connected to a net, which results in a stabilised

green tea) was investigated.

and modifiable BC sheet. Furthermore, the fast growth enables this experiment to be more suit-

3. Results and discussion

able for a larger scale set-up. After 3 weeks, the

All three approaches successfully produced BC

The cellulose is permanently ­attached to the

onto an object, a mould or net and could sustain

net. Furthermore, we found that a ­medium/air

across time without contamination.

ratio of 1:10 tended to lead to faster BC produc-

net was removed from the ­medium and dried.

Through dopamine coating, the cellulose-pro-

tion compared to other ratios. The incubation

ducing bacteria were successfully immobilised

temperature of 30°C did not accelerate BC

on the 3D object. After 4 weeks of incubation,

growth and in some cases even inhibited it.

a thick layer of BC grew around the whole ob-

In comparison, incubation at room tempera-

ject. The growth was mainly at the surface of

ture (20°C) and in Kombucha growth medium

the coated object, however, after 4 weeks a

showed the most promising BC production.

thin layer was established at the water-air in-

Finally, BC with a “whiter” colour could be ob-

terface. This approach was very promising but

tained by using green tea as a substrate instead

up-scaling might be problematic because a

of black tea.

large shaker would be necessary. In order to

Lastly, we demonstrated that LB medium is

tackle this problem, a set-up using a pump to

most suitable for the Komagataeibacter sucro-

supply ­oxygen was used, however, contamina-

fermentans strains. However, using LB medium

tion could not be prevented in that case. More-

for bacteria from Kombucha tea resulted in very

over, the growth of BC required 4 weeks, which

little growth of BC, missing the powerful sym-

makes this approach quite time consuming.

biotic culture of the original procedure. Using

Through PFTE coating, a homogeneous, seam-

the Kombucha tea medium for our Komaga-

less and even film of BC was obtained (after

taeibacter sucrofermentans strains resulted in

5 days). The short time of incubation and the

no growth at all, demonstrating once again the

simple way to generate access to oxygen facil-

importance of the correct medium for sufficient

itated by this method ensures the high potential

BC growth.

NEPTUN YOUSEFI

4. Summary and conclusions Bacterial cellulose was successfully grown onto both dopamine- and Teflon-coated 3D ­substrates, rather than at the water-air interface. However, the approaches with dopamine coating are not suitable for up-scaling, as the experimental set-up and risk of contamination are limited by the dimensions. In comparison, Teflon-coating is more suitable for a larger scale set-up, as the oxygen supply is generated more simply, leading to a lower risk of contamination. Nevertheless, the BC growth was not in a 3D shape hence the method of attaching the PTFE particles to the object required further optimisation. The production of a net-connected BC layer seemed to be a more promising approach for an art exhibition, as it does not require specialist equipment and is easier for up-scaling. The first approach showed the successful a ­ ttachment between BC and the net. To obtain a culture medium with less vulnerability to contamination, BC produced from Kombucha substrate was investigated, as Kombucha is known for its powerful symbiotic culture. In conclusion, a net-connected BC layer produced from Kombucha substrate has shown ­potential to be utilised on a large scale, as the microbial culture from Kombucha appears more resistant to contamination. In comparison to the growth of BC on 3D substrates, the experimental set-up for a net-connected BC layer is less complex and an additional air supply is not necessary. Optimal growing conditions could be identified, which would lead to a fast growth of the BC layer. The interaction between visitors and the BC layer could be achieved through changing the shape of the net or through spraying the medium on the BC layer, which enables the bacteria to continue BC production. ●

81

1. Hon, D. N. S. (1994) Cellulose: a random walk along its historical path. Cellulose. 1:1–25. 2. Salmon, S.& Hudson, S.M. (1994) Crystal morphology, biosynthesis, and physical assembly of cellulose, chitin, and chitosan. Journal of Macromolecular Science, Part C: Polymer Reviews 37(2):199–276. 3. Cosgrove, D. J. (2005) Growth of the plant cell wall, Nature reviews molecular cell biology. 6(11):850–861. 4. Brown Jr, R.M. (2004) Cellulose structure and biosynthesis: what is in store for the 21st century?, Journal of Polymer Science Part A: Polymer Chemistry. 42(3):487–495. 5. Klemm, D. Cranston, E.D. Fischer, D. et al. (2018) Nanocellulose as natural source for ground breaking applications in materials science: Today’s state, Materials Today, 21(7):720–748. 6. Ross, P., Mayer, R. & Benziman, M. (1991) Cellulose biosynthesis and function in bacteria, Microbiological reviews 55(1):35–58. 7. Watanabe, K., Tabuchi, M., Ishikawa, A. et al. (1998) Acetobacter xylinum mutant with high cellulose productivity and an ordered structure, Bioscience, biotechnology, and biochemistry. 62(7):1290–1292. 8. Toyosaki, H., Kojima, Y., Tsuchida, T. et al. (1995) The characterisation of an acetic acid bacterium useful for producing bacterial cellulose in agitation cultures: the proposal of Acetobacter xylinum subsp. sucrofermentans subsp. nov, The Journal of General and Applied Microbiology 41(4):307–314. 9. Ishikawa, A., Matsuoka, M., Tsuchida, T. & Yoshinaga, F. (1995) Increase in cellulose production by sulfaguanidine-resistant mutants derived from Acetobacter xylinum subsp. sucrofermentans, Bioscience, biotechnology, and biochemistry 59(12):2259–2262. 10. De Wulf, P., K. Joris, K. & Vandamme, E. J. (1996) Improved cellulose formation by an Acetobacter xylinum mutant limited in (keto) gluconate synthesis, Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology: International Research in Process, Environmental and Clean Technology 67(4). pp. 376–380. 11. Hungund, B. S. & Gupta, S. (2010) Strain improvement of Gluconacetobacter xylinus NCIM 2526 for bacterial cellulose production, African Journal of Biotechnology 9(32):5170–5172. 12. Gullo, M., Sola, A. & Zanichelli G. et al. (2017) Increased production of bacterial cellulose as starting point for scaled-up applications, Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology 101(22):8115–8127. 13. Carpita, N. C. & Vergara, A (1998) Recipe for cellulose, Science. 279(5351):672–673. 14. De Wulf, P., Joris, K. & Vandamme, E.J. (1996) Improved cellulose formation by an Acetobacter xylinum mutant limited in (keto) gluconate synthesis, Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology: International Research in Process, Environmental and Clean Technology 67(4):376–380. 15. Han, N. S. & Robyt, J. F. (1998) The mechanism of Acetobacter xylinum cellulose biosynthesis: direction of chain elongation and the role of lipid pyrophosphate intermediates in the cell membrane, Carbohydrate Research. 313(2):125–133. 16. Rühs, P. A., Malollari, K. G., Binelli, M. R. et al. (2020) Conformal Bacterial Cellulose Coatings as Lubricious Surfaces. ACS Nano. 14:3885–3895. 17. Greca, L. G., Lehtonen, J., Tardy, B. L. et al. (2018) Biofabrication of multifunctional nanocellulosic 3D structures: a facile and customisable route, Mater. Horiz. 5:408–415. 18. Villarreal-Soto, S., Beafort, S., Bouajila, J. et al. (2018) Understanding Kombucha Tea Fermentation: A Review, Journal of Food Science. 83 (3):580–588.

CO-CORPOREALITY

AUSTRIAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (OFAI)

An Interview with Robert Trappl

Intelligence of Living and Artificial Systems

“We live in very different temporalities from other species.”

INTELLIGENCE OF LIVING AND ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS

Barbara Imhof Robert Trappl

Barbara Imhof

Robert Trappl

What is intelligence? My first answer is – what is intelligence? There are many definitions. The best example to aid the explanation is to tell you what is tested in an intelligence test. There are several dimensions. One of them is logical reasoning; in this you may be asked to continue a sequence of numbers, to find in a short list of words which is the odd one out or to work out which geometric figure is not identical to the others on the page. General knowledge tends to be one of the most important categories, as does memory. There is always a certain time pressure in these tests. This correlates with the scientific hypothesis that a common factor of intelligence exists and many scientists assume that this is ‘speed’. In the biological world speed is also important. If you’re a slow thinker, you can develop excellent plans for the next week or next month, but sometimes reactions have to be fast and this is not only necessary in intelligence tests. In the biological world speed can be for survival or growth. One additional problem is that intelligence doesn’t mean the same in all cultures; it cannot be perfectly translated. The front page of a recent issue of The Economist read ‘Open Source Intelligence Comes of Age’. In English, intelligence is also important data. In German speaking countries, intelligence is restricted to a specific meaning, although it need not be. Looking further into what intelligence means in other languages allows us to understand specific cultural nuances in its definition. How is biological intelligence different from artificial intelligence? In nearly all aspects. You have to differentiate between AI – which runs in a computer or computer systems – and these systems that we call robots – which rely on in-built AI systems to support their sensing abilities such as proprioception. A ‘good’ robot should have an ethical AI system that uses its intelligence to ensure it does not hurt another human being. Furthermore, its intelligence should prevent humans from being hurt in any way, and lastly, it enables the robot to protect itself. I once edited a volume called A Construction Manual for Robots’ Ethical System, which goes into the ethics of AI more deeply. In it I wrote “It should be stressed that the ethical principles for robots and

CO-CORPOREALITY

Robert Trappl is the head of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Professor Emeritus of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence at the Centre for Brain Research at the Medical University of Vienna. During the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project he has helped the team better understand the ethics, philosophy, affordances and continuing developments of Artificial Intelligence.

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT TRAPPL

Barbara Imhof Robert Trappl Tiziano Derme

Robert Trappl

85

those for designers, developers and those who deploy robots need not be identical.” We do not find intelligence within robots that is developing structurally; but do find an intelligence which can learn, which can adapt when put into different environments. I don’t know at the moment of any complex, intelligent, robotic systems which would, for instance, recognise the need to learn a new language in order to communicate with humans in a different country. There are really large differences between biological and artificial intelligence. Biological intelligence is based in an evolving or sometimes deteriorating biological system. Brain development is an e­ specially good example in relation to the evolution and deterioration of a biological system over time or due to certain impacting factors. Specific parts of the brain have an enormous influence on the functionality of intelligence. The emotions that accompany our personal drive or our needs can impact our intelligence. Drugs also alter and influence these capacities. So, you do not consider AI to be alive? No, AI is not alive. Intelligence is connected with sensing: how many parameters can we observe within our environment? How would you define the connection between observing, sensing and ­intelligence? Intelligence developed because living beings wanted to survive. They had to develop intelligence in order to accomplish the Famous Four: Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding and the fourth F. This corresponds with an evolutionary point of view; it explains why we have intelligence. Would intelligence be possible if there was no sensing? It is well known that after a relatively short period of time, when sensory input is suppressed – especially vision and hearing – many humans in an acoustically isolated space like an unlit prison, or floating in a sensory deprivation tank, autonomously begin seeing and hearing objects or subjects. Sensory deprivation leads to illusions and people begin to believe that they are real. We often happen to see or hear something that might satisfy our needs and this sensory input leads us to use our intelligence to try to retrieve it by implementing a series of specific actions. On the flipside, when we know we want or need something then we use intelligence to locate it; maybe we Google something and then develop a plan of how to get it – in case of goods we might try to work out how to get it as cheaply as possible.

Daniela Mitterberger

Robert Trappl

Not everything has to be so immediate! Humans have an exceptionally developed and special brain system that allows for longterm forecasting, which means they can plan for delayed gratification, knowing that long-term thinking can lead to larger and better fitting rewards. However, cynics (or more realistic people) define planning as the substitute of chance with error. In a project that spanned several years, we tried to model some functions of the hippocampus in a complex computer model. Part of the functioning of the hippocampus was analysed a few years ago by two scientists who were awarded with the Nobel Prize. The ­location of objects and the movement between them is (temp­orarily) stored in the hippocampus. We showed that our robot, with the simulation model of this functionality, could identify the optimum path from a starting point in a city to a destination point by using its ‘mental’ map. Through this map it was capable of identifying its path through prominent buildings – much like a taxi driver. It was possible to generalise this result to various cities globally. Then there are these other intelligences that we cannot prove and have not analysed (in this field). Some people have senses which allow them to connect to other potential beings, like gods or the Virgin Mary, but we can never prove this. I don’t know if robots have that ability; at least they don’t tell us anything about it, but maybe they have it? Do you see any connection between that and the idea of us as part of the Observing System – the role of the observer in the second order of cybernetics is that we are always part of the system that we are observing? I would say it depends on whether or not the observer of the system thinks this is the case. Norbert Wiener wrote in Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, that this is First Order Cybernetics, in which the observer has no active influencing role. This may be true with large non-biological objects but with sensing, living beings this will hardly hold true, unless you can hide perfectly, or there is the use of one-way mirrors. However, if we compare it with quantum physics we know we cannot observe without influencing what we observe. Even more, do things exist if they are not observed? Do microorganisms really observe human beings? Some of them obviously do observe us, otherwise they could not live in our ­intestines. Others, like bacteria, can identify cells to which they

CO-CORPOREALITY

INTELLIGENCE OF LIVING AND ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT TRAPPL

Tiziano Derme

Robert Trappl

Daniela Mitterberger

Robert Trappl

87

can attach and even viruses can interact with us. In some cases they develop special spikes and change a few molecules in a trial and error mode and these changes greatly reduce the efficiency of a vaccination. This is an example of interaction between humans and microorganisms that results in adaptation on both sides. What happens to the meaning of feedback when we start relating to temporalities different than ours? Many investigations have been undertaken to find out what is the temporality, for example, of animals. If you take the moment as a measure, it is possible to compare the different moments of different animals. Moment can be thought of as the smallest time interval that an animal or human can detect. For humans this is approximately 1/18th of a second. If we present 24 pictures per second to humans, they don’t see independent pictures but movements. This subjective moment is very important. How about animals? When researching snails it was found that they detect a movement and retract if the object moves with a frequency of less than 4Hz. If the object moves with a higher frequency then no movement is detected and the snail climbs onto the object. Their subjective moment seems to be ¼ of a second. As a consequence, snails see us rushing through the forests and, compared to the fixed trees, they believe they are too. Dragonflies on the other hand have such a short moment that if they were flying in a fighter plane at a supersonic speed along the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, they could read the price tags in the shop windows of Colette. We live in very different temporalities from other species. The moment can differ greatly between humans and other biological systems. The facial recognition and eye movement observing tools in co-corporeality have been used to detect and analyse different human emotions. What do you think about these technologies? How can we employ them in ­meaningful ways in the future? Meaningful for whom? You can express emotions that you don’t have. You can express happiness by laughing but, please, don’t keep your eyes wide open. When you are truly laughing your eyes are barely visible. Actors earn money for expressing emotions. I learned from an actor that there are two kinds of actors: one kind who learned Method Acting plays poor King Lear so that you feel pity for him. He really suffers. The other kind of actor playing King Lear just thinks about the delicious liver dumpling soup that awaits him in the Kantine of the Burgtheater. You can feel the same amount of pity for him!

Tiziano Derme

Robert Trappl

Some of your emotions produce changes in your face, some of which you are not even aware of. So you can be sad and your expression suggests you are sad but you don’t know you are sad. Someone may suggest to you that you look sad and this cue will allow you to recognise the emotion. The feedback system of your facial movements doesn’t always work. To read a person’s face is not always an accurate reading of the emotions of that person. Do I see the potential? Yeah, I see so much negative potential at the moment that I am just not certain. Maybe the technology would be good for certain products – if you want to sell something it might be interesting. Would you purchase a mirror that would tell you to go back to bed if it reads that you are tired? Do we want to be informed by outside sources about our mood? What do you think is the future of artificial intelligence? I don’t know. However, what I don’t see is an end in either direction. I don’t think that AI will become the superpower or the super intelligence that we will be forced to obey. I always recommend that people who do believe this will happen should spend some money on the zoo at Schonbrunn Palace here in Vienna. Because, if in 10 or 20 years the robots are visiting us humans there, by then we should have invested in nice meadows and lakes for us to swim around in. Honestly, I can’t imagine that computer systems or robots will progress to a super intelligence – they would need to have ‘mean’ personalities to enforce these kinds of social systems wherein humans are treated like pets. Do they have personalities? Not yet. Some computer games have synthetic actors. In 1997 we (Robert Trappl and Paola Petta) contributed and edited a book Creating Personalities for ­Synthetic Actors: Towards Autonomous Personality Agents on creating personalities for synthetic actors and I think that this is a fascinating but potentially dangerous research area in AI. Do AI systems have emotions? They can detect, process and ­express emotions, but they don’t ‘have’ them because they are not conscious. Will they be in the future? We have some assumptions about why humans have consciousness. We have the same assumptions about a number of animals, but expect the consciousness is somehow to a lesser degree than ours. When a robot is navigating over terrain with special architectural marks or is roaming around in a kitchen, is he conscious of this environment? Currently robots have something closer to awareness than consciousness per se.

CO-CORPOREALITY

INTELLIGENCE OF LIVING AND ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT TRAPPL

89

Three years ago I was invited to an international philosophy conference to give a talk and I decided to talk about Robot Deus, modifying Harari’s book title Homo Deus. Could a robot become God? Could the Internet become God-like? It is everywhere, it knows practically all, it can influence so much. The internet is omnipresent and close to omnipotent. What is the difference to God(s) in most religions? Can the creator of such an AI system become a God him-/herself? Just kidding. What I believe to be of utmost importance is to come back to explainable AI. We had symbolic AI for many, many years in which you could trace back the reasoning leading to a specific result. In the 1980s some scientists already had the idea of combining simple elements which they, unfortunately, named ‘neurons’. They combined the ‘neurons’ to a connected system in which some of the elements were ‘sensors’ which could receive information and others ‘effectors’ which delivered output. But the processors in computers became much faster, the size of their data storage (‘memories’) increased enormously and many Terabytes of data – next are Peta-, Exa-, Zetta-… are available from the Internet. Some very clever people built systems with hundreds, thousands or even millions of these ‘neurons’ with many millions of connections and this means you have no idea what the system is really doing. What can we do? Is it possible to trace back through 10 million connections? Probably not. We have no explainable AI in Deep Learning. Nowadays, most of machine learning is Deep Learning. It is really dangerously risky. AI tries to identify animals and suddenly elephants are confused for zebras. Or you change a few dots in the picture of a yellow bus – dots invisible to the naked eye – and the identification programme gives the result ‘ostrich’. When there are so many possibilities it is hard or impossible to trace back the decision making process. There are attempts to aid, for instance, heat maps that are capable of showing which parts of an image influenced the decision or where some information was intentionally added or deleted. The risky part of it is that it can be influenced by humans. Humans are biased creatures and so the systems take on the bias or opinions of their creators. In my opinion, making Deep Learning systems explainable is one of the most important AI research areas at the moment. ●

CO-CORPOREALITY

© 2022 Zita Oberwalder

INTELLIGENCE OF LIVING AND ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS

91

Facial Expression Recognition The study of human facial expressions has been a longstanding focus of research in the fields of psychology, communication science and evolutionary biology. Facial expressions are commonly associated with emotions; we interpret them as observable manifestations of hidden/latent emotional states. In Co-Corporeality, we focus on facial expression as a mode of non-verbal communication that can enable interaction with machines. In the realisation of the E-Feed/­er performance, facial expression is the primary form of recognised communication. The E-Feed/er directly translates the emotions suggested by facial expressions into machine actions in order to interact directly with bacteria. This translation of facial expression to emotions is an ambiguous one, as the assumption that there is a causal and distinct relationship between human emotions and facial expressions is heavily contested.

Martin Gasser

AUSTRIAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (OFAI)

FACIAL EXPRESSION RECOGNITION

Furthermore, facial expressions are pervaded by micro gestures and nuances, which make it

Automatic facial expression recognition • Computer Vision systems have been used to

hard to define a clear and universal translation

analyse human faces for a long time.5 Numer-

between distinct emotions and their equivalent

ous algorithms have been developed that can

facial expression.

detect or recognise images of human faces.6, 7 Algorithms have been developed that can de-

The claim that human facial expressions are

tect the position of certain facial keypoints

universal regardless of socio-cultural back-

(such as the eyeballs, the eyebrows, nose, cor-

ground was first established by Charles Dar-

ners of the mouth etc).8

win who found evolutionary evidence for the belief that emotional states induce facial

Those positions can be used to train ma-

­expressions.1 However, Russell claimed that

chine-learning methods such as KNN classi-

the Universality Hypothesis cannot be accu-

fiers or they can support vector machines to

rately tested, as it focuses on posed rather than

recognise facial expressions.9

spontaneous expressions.2 Russell surmised that the forced choice test design (i.e. sub-

Fig. 1 (on the following page) illustrates one

jects are forced to select one of several pre–

method of performing facial expression recog-

defined emotions rather than providing their

nition based on classical computer vision and

own label) is heavily biased and that the judge-

machine learning algorithms. In step (1), a face

ments of facial expressions are influenced by

rectangle is detected using Haar features. 10 In

preceding judgements, which makes it very

step (2), 68 facial keypoints are extracted. Step

difficult to evaluate the hypothesis objectively

(3) calculates a feature vector from pairwise dis-

in large-scale tests. Paul Ekman developed

tances between keypoints. In step (4), a ma-

the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which

chine learning algorithm is used to associate

consists of a large set of facial muscular ­actions

this feature vector with a facial expression class.

(Action Units) that can be combined bottom-up to form facial expressions.3 ­Ekman’s research

End-to-end systems based on Deep Learning

group provides instructional material and

• The aforementioned automatic facial expres-

workshops that should help h ­ uman coders

sion recognition systems are based on ­manual

apply the FACS: the system has proven useful

feature engineering (that is, a hand-crafted

in various fields from psychology to computer

­algorithm analyses the digital image of a h ­ uman

animation.

face and finds the keypoints in the face) and uses machine learning to classify the displace-

Recently, the deployment of facial expression

ments of the keypoints into a set of classes that

recognition systems in sensitive environments

are most often associated with human emo-

such as workplaces or schools has drawn a

tions. However, a Deep Learning system based

lot of criticism due to the excessive amount

on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN’s)

of power it puts into the hands of authorities

works differently.11

and governments, and due to the fact that this is just another step into a dystopia where

Instead of extracting features from images

­humans are encouraged to win the goodwill of

with human-engineered algorithms, Deep

a machine.4

Learning algorithms are directly trained from

MARTIN GASSER

93

images and corresponding labels (in our case,

mobile and embedded devices.13 We deployed

those of facial expression). Neural networks

the model on PC’s as well as on a single-board

are based on the idea of weighting, summing

computer (the Nvidia Jetson Nano14).

and non-linearly scaling data, thereby reducing the dimensionality of the data in a multi-level

The model was trained on the FER-2013 dataset

­manner, until a low-dimensional representation

using the PyTorch Deep Learning framework.15, 16

of the original data is left that models the original data as accurately as possible. The actual knowledge is stored in a large set of numbers called weights or parameters and the values of those numbers are usually determined during

Facial expression recognition in the c ­ ontext of Co-Corporeality • Facial expression is an

important cue amongst other non-verbal cues in communication because it allows us to

the training of the neural network in a process

guess the current emotional state of the com-

called back-propagation.

munication partner. Co-Corporeality strives for new forms of communication, particular-

CNN’s use a special type of data combination

ly b ­ etween humans and microbial life forms,

called convolution.12 Fig. 2 shows how the con-

therefore non-verbal communication is at the

volution operation works: pixel values are mul-

centre of our interest. Although it is difficult

tiplied by a set of weights from a convolution

and problematic to translate facial expressions

filter and summed. The figure shows two differ-

directly into specific emotions, it still allows

ent filters that are convolved with two different

­humans to develop new interaction vocabular-

positions of an image. The full convolution of an

ies. These vocabularies are based on intelligent

image with a convolution filter is computed by

and complex algorithms used for translating

moving a filter over an image; the size of the

human ­facial expressions to ­machine actions.

convolution filter defines its receptive field.

A simple algorithm might translate human

Each filter generates a feature map from the

­expressions directly one-to-one into machine

original input image.

actions and emotions, ignoring fine nuances and micro gestures. Whereas, if the algorithm

CNN’s are multi-layer neural networks, where

interprets the facial expression ­ambiguously,

the output of a convolutional layer is fed as in-

we can create novel facial e ­ xpressions linked

put to the next layer. Fig. 3 shows the general

to specific ­machine actions and thus to bacte-

structure of a full CNN.

rial interactions.

We can see that the final layer does not contain

Machine Learning is essentially about de-

convolution operations. It is a fully connected

tecting patterns in data; the problem of facial

layer, where each input is connected to each

expression recognition can be formulated as

output via a weight value that is also learned

finding the patterns in image data that are as-

during the training process.

sociated with a given description (in this case,

Facial expression recognition using m ­ obilenet

Learning is all about using the image data to

a facial expression). The subfield of Deep V3 • In Co-Corporeality, especially we use the

predict the descriptions directly, instead of

Mobilenet V3 architecture because of its com-

using manually engineered algorithms that try

putational efficiency, which makes it usable on

to detect facial keypoints such as eyes, n ­ ostrils,

FACIAL EXPRESSION RECOGNITION

or the corners of the mouth. We have used Deep Learning to solve this problem and we have deployed a trained Deep Learning model for facial expression recognition on various platforms. ●

1. Russell, J. A. (1994) Is there universal recognition of emotion from facial expression? A review of the cross-cultural studies. Psychological Bulletin, 115(1):102–141. 2. Li, S. Z. & and Jain, A. K. (2011) Handbook of Face Recognition. 2nd edition. Springer Publishing Company: New York, NY. 3. Duda, R. O., Hart, P. E. & Stork, D. G. Pattern Classification. 2nd edition. Wiley: New York. 4. Howard, A., Sandler, M., Chu, G. et al. (2019) Searching for MobileNetV3. in 2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Seoul, South Korea. 1:1314– 1324. 5. Darwin, C. (2015) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. 6. Yang, M-H., Kriegman, D.J. & Ahuja. N. (2002) Detecting faces in images: a survey. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 24(1):34–58. 7. LeCun, Y., Boser, B., Denker, J. S. et al. (1989) Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition. Neural Computation. 1(4):541–551. 8. Shape_Predictor available at: http://dlib.net/imaging.html#shape_predictor 9. Ballard, D.H. & Brown, C.M. (1982) Computer Vision. Prentice-Hall: Hoboken, NJ. 10. Viola, P. & Jones, M. (2001) Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features. In Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Kauai, HI. 1:511–518. 11. Crawford, K. (2021) Atlas of AI. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT. 12. The term convolution refers to both the result function and to the process of computing it. 13. Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (1978) Facial Action Coding System. Consulting Psychologists Press Manual. 14. Jetson Nano Developer Kit available at: https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/ jetson-nano-developer-kit. 15. FER-2013 dataset available at: https://www.kaggle.com/msambare/fer2013. 16. Pytorch available at: https://pytorch.org.

(1) detection (1) Face Face detection (1) Face detection

(2) Fa (2) Facial k

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abs(p0-p1) abs(p0-p2) abs(p0-p1) abs(p0-p1) abs(p0-p1) …abs(p0-p2) abs(p0-p2) abs(p0-p2) …… … abs(p0-p67) abs(p0-p67) abs(p0-p67) abs(p0-p67) abs(p1-p2)

Support Vector Machine

abs(p1-p2) abs(p1-p2) abs(p1-p2)

Support Support Support Vector Vector Vector Machine Machine Machine

…

…… …

abs(p1-p67)

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…

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abs(p66-p67)

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acial keypoints detection (2)(2) Facial (2) Facial Facial keypoints keypoints keypoints detection detection detection

(3) Features (3)(3) Features (3) Features Features

(4) Machine Learning (4)(4) Machine (4) Machine Machine Learning Learning Learning Fig. 1. Classical machine learning pipeline for facial expression recognition.

Fig. 2. The convolution operation.

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Eye-Gaze Tracking Technology

Martin Gasser

AUSTRIAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (OFAI)

MARTIN GASSER

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1. Introduction

1.2 Head-mounted eye-gaze detection

Non-verbal aspects of communication are

Head-mounted eye-gaze trackers consist

relied upon more heavily when we do not

of a camera pointing towards a human’s

speak the same language as those we wish

eye, which is mounted on a wearable frame.

to communicate with. When the wish is to

The advantages of these systems are (1) that

communicate with other life forms, this wish

they allow the user to move freely and (2)

becomes a question of logistics. Within the

have higher accuracy. The disadvantage

realm of AI, sensory cues can be analysed

is the potentially invasive nature of these

with a number of technologies. In the case

systems (i.e. users have to wear a head-­

of Co-Corporeality we relied on eye gaze

mounted device which has to be connect-

as an important cue that demonstrates the

ed to ­another computer system via either a

importance of a visual impression. Methods

cable or a wireless connection).

have been developed that can detect the gaze direction from images of the human

See 1 for an extensive overview of eye-gaze

face or eye.

tracking technology.

In Co-Corporeality, we use eye-gaze de-

2. Combined position, orientation

tection in conjunction with head orientation and position tracking devices to develop in-

and eye-gaze tracking

tuitive interfaces for interaction in complex

In the Co-Corporeality project, we used the

3D environments.

Pupil Labs Pupil Core headset to determine

In the following text we review two

a user’s eye-gaze direction.2 We chose the

approaches to eye-gaze tracking:

Pupil Core platform because of its moder-

– Remote eye-gaze tracking

ate price and because the software and the

– Head-mounted eye-gaze tracking

hardware are primarily Open Source and

1.1 Eye-gaze detection with

To define where a user is looking in space,

hacker-friendly. a stationary camera

we need to determine a correlation between

If users remain stationary in a three-dimen-

the position of a user. This process is called

sional environment, it is possible to perform

“eye tracking” and refers to measuring our

eye-gaze tracking with a front-on camera

point of gaze. Our system uses a non-inva-

pupil and gaze positions in combination with

picture of the human face; typically, this

sive, optical eye-tracking setup requiring

means that a person is located in front of a

three cameras. The first camera registers

screen with a camera mounted next to it. In

the pupil position and is called “eye camera”.

such a setting, the eye location and the eye-

The Pupil Core hardware comes with a high-

gaze direction can be computed by fitting a

speed “eye camera” pointing toward the eye

geometrical model of the human eye to the

of the user. Calibrated via screen markers,

image, resulting in solutions for parameters

the second camera (“world camera”) ­enables

that define the line of sight (eyeball position

us to register the gaze position of the wearer

and gaze vector).

by pointing in their ­viewing direction.

EYE-GAZE TRACKING TECHNOLOGY

We trialled two devices for use as a “world camera”. In the first prototype we used an Intel

Tracking device Eye Camera

World Camera

Main Computer Tracking Camera

Realsense D435 device and in the second iteration a standard webcam.3 Along with the

USB

first two cameras the set-up requires a third:

Raspberry Pi

camera 3 is a tracking camera that also points

Ethernet/WiFi

Pupil Core software

World coordinate transformation

Interaction

Visualisation

Fig. 2. Schematic of eye tracking system

in the wearer’s viewing direction. In order to define the wearer’s position in space we use an

Fig. 2 shows the second proof-of-concept

Intel Realsense T265 tracking camera to track

prototype with a custom 3D printed frame. The

their head position and orientation.4 The com-

front-facing cameras and the eye camera are

bination of the output of cameras 1 and 3 with

mounted directly on the frame. The Raspber-

the calibration performed by camera 2 enables

ry Pi computer is attached to a wearable and

us to calculate the absolute 3D world-space

powered from a battery.

positions and gaze directions of the user’s eye; all of which are calculated as the user moves.

In our system, the three cameras are connected to a Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer that

As the default frame that comes with the Pupil

streams the video data and the position/orien-

Core headset was not robust enough to car-

tation information to a main computer via an

ry all three cameras, we decided to mount

Ethernet or a WiFi connection. The main com-

them onto a custom frame for prototyping our

puter is running the Pupil Core software and an

tracking system. To decrease the weight on

additional programme uses the tracking data

the headset we designed a wearable for the

to calculate absolute world-space positions

Raspberry Pi computer.5

and gaze directions. Based on this information it implements the interaction logic.

Fig. 1 shows the first proof-of-concept prototype during our experiments with a bike hel-

When using an Ethernet connection, we used

met used as a custom frame. This prototype

the cable not only to transmit the data, but also

includes the front-facing cameras mounted on

to power the Raspberry Pi and the cameras

the helmet, the eye camera mounted on the

over Power over Ethernet (PoE).5 For the wire-

original Pupil Core frame and the Raspberry Pi

less connection, we decided to use a battery

computer mounted on the back of the helmet,

to power the Raspberry Pi.

with the Ethernet cable connected. 3. Calibration For calibrating the eye tracking device, the user has to focus on a predefined set of marker symbols on a screen, as shown in Fig. 3. The world camera is used to detect the positions of the symbols in the viewing space and by combining these positions with the information from the eye camera, the system can derive the Fig. 1. Eye-gaze tracking prototype.

transformation of eye pupil positions to gaze

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MARTIN GASSER

directions. To correctly derive the real position (i.e., the world space coordinates) from the

5. Conclusion

tracking data, the system has to be started with

We have demonstrated how to build a wearable

the user located in a known initial position. Sub-

device that can be used to track the eye gaze

sequently, the tracking camera can be used to

of the wearer whilst they are in motion. We

locate the user in world space.

have also created software that interprets the tracking data with respect to predefined world

4. The experiment

geometry, i.e. it computes which objects the user is currently looking at.

To prove that our eye-gaze tracking system works, we conducted two experiments, the

As one of the core goals of Co-Corporeality

first in our project room and the second in

is establishing new forms of communication

the final exhibition setup. The setup of both

between humans and microbial life forms,

experiments, besides small adjustments, was

the identification of objects that grab human

mostly the same. In order to undertake the

attention is one strategy to approach this

experiments we created a 3D model of the

goal. In these circumstances attention is the

space – included in the model was a piece of

basis for communication. Eye gaze is an un-

furniture and several objects. Fig. 4 shows a

conscious cue that indicates what we need to

user wearing the device and looking at a flask.

know – which visual stimuli are able to attract

The 3D visualisation, seen to the right in Fig. 4,

the attention of humans? ●

shows the position of the user and the gaze

A

direction of her eyes. It also shows that the object (flask) she is looking at has been detected by the software. This is visualised by a red

B C

boundary box appearing around the object in the 3D model (visible in the 3D visualisation of the room in Fig. 4). Fig. 4. The system in action. A: The user is wearing the device and focuses on the flask. B: Camera 1 tracks the pupil and eyeball position in 3D C: 3D visualisation of the room. The object of interest (the flask) is highlighted in red.

1. Kar, A. & Corcoran, P. (2017) A Review and Analysis of Eye-Gaze Estimation Systems, Algorithms and Performance Evaluation Methods in Consumer Platforms. IEEE Access, 5:16495–16519. 2. Pupil Core available at: https://pupil-labs.com/ products/core/. 3. Depth Camera D435 available at: https://www. intelrealsense.com/depth-camera-d435/. 4. Tracking Camera T265 available at: https://www. intelrealsense.com/tracking-camera-t265/.

Fig. 3. Calibration process using markers.

5. Raspberry Pi 4 available at: https:// www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/.

CO-CORPOREALITY IN PRACTICE

Co-Corporeality in Practic of the project, the Co-Cor developed and built two in to exhibit the experiments invite visitors into understa Co-Corporeality. The E-Fe of Life are installation exp co-corporeal environmen scale. Both incorporate the results of extensive experi framework of the project. I essays the E-Feed/er Insta Life are described in more with images from their res

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ce. During the course rporeality project team ntegrative installations s of the project and anding of the state of ­ eed/er and Degrees periments that create nts at an architectural e critical themes and rimentation done in the In the following visual allation and Degrees of e detail and illustrated spective installations.

E-Feed/er

CO-CORPOREALITY

“Communicating with m a challenging task as it r overcoming different exp of time and space.”

Co-Corporeality Team

microbes is requires periences

E-FEED/ER

The e-feed/er is a platform for interaction between humans and microbial life. With the help of a facial recognition system, visitors can communicate non-verbally with bacteria via their facial expressions. Communicating with microbes is a challenging task as it requires overcoming different experiences of time and space. Since the perception systems of humans and microbes are very different, direct, understandable communication is often impossible or misunderstood. Microorganisms usually communicate chemically or physically, by emitting signal molecules to attract or drive other organisms away. Humans can communicate non-verbally with microbes through the e-feed/er installation by changing their environmental conditions and thereby triggering a microbial reaction.

The colour change of pre-grown bacterial cultures can be induced by the addition of X-gal or lactose, which is released with peristaltic pumps via distinct nozzles. These pumps and the following colour change is dependent upon and triggered by reading of a positive emotion in visitors, who are able to influence the growth and the development of the bacteria. X-gal, which is a pigment (X) attached to galactose (sugar), generates a blue colour. When the galactose is eaten by the bacteria, the blue pigment is released. When lactose, also a sugar, is consumed by the bacteria, they produce acid, which in turn changes the medium into a red colour. If a negative emotion is read, the use of UV-C light destroys the bacteria and prevents further bacteria growth on the UV exposed area. Following the action of the e-feed/er the growth of the colonies is analysed through a digital microscope. This examination is done in order to determine the development patterns of the bacteria. The e-feed/er is designed to be an interface between humans and bacteria able to translate each subject’s behaviour to the other.

CO-CORPOREALITY

A computer and machine vision controls the actuation mechanism of the e-feed/er. More specifically, a face recognition algorithm is used to translate the user’s facial emotion into the physical actions of the e-feed/er. Human emotions are collected from visitors by tracking their eyes and facial expressions, which are then processed by machine vision, fed into the feeder and thus influence the microbial cultures. The selected microbial species is Escherichia coli, an intestinal bacterium that can multiply every 20 minutes under favourable conditions; it is also valued for its robustness in laboratory environments. Once the facial recognition algorithm has read the expression of a visitor either growth is promoted, or selected parts of the microbial cultures (E. coli) are destroyed.

CO-CORPOREALITY TEAM

With the e-feed/er, all essential features for human-microbial communication were combined for the first time in the project: –

human perception and reaction,

–

microbial perception and reaction,

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hardware for enabling environmental changes and for recording reactions, and;

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applications of machine learning that make it possible to bridge the gap between the differences in the respective communication channels.

The e-feed/er has been shown as part of FeLT, part of the 4th Renewable Futures conference in Oslo; during the Angewandte Festival Wanderlust 2021 and was presented for the first time at the Angewandte Festival 2020. ●

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E-FEED/ER

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MICROBIAL ECOLOGY — SYMBIOSIS, CO-EXISTENCE, INTERACTIONS E-FEED/ER

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The ‘E-Feed/er’ displayed at the ‘Degrees of Life’ exhibition in Vienna, Austria, February 2022. Photo © Zita Oberwalder.

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Degrees of Life

CO-CORPOREALITY

“How can we speak of a completely diffe

k with a living entity fferent nature?”

Co-Corporeality Team

PHOTO © ZITA OBERWALDER 2022

DEGREES OF LIFE

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© 2022 Zita Oberwalder

DEGREES OF LIFE

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Degrees of Life is an experiment approached at an architectural scale. The exhibition, held in Vienna in February 2022, investigates non-verbal communication scenarios between humans and bacteria, in order to navigate towards a shared space of sensing and coexistence. The experiment is driven by the question “how can we speak with a living entity of a completely different nature?” As this someone, ‘the other’ does not communicate audibly, the exhibition investigates different modes of non-verbal communication to bridge the gap. Different sensory modes and reactions are i­ nitiated in the space to explore how else communication can take place between humans and bacteria. The look at the ‘other’, whether it is curious, scared, or investigative, builds the foundation for an emotional connection. We use an eye-tracking device to register the human gaze. This sensor device can track the user’s gaze, attention span and emotional level and is linked within the exhibition to a machinic environment in which different species of bacteria live. The human gaze activates the environment to direct and stimulate the growth of the bacteria. For this, we are using bacteria-specific ­triggers such as chemical reactions, changes in their environmental conditions through light and the addition of nutrients.

The condition of the space creates a context by placing human bodies in a technological entanglement with non-human life. The intricacy between the human and the bacterial body bridges two different scales and temporalities, creating a condition of ­co-corporeality. Physical presence in this context is understood not only as a biological domain but also as a performative, relational entity that emerges through interaction with other media. Interaction in these circumstances is linked with the creation of observable environmental, biological and chemical events. These events range from real-time reactions to a delayed reaction time, in order to reflect and question the perception of time and scale for different biological subjects. ●

n o i t i b i h x E

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e os ul e ll typ se e C to lo Cr ia pro llu ype Su A t e er y 2 1– 4 C act rid a C oto B -G ri pr 3– e D 3 ct ce r 5 Ba tti d/e La Fee 6 E- o Ec 7 8

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The exhibition is structured around three different self-sustaining environments hosting three types of bacteria: Cyanobacteria, Escherichia coli and Sucrofermentas bacteria. The three enclosed environments, entitled CyA, ECo, SuCr, refer directly to the names of the microorganisms/bacteria living in them. All settings provide the necessary environmental conditions for the bacteria to survive, but they rely on human interaction to thrive.

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ts en rim pe Ex

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PHOTO CO-CORPOREALITY © ZITA OBERWALDER 2022

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PHOTO CO-CORPOREALITY © ZITA OBERWALDER 2022

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The SuCr environment, inhabited by the Sucrofementas bacteria strain, supports the growth of cellulosic bacteria and supports survival outside its nutritional liquid. Human interaction can direct the location of growth via a moving spraying nozzle.

PHOTO CO-CORPOREALITY © ZITA OBERWALDER 2022

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PHOTO CO-CORPOREALITY © ZITA OBERWALDER 2022

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© 2022 Zita Oberwalder

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The environment ECo hosts the Escherichia coli bacteria. Human interaction allows the bacteria to grow through the addition of nutrients. This growth can be visualised through different colour spectrums through the addition of chemicals.

PHOTO CO-CORPOREALITY © ZITA OBERWALDER 2022

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The CyA landscape provides an environment for cyanobacteria. Human interaction can stimulate photosynthetic activity by regulating the environmental light conditions and therefore influence the enclosed system’s photoperiod through alternating the levels of oxygen production.

Human interaction is supported by an eye-tracking device that registers the local position and rotation of the moving pupil, situating the human eye precisely within the surrounding physical space (in this case the exhibition). The eye-tracking is used to activate specific machine parameters in order to visualise, stimulate, or direct bacterial growth and behaviour. Conscious human actions such as gaze direction and duration and unconscious human data such as pupil diameter are processed before activating the machines within ‘Degrees of Life’.

PHOTO CO-CORPOREALITY © ZITA OBERWALDER 2022

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The self-sustaining environments are accompanied by a series of artefacts from past human-bacterial worlds and a visual interface displaying the perspective variables associated with the visitor’s gaze detection. Artefacts act as the narrator of the exhibition as they guide the visitor through a series of communicative actions. ‘Degrees of Life’ creates a context where physical presence continually relates to new modes of observation and integration within embodied forms of computation.

PHOTO CO-CORPOREALITY © ZITA OBERWALDER 2022

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Petra Gruber TRANSARCH, YBBS AN DER DONAU, AUSTRIA

Survival Perspectives on

CO-CORPOREALITY

“By taking on a biologica secting familiar concepts systems thinking, it is po diversity into our built en

Cohabitation by Design

al perspective and inters of stewardship with ossible to integrate bionvironment.”

SURVIVAL PERSPECTIVES ON COHABITATION BY DESIGN

The earth shall be a common home to life. Sovereignty shall pertain to every living.

The world around us continues to reveal itself and teach us what it has always known; it is astonishing how much we have not yet learned. Paradoxically, with this knowledge, a belief remains that the only reason that cohabitation eludes us is that we haven’t tried to initiate it. We imagine that we could translate this wish into a successful and thriving paradise of living together with nature, in harmony, anytime. And yet, what we see instead, is that even simple efforts to reintegrate biological organisms into our built environment fail. And many more projects are silently removed and abandoned – the green facade that dried out during the short failure of a water supply or a hot spell, the algae bioreactor that became clogged, the bacteria in self-healing concrete surviving only a couple of months.2 The continued application of animal control measures such as spikes and fencing have become a persistent reminder of the reluctance to allow other life forms to inhabit our shared built environment. To change the way we live together takes more than goodwill. We suffer from a fundamental lack of knowledge about biology. Yet living organisms enliven our daily experiences in the world. At the same time, we often think of basic research in biology as a luxury that we are ready to support only if there is the prospect of direct useability in human technology. In order to really work towards integration and limit the ultimate disaster of biodiversity loss we need to invest in research and design for the environment. By taking on a biological perspective and intersecting familiar concepts of stewardship with systems thinking, it is possible to integrate biodiversity into our built environment. Biosphere stewardship today involves measures that reconnect people and development to the biosphere foundation – engaging living systems and institutions in our built environments to the wider

1. Mancuso, S. (2021)  The Nation of Plants. Trans. G. Conti. New York, NY: Other Press.

2. Nguyen, P. Q., Courchesne, N. M. D., Duraj-Thatte, A., Praveschotinunt, P., & Joshi, N. S. (2018) Engineered living materials: prospects and challenges for using biological systems to direct the assembly of smart materials. Advanced Materials, 30(19).

CO-CORPOREALITY

Stefano Manusco 1

PETRA GRUBER

planet.3 When considering this in relation to the materials that make up our built environment we can turn to Julien ­Vincent who writes: “our materials are rendered biologically inert through the introduction of high energy bonds (necessarily using high temperatures). Biological materials have evolved to be recycled and their molecules are stabilised by bonds that are only just strong enough for the expected conditions of temperature and mechanical function.” 4 Notions of closedloop stewardship of resources and biomimetic manufacturing are inextricably linked;5 however, they do not need to rely on short-cuts through often problematic technologies. To create places or to initiate cohabitation relies on complex, ongoing integrated processes of design, development, space and management; in which management incorporates the place-based responsibilities for stewardship, security, maintenance and ongoing funding.6 These opinions, when considered in the context of cohabitation by design, demand human stewardship of biological and ecological systems through systems thinking. It is not enough to render systems alive, but also necessary to understand how the aliveness can be sustained through socio-biospheric collaboration and in an active engagement with scientific knowledge. Bio-systemic design thinking and new tools such as Gigamapping try to make the complexity of interactions workable. Gigamapping envisions linking together “people, animals, plants and insects, as different scales, stakeholders and their agency speculate on planned actions of the biosphere.” 7, 8 To ensure the survival of the biosphere, we need to take design out of the technology realm and create processes and interactions instead of products. Process and interaction based design can be forms of biological delegation, support and resilience. The research question should really be: if our houses were alive, how would we keep them happy? The exploration of the intersection of biology and the built environment has increasingly been the focus of researchers in the last decade, with emerging centres such as The Living ­A rchitecture Systems Group (LASG), The Hub for ­Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE) and Matters

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3. Folke, C., Gren, Å., Larsson, J. et al. (2021) Cities and the Biosphere. Ambio. 50: 1634–1635.

4. Vincent, J. (2012) Structural Biomaterials: Third Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

5. Pawlyn, M. (2011) Biomimicry in architecture. London, UK: Riba Publishing.

6. Carmona, M. (2014) The Place-shaping Continuum: A Theory of Urban Design Process, Journal of Urban Design, 19(1): 2–36.

7. Zavoleas, Y. (2021). Patterns of nature: Bio-systemic design thinking in meeting sustainability challenges of an increasingly complex world. Developments in the Built Environment. 7. 8. Sevaldson, B. (2011). GIGA-Mapping: Visualisation for complexity and systems thinking in design. Nordes. 4.

SURVIVAL PERSPECTIVES ON COHABITATION BY DESIGN

of Activity hosting a variety of research threads benefiting from the information flow between the disciplines. 9. Living Architecture Systems. (2022) Living Architecture Systems Group. Available at: https://livingarchitecturesystems.com/. Accessed 15 February 2022.

10. The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment. (2022) HBBE – Biotechnology in the Built Environment. Available at: http://bbe.ac.uk/. Accessed 15 February 2022.

11. Matters of Activity. (2022) Matters of Activity. Available at: https:// www.matters-of-activity. de/en/. Accessed 15 February 2022.

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The Living Architecture Systems Group based in Toronto, Canada brings together researchers and industry partners in a multidisciplinary research cluster dedicated to developing built environments with qualities that come close to life, in advanced prototype envelopes of “near-­living” architecture.9

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The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment based in Newcastle, UK, brings together bio-scientists and architects, designers and engineers with the mission to develop biotechnologies to create a new generation of “Living Buildings”.10

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Matters of Activity is based in Berlin, Germany, and brings together more than 40 highly specialised ­disciplines. ­Aiming to create a basis for a new culture of m ­ aterials, it systematically investigates design strategies for active ­materials and structures that adapt to specific ­requirements and ­environments.11

12. Baubotanik. (2022) Baubotanik Ferdinand Ludwig. Available at: http://www.ferdinand ludwig.de/. Accessed 15 February 2022.

13. Terreform ONE. (2022) Therefrom Open Network Ecology. Available at: https://terreform.org/. Accessed 15 February 2022.

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The Baubotanik approach further developed traditional plant grafting technologies in order to design architecture with plants by connecting living and non-living technical elements to a connected and growing composite structure.12

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The group Terreform ONE (Open Network Ecology) is a New York-based nonprofit art, architecture and urban design research group that was co-founded by Mitchell Joachim to combat the extinction of all planetary species through pioneering acts of design.13

CO-CORPOREALITY

In the meantime, we also have exemplary success stories: the Baubotanik approach of Ferdinand Ludwig has resulted in a series of living structures; the application of mycelium in building in Mycoform that Joachim Mitchell and his team have successfully applied and Andrew Adamatzky’s visionary use of fungal networks has been investigated in the Fungar project.

PETRA GRUBER

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Fungal Architectures is a new cross-disciplinary research project based at the University of West England in Bristol that seeks to develop a fully integrated structural and computational living substrate using fungal mycelium for the purpose of growing architecture.14

These approaches go beyond bioinspiration and biomimetics and hint to a directional shift in the field towards a biohybrid approach that integrates living organisms in materials, structural design and information technology by blurring the distinction between the living and non-living (Nonosovski 2018).15 How can we ensure cultural practices of managing our environment and constructing our built environment are infused with these visionary ideas? Our current practices of using other organisms for human survival, as exemplified in the food industry, are extremely cruel and show a systemic lack of empathy towards other creatures and ecological systems, so nothing less is to be anticipated from an industry implementing the integration of biology into building. The question of ethics that arises with biodesign and any use of another living being is again discussed from a human perspective. This is of course shaped by our cultural understanding in terms of identity and agency, and interestingly less in terms of how we can ensure a good life for all, or even strive for happiness (another category that we rarely mention as a design goal). While we look at biology as a paradigm that potentially bears the solution to our global problems, we should look at the ­unwanted elements of nature in a more systematic way to better understand future opportunities. –

The ubiquitous presence of water is the source and environment of life in biology, but in contemporary building we need to exert extreme control of humidity levels. ­Water is as important for our survival as it is a resource for other organisms. It allows for the thriving of potentially harmful micro-organisms and can act as a solvent for our building materials.

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14. Fungar.eu. (2022) Fungar Architectures. Available at: http://www. fungar.eu/. Accessed 15 February 2022.

15. Nosonovsky, M. (2018). Cultural implications of biomimetics: Changing the perception of living and non-living. MOJ Appl. Bionics and Biomechanics. 2:230–236.

SURVIVAL PERSPECTIVES ON COHABITATION BY DESIGN

Rainforest on the island of Moorea, French Polynesia, 2019. Rainforests in tropical climates are hotspots of biodiversity. The biodiversity of Moorea was mapped in the "Biocode" project as the first in the first comprehensive inventory of all non-microbial life in a complex tropical ecosystem (2010) https://geome-db.org/ workbench/project-overview?projectId=75 Image © 2019 Petra Gruber.

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Slime mould and millipede on a decaying tree trunk, Moorea, French Polynesia 2019. Image © 2019 Petra Gruber.

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Flows of matter and energy need to be managed in a similar way, so that ­cyclic processes are more difficult to generate and oppose our intent of ­order if they spontaneously emerge. Unwanted presence of organisms such as insects, birds and mammals in our houses and urban environments have brought an industry of pest control and deterrence mechanisms. I­ nstead of managing other species’ lives by understanding their needs, housing them appropriately and investing in measures to balance populations sustainably, we invest in poisons and technical innovation that make our architectural spaces uninhabitable.

–

On the other hand, processes of decay, killing and death have long been excluded from welcome human experiences. With the hidden and unseen comes the abandoning of ethical boundaries that often results in a product perspective on sentient beings. Reintegrating biology comes with the requirement to investigate our capacity to face ‘decay and limitation’ and to also accept the unknown and unpredictable into our lives.

The questions posed reach beyond the design of material products and instead concern novel fields of experimentation abundant with distinct ­behaviours and cultures. These implicit functions require a reconsideration of ethical frameworks for research and development. So how can architecture contribute to this extension from design for humans to the design of cohabitation environments, beyond the obvious collaboration of planners and biologists?

Applying these principles to the built environment this means reuse, revitalisation, re-ordering and re-developing, exchange of opportunities, dynamic use of space, designing for organisms and ecosystems, hybrid systems where cultural and natural processes interlink and create value. Ecosystem services

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What we can learn from biology is a fundamentally different perspective on the creation of environments. The sheer existence of material structures – bodies – impacts the surroundings and creates a new environment with a multiplicity of opportunities. The change of the physical environment, provision of shade from sun or wind or reflection of light, creates potential spaces for new habitats. The outputs of these metabolic processes can feed others and the agency of living creatures can affect their overall surroundings. The environment, or territory, is created in the in-between, in the rupture, by assembly and emergence of new order, that also follows dynamic space and time rhythms.

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of architecture for the living environment can be assessed and provided in the same way as services are planned for clients – to p ­ rovide shade, change air pattern, ensure water access and availability, ­create safe and manageable habitat for other organisms, provide space for secondary and tertiary functions, provide structures for parasitic use and so on. The innovative design request is less in the technical material sphere but in the way we live together and share concepts of property, private and public space, responsibility, safety and regulation. Finding new modes of sharing and co-living extends the design activity to social systems, behaviours and the inclusion of sentient nonhuman living beings in planning processes in an “ethics of entanglement”. 16, 17 Communication between humans and microbial life and how it is mediated, is explored by co-corporeality in an artistic context that liberates the designers from the request to deliver scientific data or product innovation. Of even more importance is the so-called ‘development’ of natural environments which needs to stop and, in many regions, to be ­reversed by providing another design space that follows new concepts of ecological restoration and rewilding.18 We need to protect still existing natural environments and create vast areas where human influence is as limited as possible, we need to extend nature reserves on a global scale, we need to literally leave space.19 What are design rules for ecosystems and how can we manage to reintegrate wildlife on a large scale into our built environment? To answer this question, we need to foster basic research in biology and ecology, as they are the fundamental foundation for integrating these principles into our built environment. We need to foster research projects that strive to explore cohabitation strategically and to deliver added value and positive impact to their environment in multiple ways. We can rely on existing knowledge and methods of codesigning and community involvement to integrate the concerns of cohabitation by design. New platforms for experimentation on a larger scale would allow for the increase of cohabitation projects and the assessment of those projects by extending design to legal and societal frameworks. Lastly, we must find out how we can implement effective mechanisms to decide on matters of global importance and to ensure implementation of those measures, while considering fundamental differences in interests and cultures. ●

16. Houston, D., Hillier, J., MacCallum, D., Steele, W. & Byrne, J. (2018) Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’in planning theory. Planning Theory, 17(2):190–212. 17. Wright, K. (2014) An Ethics of Entanglement for the Anthropocene. Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture. 11(1):1–5 18. Jørgensen, D. (2015). Rethinking rewilding. Geoforum, 65: 482–488. 19. Ripple, W. J., Wolf, C., Newsome, T. M., et al. (2021). World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency 2021. BioScience, 71(9):894–898.

Open Systems for Living Architecture

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GROVE:

“In the face of planetary environmental shifts, buildings should be designed as open systems.”

DIRECTOR, LIVING ARCHITECTURE SYSTEMS GROUP ( L A S G ), TORONTO, CANADA

Philip Beesley

GROVE: OPEN SYSTEMS FOR LIVING ARCHITECTURE

Hardened crusts lie all around our built environment. Metabolites and tars and shells and crystals harden within radiant burning energy, the materials of skeletons and shells and anchors within our world stage. A hollow and brittle equilibrium of crystal shards create walled communities and crystalline, vitrified, calcified cores. We are surrounded by rigid wall-building. When environments cause stress and pressure on human activities, it seems to be instinctive to harden and seal our spaces – to keep the world out in order to maintain safety and security within our own private, climate-controlled ecosystems. Yet hardened walls can create turbulence that ultimately creates even more social insecurity, both inside and outside. Likewise, physical infrastructure can exacerbate existing problems. For instance, concrete flood walls that line some urban rivers can actually amplify the damage of a torrential river during a storm or spring breakup of ice. The reaction is one of control that centres the human and resists changes that come from outside systems. Yet, as we’ve seen with increasingly drastic climate events, natural forces are not easily contained. How can we balance human needs, a stressed environment and increasingly violent natural and social reactions to disrupted ecological equilibriums? How can we live together in a turbulent, stressed environment that seems to call for sealed walls?

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In this time of ongoing climate catastrophes that drastically upend human lives and built spaces, how can we calm and buffer the forces of the environment? This chapter offers a meditation on closed and open boundaries; arguing that in the face of planetary environmental shifts, buildings should be designed as open systems. By viewing the open system as not in opposition to but embracing of current closed system approaches to architecture, it can be understood as flexible and porous in any circumstance. But in a world of closed system architectures, what can we rely on to influence this alternative approach to design? With a focus on their delicate geometries, the chapter opens into a discussion of natural snowflakes as an example of a design system that can provide alternative practical approaches to complex problems affecting design of the built environment today. From open systems to dissipative systems, the chapter unfolds into Grove, a multilayered design system, installed at the 2021 Venice Biennale for Architecture by the author’s Living Architecture Systems Group. The technical shaping and social experience of Grove’s gathering space is discussed in order to ask: “Can we think of ourselves as part of a fluid commons? Might our identities vary and transform into a multitude of arrangements over time”,1 and can our built environments do the same?

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Open systems • Traditional digital design tools are embed-

ded within Classical traditions of form-making that favour ­reductive, clear boundaries. The polarised qualities of classical design can seem opposite to natural environments that often intermingle opposing forces in a near-but-always-­ shifting balance. Many Western design methods – including both physical and computational architectures – are biased towards the Platonic geometric primitives and linear creation methods which favour rigid, bounded forms. The traditional approach to architecture values permanence, stability and clear boundaries that create opposition and privilege. The ancient classical paradigms that were expressed in ­Marcus Vitruvius Pollio’s De Architectura still prevail within contemporary Western architecture, focused by the principle of firmitas: reinforcing energy-intensive investment in closed forms and stable, rigid mass.2 Yet, to create the conditions for healing and vitality, it is not enough to build walls and shells. Instead of closed boundaries, we need flexible, ­porous scaffolds that provide protection and shelter while we share and connect with others around us. By foregrounding fragility and ambivalence as coherent design modes, architecture based on these kinds of open systems can act as a radical model that can address complex stresses within the human-centred Anthropocene. Dissipative systems • A valuable example of an alternate model

for design lies in dissipative adaptation. This idea is influenced by the 1978 Nobel Prize of physicist and chemist Ilya Prigogine, who described the evolutionary tendency of natural systems to adopt layered, reticulated forms that arise when absorbed energy is subsequently dissipated.3, 4 In practical terms, this involves flexibility and fluctuation in physical architectural forms – qualities that traditional architecture tends to oppose. Turning against traditional Vitruvian models, new design paradigms could be associated with living ingredients: compartments, information and metabolisms. These living ingredients would help to achieve resilient envelopes that function in a porous, liminal fashion.5 At the scale of architecture, this might offer an alternative to the static, exclusionary, energy-intensive enclosures of walls and roof, reconceiving those surfaces as layered, interwoven m ­ embranes that can actively modulate the boundaries between inner and outer environments.6

GROVE: OPEN SYSTEMS FOR LIVING ARCHITECTURE

How will we live together? Do we close ourselves off from our surroundings? Concept drawing for ‘Grove’, Philip Beesley, 2019.

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What if we extended and opened our boundaries? Could we build open, vital thresholds? Concept drawing for ‘Grove’, Philip Beesley, 2019.

PHILIP BEESLEY

‘Grove’ offers a new kind of gathering place. Instead of rigid walls that exclude, lace-like scaffolds offer extraordinary durability and shelter. Concept drawing for ‘Grove’, Philip Beesley, 2019.

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“Exclusion is the rule in binary practice, whereas poetics aims for the space of difference – not exclusion but, rather where difference is ­realised in going beyond.” 7 Liminality can be understood to be a space of difference. In going beyond, liminality is considered a state where insight can be gained, hovering at the outer edge of a city, with one foot leading toward wilderness and the other foot within the safe and bounded space of civilisation. On the other hand, liminal space can be considered a state of danger and irresponsibility. An ambivalent, open liminal space can seem to endanger civic sanctuaries for those who have become familiar with them. We rely on the liminal as an approach in design as it lets us go beyond what currently exists, yet we realise it with familiar elements of the living world around us.

Illuminating the sheer intensity of this kind of form-gesture, in ­Poetics of Relation, the mid-century poet Édouard Glissant writes: ­“…­ that which cannot be reduced ... is the most perennial ­g uarantee of participation and consequence. We are far from the opacities of Myth or Tragedy, whose obscurity was accompanied by exclusion and whose transparency aimed at ‘grasping’. In this version of ­understanding the verb to grasp contains the movement of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them back to themselves. A gesture of enclosure if not appropriation. Let our understanding prefer the gesture of giving-on-and-with that opens finally on totality.”8 By grasping the capacities of the snowflake we begin the process of giving-on-and-with through design.

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Liminal architecture can be modelled by emulating the dissipative forms of existing natural systems. Snowflakes exemplify dissipative forms. The efflorescing, crystalline organisation of snowflakes combine innumerable bifurcations responding to the slightest whisper of circumstance. The innumerable variations of frozen ice forms within snowflakes offer an example of a building strategy for liminal space. The variations assure constantly renewing diversity while at the same time pronouncing coherence and clarity, locally balanced through polar symmetry and antisymmetry, in its individual members. The innumerable variations that ice forms within snowflakes offer an example of a building strategy for liminal space. Snowflakes dance against the hardened skins of stalwart living beings, testing their limits and coaxing out conscious growth. Perhaps no form is more sensitive and vulnerable, nor more responsive. The flexibility and fluctuation of the dissipative system is present in the macroscopic view of falling snowflakes.

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Design systems: Grove • Seen in this nuanced way, how does the dis-

sipative form of a snowflake help architects build liminal space? Can snowflakes demonstrate transformed building methods in their seemingly hesitant trembling, vulnerable extensions? Designed for the 2021 Venice Biennale for Architecture, the collaborative project Grove attempted to offer practical answers to these questions, expanding the form-language of natural dissipative forms into a large, public canopy and also into an immersive digital environment. The structure of Grove includes a lace-like overhead canopy containing a centre void. Suspended above an elliptical gathering space the canopy is punctuated by multiple columnar forms containing omnidirectional custom speakers. Occupants can walk freely amidst the columns and gather around the centre. Grove used the paradigms of dissipative structures and diffusion as guides for its design and fabrication. The structures within this project resulted in minimal material consumption – achieved by automated cutting as well as thermal and mechanical forming of expanded arrays of filamentary structures. A hovering filter environment composed of hundreds of thousands of individual laser cut transparent polymer, mylar, glass and expanded polymer elements created diffusive visual boundaries between occupants and the surrounding environment. The organisation of these components was characterised by punctuated oscillation and quasiperiodic geometries with shifting boundaries that fluctuate. The makers of Grove worked by drawing and combining thin sheets and strands of primary materials into strong components, which were then massed together into larger groups. The massed groups were compounded and grouped again, creating interconnected networks. Those actions of combining and building and interweaving can produce technologies and expressive experiences that come close to life itself. Components were designed with reactive, poised dispositions that responded to gravity and shifts in airflow. Trembling and vibrating movement was enhanced and amplified by design that brings materials close to their limit of spanning and stability, creating measured precarity. Flexure and elasticity was retained by voiding out large surfaces and volumes, opening the components for deflection and compliance. Mesh works of relatively long tensile filaments were embedded with small compressive struts, creating tension-integrity networks carrying gentle prestressed forces, creating poise. The design and fabrication of these openwork scaffolds suggest methods for creating full-scale resilient and responsive architecture.

‘Grove’ side view showing cloud and speaker columns, Philip Beesley and the Living Architecture Systems Group, Arsenale, Venice, Italy, 2021. Photo by PBSI.

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MICROBIAL ECOLOGY GROVE: — SYMBIOSIS, OPEN SYSTEMS CO-EXISTENCE, FOR LIVING INTERACTIONS ARCHITECTURE

PHILIP DAVID BERRY BEESLEY

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GROVE: OPEN SYSTEMS FOR LIVING ARCHITECTURE

When you entered the great dark columned hall of the Arsenale, in the distance you could see a glowing oval pool surrounded by islands of clustered sculptural fronds. Lace-like skeletal clouds spiraled upward through those floating, blooming forms. Clouds and islands were concentrated at the centre, moving in different choreographies over the pool. Shimmering light played constantly, like sun edging its way around a copse of trees. As soon as visitors gazed towards the first main chamber of the Arsenale, they were invited by dancing light and the suggestion of rest in the clearing of Grove.

Looking down into the pool, a dream-world opened up. The shifting, whispering world around and above you was projected into the infinite depths of a newly transformed shadow world below. A short, single-channel film projected into the pool depicted a cycle that moved from marine-like lagoons of deep darkness into brilliant light and back into darkness.9 In that depth, the physical environment was transformed by a layer of moving images, becoming a realm of dreams and possibility where plants became living forces and presences implied in the physical elements above transformed into animal and human actors. The interwoven field of living presence constantly transformed itself from fertile life into sterile, desert-like stillness and then into life arising again.

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Forum supports shared gathering • The space of Grove provided a tangible public forum, designed for free assembly and informal gathering. The clearing at the centre of Grove was focused by a projection directed into a curved, pool-like oval screen set into the floor. The pool was bordered by a swell within the floor surface that invited lounging and relaxing along its edge. The incurving edge of the pool created a threshold where viewers gathered, assembling informally and sharing the experience of the immersive space. Around that centre, viewers walked freely amidst the columns, drawing close to each multi-channel speaker in turn to hear their individual emanating whispers, a composition determined by their oscillation throughout the space. Standing and gazing down toward the pool, or reclining and looking upward, you looked into a sky of interwoven clouds and miniature islands. When you reached the pool, hanging transparent fronds encrusted with thousands of teardrop-shaped liquid-filled glass vessels surrounded you, each holding crystalline synthetic cells within their clear liquids.

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Interwoven components create resilient space • The work followed a conception of architecture that extends outward and inward from boundaries, encouraging crossing and passage. Outward: tendrils and plumes interweave with surrounding layers of air. Clusters of laser-cut translucent polymer fronds were arranged by grouping and bundling their angled geometries around close-­ fitting inner sheath structures. Cantilevered resilient stays were inserted and arrays of individual impact-resistant acrylic chevron links supporting these bundles were chained together with elastic joints to form a diagrid of corrugated mesh with diffusive, viscous performance, permitting outward extensions. Leaf-like tines within each frond gently fluttered and stirred, responding to gentle air movements created by the movements of viewers.

Like the geometric systems that result in innumerable variations within natural snowflakes, a ‘quasiperiodic’ fluctuating geometry organised the billowing skeletal membranes floating above the ground level of Grove. The nested spiral fabric membrane was highly elastic, accommodating large displacements within its hung tentwork placement. This elastic performance was dynamic, creating infinitesimally varying stretching and contracting motions in response to air movements within the hall and ­amplifying increments of pressure produced within the individual comb-cell filters. Skeletal hexagonal frames followed tiled arrangements harmonised with the inner cores. Large sections of the outer membrane showed additional chiral organisation. In these sections, each tile contained a rotated core encircled by alternating upward and lower-reaching flexible curved arms, creating voided helical rosettes that spiral around their centre. Matching triangular couplers contained similar spiraling arms. Each arm of these curved skeletons carried a curving frond with extended combs of individual needle-shaped mylar filaments. Each needle form was extended close to its cantilevered span limit, reacting with trembling vibrations to slight shifts in the surrounding atmosphere created by mechanical and human produced air movement. Individual filaments followed contractions latent within the lower sides of sheet-formed polyester material, creating pronounced concave profiles. Intersecting combs that follow these profiles created a toothed valving structure which tended to close against downward drafts of air while opening and amplifying upward currents. The composite structure performed as a gentle mechanical pump, amplifying upward convection. Supporting this turf-like interwoven layer, the linked spring skeletal structure followed a tracery of oscillating filaments whose continuous undulating paths extend throughout the entire canopy.

GROVE: OPEN SYSTEMS FOR LIVING ARCHITECTURE

‘Grove’ worm’s eye view of cloud, Philip Beesley and the Living Architecture Systems Group, Arsenale, Venice, Italy, 2021. Photo by Riccardo Vecchi & PBSI.

‘Grove’ detailed view showing cloud, projection pool and speaker field, Philip Beesley and the Living Architecture Systems Group, Arsenale, Venice, Italy, 2021. Photo by Riccardo Vecchi & PBSI.

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GROVE: OPEN SYSTEMS FOR LIVING ARCHITECTURE

Climate change • Grove addressed climate change by demonstrating

how architecture can help to heal the environment. The construction of Grove drew its forms from the kind of fertile relationships that we can see in a natural wetland that lines a river. Instead of unintended destructive forces that come from sealed walls, resilient interwoven components can gently break down, absorb and dissipate, similar to the forces of water and air, which allows benign forces through and between separate areas while at the same time calming them. That doesn’t mean, however, that we need to lay ourselves completely open, uncontrolled and vulnerable. Instead, Grove proposed a kind of regeneration that contrasts with the hard, closed surfaces of traditional urban building, while still offering shelter and sanctuary. Grove’s dissipative adaptation follows Prigogine’s innovative view that multiple layered systems can continually reorganise and refresh themselves by shedding forces, relaxing and interconnecting with the surrounding world. This is far from the view that says we need to concentrate our boundaries and close ourselves off from the world. Instead, it is by encouraging sensitive interactions and by pursuing precarious gentle and unapologetically fragile dimensions of work that we can make a strong contribution. It is in this kind of careful detailing, creating resilience and harmony, that things can connect and complement and balance each other.

Grove was a philosophical and physical essay that meditates on how thresholds can be open. Grove crossed both social and natural worlds in demonstrating how thresholds can heal and regenerate. It demonstrated a model of mutual sharing. The openings within Grove offered resilient layers that handled the widest possible range of forces. In this fundamentally insecure time, there is a natural human tendency

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Living architecture • Grove is a prototype of ‘living architecture’ that works with nature by interconnecting and embracing the myriad forces of the physical world. When people experienced Grove, they could feel some of the sensations they do walking through a deep twilight forest, seeing the myriad of tiny organisms, plant growths, animals and the memory of other people that have passed there. The sense that we are not alone and that space is not empty but rather full of possibility, was a fundamental sensation that the Grove project intended to impart. The message of this work was that we are deeply interconnected with the animate and inanimate world and we should feel motivated and hopeful by this fact. When we look at life as something that connects us all, we can begin to see how our world can heal, full of renewed possibility.

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towards self-protection. This can translate into a desire to build the strongest possible walls and boundaries to create sanctuaries. Traditional architecture has been preoccupied with classical values that are concerned with making a maximum of individual territory within cities. Classical order emphasises differences between the inside and outside of space, sorting between the groups that belong within and leaving the others ‘outside’. Walls can make us feel safe. Yet, boundaries that create sheltering order can be distorted by fear. Closed boundaries can polarise us, creating unnecessary conflict. The same walls that apparently protect us can amplify our problems. Instead of closed walls, Grove offered a multitude of gentle lace-like filtering layers gathered together, interweaving and interconnecting. By creating expanded, open thresholds, we design with nature. We need generous ways to connect with one another and with the larger world that lies beyond human-centred circles. We need to foster natural flows that promote growth and regeneration amongst plant, animal and mineral worlds. In prototyping ‘living architecture’ we move past the opaque and closed and the whole system of its design is reliant on the gesture of giving-on-and-with. In the example of Grove this gesture opened into a forest-like glade that invited visitors to think about porous, fragile ways of sociality and living-within an expanded world enfolding both mineral and living beings. The intimate dimensions implied by these experimental works imply form-languages for designing buildings. Instead of valuing resistance and closure, new form-languages for architecture could foster mutual relationships and maximum interaction; they are in this sense ever-opening. ‘Living architecture’ is a suggestion of totality, one of inclusion that is brimming with new forms of life. ● 1. Guarantyne, G. (2021) “Guy Guarantyne on Édouard Glissant”, Archipelago. Isolarii press: New York 2. Vitruvius Pollio, M. (c. 30–15 BCE) De Architectura. 3. Beesley, P. “Dissipative Models: Notes toward Design Method”, in Paradigms in Computing: Making, Machines and Models for Design Agency in Architecture, eds. D. Gerber & M. Ibañez (eds.) New York, NY: eVolo. pp. 24–34. 4. England, J. (2015) Dissipative Adaptation in Driven Self-Assembly, Nature Nanotechnology, 10(11):919–923. 5. Crist, C. P. & Roundtree, K. (2006) Humanity in the Web of Life, Environmental Ethics, 28(2): 185–200. 6. Addington, D. M. and Schodek, D. (2004) Smart Materials and Technologies: For the Architecture and Design Professions. Amsterdam & Boston, MA: Elsevier/Architectural Press. 7. Glissant, E. (2010) Poetics of Relation Trans. Betsy Wing. University of Michigan Press: Chicago. 8. Ibid. 9. The film projected within the Grove installation was entitled “Grove Cradle”, directed by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones, with sound composed by Salvador Breed.

Rethinking the Common

Alex Arteaga

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“Environments are always for those to whom experi irreducible specificity.”

from Its Biological Roots

ys environments ience them in their

RETHINKING THE COMMON FROM ITS BIOLOGICAL ROOTS

The project Co-corporeality has generated a complex research ­environment facilitating perception, imagination and reflection on funda­ mental questions related to life and our actions of dwelling, designing and building habitats. To be more precise, Co-corporeality enables the reassessment of dwelling, designing and building as activities rooted in our biological existence and simultaneously, the reassessment of the performance of these practices in order to rethink, in a transformative way, our lives as living systems among living systems. In this text, I inhabit this environment to inquire, briefly and speculatively, into seven specific and interrelated issues which build into one another: organic matter, communication, construction, material, environment, ­anthropocentrism and aesthetic action / aesthetic cognition. The selection of these subject matters and the way to address them results from the encounter between this research project and my own exploratory ­trajectory – a path shaped by the intertwined performance of certain aesthetic and conceptual practices in the framework of phenomenology and the enactive approach to cognition. The thoughts that I formulate in the following lines – neither as a biologist, nor as a philosopher or as an architect but as an artist researcher – do not aim at achieving conclusions but rather at feeding the growing body of research brought to life through this project. Organic matter • Two different features operatively characterise this kind

A second constitutive feature of organic matter is its intrinsic capacity for self-organisation, that is, its agency of generating structures spontaneously through its own dynamics. A capacity that leads, on the one hand, to generate closures – closed systemic units – and, on the other hand, to expand by progressively increasing the structural complexity: from the cell to the tissue, to the organ, to the organism. The systemic operativity of certain closures gives rise to an astonishing emerging dynamic: ‘­autopoiesis’, a specific variety of self-organisation of what we call ‘life’, embodied in what we call ‘living systems’.

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of substance which, from a chemical point of view, is discriminated from inorganic matter simply by the presence of one component: carbon. The first characteristic is fragility. Organic matter is, fundamentally, soft, delicate, ductile, lithe, easily breakable and destructible – even if it adopts a hard state as in the case of bones or shells. Therefore organic matter is essentially vulnerable. It is in constant peril of breaking apart, of disintegrating, of losing its integrity, its own status as matter.

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Autopoiesis, however, does not occur in a void. It ‘takes place’, it is situated. It requires a complementary agency – ‘structural coupling’ – to embody the structures that it enables and that facilitate its generative dynamics. Living systems are structurally embedded in their surroundings and therefore they constitute extensive systems that incorporate inorganic matter in the dynamics of the living. The convergence of autopoiesis and structural coupling enables the emergence of phenomenal life (the kind of conscious life that at least we humans live) and thus, of ‘selves’ and ‘worlds’ in a constant relation of mutual conditioning – a relation of ‘communication’. Moved by the reciprocity between its own fragility and its self-­ organising agency, organic matter acquires resiliency, that is, the capacity that allows living systems to negotiate, inhabit and sustain without (hopefully) ever negating their own vulnerability. Communication • Bringing this word back to its etymological roots – “to

make common” – communication can be understood not as the transmission of information from one entity to another but as making together a togetherness. Togetherness, thus simultaneously as enabling conditions for and as outcome of itself. Accordingly, if the mentioned variety of action – ‘making’ – is displaced toward another model more adequate for the collective dynamics and results (‘to result’, according to its etymology: “to spring forward” is better in this context than ‘to produce’: “to bring forth or to the outside”) – communication can be conceived as the emergence of the common through the common. Communication, thus, as the performance of the common. To understand the common in this way implies a departure from the common in order to achieve a transformed common. An apparent paradox that disappears when observing the dynamics of what we call ‘life’, that is, observing the autopoietic agency of living systems realised by virtue of their skill of structurally coupling with their surroundings. Or, formulated phenomenologically, according to the expression of these dynamics: selves coming to be due to the arising of worlds – worlds enabled by the arising of those selves to whom these worlds appear. The common, thus, not only not in contradiction to any manifestation of individuality but as an enabling condition, as a necessary substrate of any form of self-affirmation.

RETHINKING THE COMMON FROM ITS BIOLOGICAL ROOTS

The common, therefore, not as construction but, firstly as the recognition of its fundamental presence before any reflection on the common may take place and secondly, as an emergent transformation of the already present common by virtue of its own performance. Construction • The logic that connects the self-organising agency of organic matter

Material • The disruption of categorical differentiations and of the hierarchies established between categories that results from the primacy of ‘matter’ and ‘organisation’ in a logic of co-emergence questions the validity of the traditional concept of ‘material’ in architecture. This shift results evident in the case of mobilising organic matter as ‘material of construction’. In this context, the disruption of the difference between ‘maker’, the means for ‘making’ and the ‘made’ is obvious and increases the suggested destabilisation of the concept and practices of construction reinforcing, as argued, the communicative component – the ‘con-’ of ‘construction’. The concept of ‘material’ loses its sedimented strength and consequently can either be discarded in favour of a diversified notion of ‘matter’, or it can be displaced and understood as the focal point of the conjunction of the agencies of the different varieties of matter at work. Accordingly, ‘habitability’ or more specifically ‘a sustainable habitat’ or ‘the feeling of protection’ or ‘a sense of orientation’ can become ‘materials’ of the systemic communication between varieties of matter – ‘materials’ of a redefined ‘construction’ – that is, their common subject-matter. Furthermore, these subject-matters, among many others, can be understood as leading vectors of the emerging environments that may appear conditioned by the arising constructs.

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with the emergence of the common can be mobilised to destabilise the concept of ‘construction’ – returning again to the etymology: “piling up together”. This destabilisation aims, as in the case of communication, at situating this concept and the practices that realise it in the framework of the systems of co-emergence instead of responding to the mono-causal dynamics of production. Accordingly, and without negating moments of ‘making’ – of executing predefined plans and procedures – construction can be understood, fundamentally, as a variety of communication or, more specifically, as the emergence of constructs as the spontaneous organisation of matter out of the communication between different forms of differently organised matter. Different forms of organisation structure different varieties of matter through communication, arising and mutually conditioning one another exclusively through different forms of contact between matter – matter that enables the emergence of matter, which in turn constrains the matter that makes possible its coming to be.

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Environment • The next concept that can be destabilised by the power of

life’s intrinsic logic – of the ecology – is the concept of ‘environment’. This new disruption hinders the qualification of ‘environment’ as ‘built’. In a concatenation of systems of emergence by virtue of which emergent qualities or artefacts become enabling conditions for new emergences, environments – understood as topological specifications of ‘worlds’ – arise out of the specific ways in which constructs (as suggested: artefacts emerging out of communication between matter) and inhabitants communicate. In this sense, environments could be understood as second-order emerging entities embedded and actively participating in living systems – systems organised by the agencies of the living and as argued, not limited to organic matter. Although both environments and constructions can be conceived as emergent entities, one basic trait differentiates them: their forms of presence or, more particularly, the specificities of their tangibility. Environments, unlike constructions, are not artefacts. They are not clearly contoured units offering the tactile resistance of matter. They are not objects and, therefore, they elude the status of phenomenon although still participate in the logic of the phenomenal. They do not appear as single appearances but as fragile and dynamic networks of phenomena. Nevertheless, environments and constructions share a basic feature: they constrain the actions of those agents that enable them to emerge. According to this approach, environments are always ‘responsive’ and specify their ‘response’ as the exercise of their transformative agency upon the living systems that simultaneously enabled and inhabit them. Therefore, as components of systems of co-emergence, environments are topological sedimentations of the process of sense making and, at the same time, agents in the process of emergence of sense, which, obviously, is neither ‘made’ nor exclusively ‘human’. Anthropocentrism • Humans can only inhabit human environments in the

same way that bacteria can only dwell in bacterial environments. According to the idea of autopoiesis and, furthermore, to the enactive approach, this is an inalterable conclusion derived from the logic of emergence of environments for those who inhabit them, meaning simultaneously, those to whom they appear and who enable their arising. The environment of a living unit is the phenomenal presence of its surroundings for this living

RETHINKING THE COMMON FROM ITS BIOLOGICAL ROOTS

unit. In other words, the specific form, sense and in some cases meaning that the unit’s surroundings acquire for this unit. Form, sense and meaning appear exclusively by virtue of the unit’s specific structure, that is, the specific realisation of its intrinsic form of organisation as its structure and the unfolding of the structural coupling between the unit and its surroundings. This is the fundamental and inescapable reason why humans, bacteria or orchids inhabit human, bacterial or orchideal environments: environments are always environments for those to whom experience them in their irreducible specificity, highly conditioned by the specificity of the experiencer’s structure. On this basis, the way to realise the acutely necessary decentralisation of humans in the framework of common life on our (so far only) planet cannot be the negation of the humanity of the human but the affirmation of the not exclusively human configuration of human living systems. Furthermore, it is necessary to reconsider and diversify the ways in which humans realise structural coupling in their surroundings, that is, their communication with the human and non-human components of their environments. Summarising: humans inhabit human environments that are not only human. In technical terms: the way toward a de-anthropomorphisation of human existence cannot be realised by negating the fundamental agency of autopoiesis but by recognizing the equally constitutive agency of structural coupling and, in this framework, make use of a very human trait: its enormous plasticity. Humans can decide, always within the limits of their own structure, how to behave  –  how to act, how to interact.

ibly mysterious otherness, endowed with the agency of transforming us and our (common) environment, is constitutive to (human) life. The other – a radical other: the non-human (‘radical’ because its otherness stems from its biological or its even deeper chemical roots) – shows itself by acting, by unfolding its agencies in contact with us. Therefore, it is only in the framework of actions-in-contact and, more specifically, through certain forms of action, that the other and the common can be recognised. Furthermore, it is through particular varieties of action that the transformative power of the other and the common can unfold and, consequently, transform the common and those who participate in it.

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Aesthetic action / aesthetic cognition • Otherness, an irreduc-

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Aesthetic action, a specific form of (at least human) behaviour, of mobilisation of its agent’s organic skills, enables a variety of communication through which otherness can manifest qua otherness, that is, without being assimilated to the already known – to what is similar to oneself. Aesthetic action allows for inhabiting a radically diverse common without any tendency of colonising the other – of annihilating it (as other). Aesthetic action, as a spontaneously respectful form of touch, facilitates the emergence of a non-hierarchical field of shared agencies in which each agent can actualise its skills in a highly receptive way – acting porously like a highly sensitive musician able to incorporate in each moment of sound production the action of listening, like an improviser moving in touch with other bodies activating in each movement the ability of noticing the other’s move. Aesthetic action as a variety of attentive acting enabled by the suspension of target-oriented and will-based actions and, consequently, by a neutralisation of the perception of the other as means for the own goals. As a form of acting enabled by the intensified mobilisation of sensorimotor and emotional skills that facilitates to become aware of the emerging common and, furthermore, of its transformation by virtue of its own intrinsic dynamics instead of due to the control of one part. Aesthetic action as a con-tingently re-sponsive, re-ceptive variety of action – as a way to ‘pledge back’, to ‘take back’ without grasping but maintaining a subtle ‘common touch’. As a necessary variety of unfolding human skills in order to decentralise the human, to facilitate distributed fields of actions – to recognise the decentralised and distributed dynamics of life. Aesthetic cognition – the variety of participation in the ­processes of emergence of sense enabled by acting aesthetically – as an adaptive variety of transformative action that allows, simultaneously, to contribute to the transformation of open-ended processes of sense-­ making emerging out of the communicative dynamics of the common and to cognise, to become aware – to realise, meaning at the same time doing and understanding – the arising of radically new selves and worlds. ●

PROFESSOR OF REGENERATIVE ARCHITECTURE, DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE, KU LEUVEN, BELGIUM

Rachel Armstrong

“The old world is dying regime struggles to be Now is the time for Co-

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Towards a More-Than-H

Quo Vadis?

and the new born. -Corporeality.”

uman World

QUO VADIS? TOWARDS A MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD

The old world is dying and the new regime struggles to be born. Now is the time for Co-Corporeality. Living better with nature • co-corporeality invokes attitudes that have been around since the Industrial Revolution; through drawing on emotion and imagination, the Romantics asked how we can live better with nature. Catalysing the modern environmental movement through technical alternatives, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring drew attention to wide-scale ecological disruption1 caused by those machines and processes that comprised human development, inviting us to consider a new relationship with the living world. Framed by systems thinking, cybernetics or “the art of steering”, persuasively provided an implementable framework to navigate the nonlinear behaviours that typify ecosystems – where feedback and emergence underpinned the complexity of the living systems. Forming the basis for James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia Hypothesis,2 the concept of ecosystems stepped forth as the technical and social framework in which emerging debates about the living world were framed. The hypothesis was rejected by Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists, on the basis that the Earth was not produced by natural selection and could not be regarded as a living thing.3 Yet, the rich interaction of goals, predictions, actions, feedback and responses of the planetary system, expanded thoughts about the relations that made up the living world through loops of circular causality, or feedback, across discontinuous media. Although cybernetic principles were often demonstrated through machine systems composed of inert parts (by Stafford Beer in his pond ecology experiments4 and Gordon Pask through electrochemical devices5) these adaptive material platforms promised the emergence of systems that could surprise us but were limited by their technical and material toolsets.

of biotechnology offered a dynamic new set of solutions to material challenges ranging from the body to the environment. Enabled by late 20th century insights, applied biological processes, which MIT’s

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Biotechnological revolution • In the 1970s, the advent

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Tom Knight has described as the nanotech that works,6 were deployed to generate a diverse range of products. Laboratories equipped with gene-­splicing enzymes could decipher the entire genetic composition of organisms and change the function of individual cells. Revolutions in medical treatments included ­tissue regeneration, bioprinting, stem cell research and the development of biosensors. ­Marking a transition towards a manufacturing paradigm whose ­impacts are more closely aligned with natural systems, the environmental impacts of biotechnologies offered a new portfolio of opportunities where, for example, natural resources could be used to generate circular economy-based systems with zero-waste policies. New ways of addressing environmental challenges were also possible through the development of biodegradable bioplastics, ­activated microbial systems and bioenergy. In the fields of bioengineering, genetics and molecular biology, a fresh understanding of living systems renders possible new scales of engagement with matter, new tools, new kinds of operations and a qualitatively different relationship with the environment. Substrates were lively, not passive and concepts such as “ ­ circularity” that linked the cycles of life and death indicated the arrival of the age of biotechnology. Despite its ingenuity, biotechnology alone could not provide complete solutions to the challenges we faced, nor could it meet every aspect of our needs. Its portfolio of operations was still very much emerging and the potential it unleashed was only just beginning. Age of convergence • Framed by systems thinking, biotechnology

did not need to act alone but became assimilated into a much-­ expanded platform proposed by Mihail Roco and William Sims Bainbridge in 2001, who formally welcomed the emerging age of convergence. Their science-oriented meeting at the National Science Foundation brought together leaders in science, industry and government in a workshop where they considered how cutting-edge developments in different areas of science could be integrated to achieve the advancement of human capabilities.7

QUO VADIS? TOWARDS A MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD

Appearing to offer an unprecedented understanding and control over the fundamental building blocks of matter, nano-science and nano-­technology provided the framework for an integrated knowledge of matter at all systems levels and with this the need for multidisciplinarity. Facilitated by the convergence of nanotechnology, biomedicine, information technology and cognitive science (NBIC), an era of new knowledge directed towards a radical augmentation of human form and function was promised. The Overview for the first NBIC Convergence Report noted: “Moving forward simultaneously along many of these paths could achieve a golden age that would be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life. Technological convergence could become the framework for human convergence …. The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment. It is hard to find the right metaphor to see a century into the future, but it may be that humanity would become a single, distributed and interconnected ‘brain’ based in new core pathways of society.” 8

More-than-human identities • Noting that advanced technologies made available to us through social systems created a political milieu, Donna Haraway’s 1991 Cyborg Manifesto proposed a new political framework for the existence of ambiguous identities and their intimate relationships with humans.10 These envisioned relationships that could be realised through fiction and lived experience.11 Such cybernetic creatures were hybrids of

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Considered a “New Renaissance”, this concept of convergence was reviewed by Alfred Nordmann for the European Union, whose report entitled Converging Technologies for the European Knowledge Society (CTEKS) highlighted its agenda-setting character and placed a strong emphasis on social and political oversight. Scaling up and converging technologies using exactly the same approaches that caused disequilibrium in the first place could not continue. It was not viable to accept a conception of the same planet described by the Modern Age – a site for plundering resources, conserving wildernesses, colonising indigenous peoples as flora and fauna and Promethean lording over – it required another kind of world built upon profoundly different rules and assumptions. In forging “… a template for trying to start again, from the bottom up, the description of dwelling places …” 9 the frameworks for inhabiting a changing world had to be altered.

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machine and organism. Being products of social reality and cultural narratives where public and bodily reality could be remapped, they provide an imaginative resource for future couplings and modes of existence. The implications of Haraway’s insight were profound: People of the third millennium were not just ­“human” but “more-than-human”, incorporating into their existence a whole range of non-human things. Haraway and the emerging field of post-humanities offered new ways of thinking coupled with associated technical/organic toolsets, capable of navigating an unquiet world. Their approach invoked a qualitatively different relationship with matter, where the environment was no longer background noise for human action, but a powerful actor on the world’s stage. Emerging at thresholds and intersections between disciplines, a de-centred view of the human emerged, preparing the ground for new convergences. Until this point, the human had been the centre of all action and thought in Western philosophy. This time, these disciplinary infiltrations did not only take place in the sciences but through manifold explorations in the arts, humanities and sciences. A number of convergences began to form, for example: organicism via Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s (1901–1972) systems biology;12 biotechnology’s view of cells as molecular machines whose parts could be rationally engineered; to bioart13 which raised questions about identity and invited an ethics of practice for an age of the manipulation of living things. Agentised matter • Emerging at the turn of the millennium, new materialism drew

these parallel lines of thought concerning the agency of matter beyond its human relations into proximity14 – not as a unifying theory but as a polyphony of voices that emanated from eco-feminism, philosophy, science studies, post-­humanities and cultural theory. While diverse, they were concordant, sharing important life-promoting principles. For example, Jane Bennett invoked the agency of ­vitalism, as well as the proclivity of matter to form assemblages that possess ‘thing power’.15 Rosi Braidotti looked to Zoë as the generic animating force that flows through lively substances. Without discriminating between biological and other types of bodies, it offered a means through which all agentised matter can form associations with other material systems.16 Karen Barad described the physical intra-actions between molecules as well as their strange quantum effects, which empowered ordinary matter to produce real effects through the chemistry and process of emergence.17 From this fundamentally ethical position, such agentised relations set the scene for multiple and nuanced forms of hybridity, which ­embodied the recalcitrant materiality of the living realm. Marking the possibility of animated materials, technologies and bodies that defied established categories of life, new materialism set them free to act and participate in the living realm, in new and surprising ways.

Fig. 1: Animations powered by microbial ‘data’ from a Microbial Fuel Cell Array, courtesy of ALICE,18 2020.

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MICROBIAL ECOLOGY QUO — VADIS? SYMBIOSIS, TOWARDS CO-EXISTENCE, A MORE-THAN-HUMAN INTERACTIONS WORLD

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1. The Active Living Infrastructure: Controlled Environment (ALICE), is a collaboration between the University of Newcastle, University of the West of England and Translating Nature. This EU funded Innovation Award No. 851246 prototypes the construction of a novel bio-digital interface using Microbial Fuel Cells and augmented reality experience for “living” bricks developed in the Living Architecture project. The live animation is accessible from the ALICE project website: https://alice-interface.eu.

QUO VADIS? TOWARDS A MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD

stepped into this melting pot of possibilities that could establish the identity of cell populations, rather than just single cells. ­Revealing the biodiverse landscapes of microbes all around us, this new science of metagenomics confronted us with just how ­microbial we actually are. Ecosystems of microbes inhabited our bodies and living spaces: around 50% by number of our own body cells were bacterial.19 This Human Microbiome20 inhabited our guts and skin playing a significant role in our welfare. In these transactional spaces, microbial activity: influenced our moods; helped with digestion; formed a first-line immune system and released microbial ‘goods’ like essential vitamins, which we could not make ourselves.21 There was no point thinking we can do without these microbial colonies as they were proven critical for our health. No longer ‘pure’ human bodies but “bodies-­asecosystems”, our newly understood multi-species bodies were made up of a multitude of human and non-human cells,22 sharing entangled histories, situated narratives,23 and their collective well-being. This expanded notion of “self” could not be separated from its ambient microbial milieu, establishing a new reference framework for identification – the Human Holobiont.24 This transactional system, however, was neither fixed nor permanent but depended on how well the constituent agents lived together. Meaningfully coexisting alongside these expansive nonhuman realms required more-than-human modes of communication and de-centring ­human expertise to establish a ‘conversation’ with microbes through the foundation of a parliament of things, where microbes, creatures, rivers, places and peoples could meet to negotiate with each other to establish laws, power structures and mutual respect on their own terms.25 Such a ­conversational Babel required intelligible languages and ways of interacting that could meaningfully translate between radically different systems.26 Creating interfaces for exchange, their chatter did not privilege one over another, but enabled a common understanding to be reached.27 Despite incommensurate challenges of scale and ­medium, molecular biology techniques demonstrated that bacteria use sophisticated chemical signals to communicate in groups by counting their own siblings and when there were enough of them together, their group behaviour was shaped by specific chemical ‘words’. Known as quorum sensing, this complex lexicon enabled bacteria to hold private, secret conversations,

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Our microbial worlds • Scientific advances in genetic technologies

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as well as public ones. Bacteria could also communicate with other species and even act as if they were multicellular, so they could accomplish tasks that were impossible as mere individuals.28 Regarding the capacities of microbes for mobility, proliferation, spatialisation and self-transformation as inspiration in recon­ figuring notions of identity, Myra J. Hird positioned their ­constant negotiations with their surroundings as the foundations of sociability.29 Hird considered the origins of sociable life from the micro-ontological perspectives of microbes. The material nature of microbes and their languages implied the formation of new territories and ways of walking their boundaries that enabled our coexistence.30 While Bruno Latour conceived of the Earth being de-territorialised from its old (human-centric) national borders, microbes had already re-territorialised this space in ways that we could only just see – which were intensified by the ongoing pandemic. The microbial realm started to define ways of navigating the living realm, proposing new ways of organising territory that were implicit in possessing a body through its occupancy of space and the limits of its influence – whether at the skin/membrane, via its ecological relations, or enabled by communications like language or vision. Whether conceived of in terms of networks, assemblages or ­topological enfoldings, human entanglement with microorganisms was a prime example of how relations between diverse ­entities composed or shaped the spaces they shared. Redefining and extending the metaphor of the body into the political realm, Stephanie Fischel examined its role in discussing an increasingly posthuman, globalised world politics. Reframing the concept of the body politic in ways that accommodated greater levels of complexity, she anticipated new configurations for political and social modes of organisation for building a world where all the planet’s inhabitants actively thrived.31 Positioning space as the very terrain and medium of power relations forged by complex, fragile, highly-distributed relations that required constant re-negotiation and careful diplomacy, the management of these encounters required a practice of the arts of (chemical) non­ human languages, so that “conversations” could be held with the microbial realm with the aim of forging new alliances capable of (re)making liveable worlds.32

QUO VADIS? TOWARDS A MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD

“Is this Tomorrow?” (2019) used the Whitechapel Gallery’s landmark exhibition ‘This Is Tomorrow’ (1956) as its model, which featured 37 British architects, painters and sculptors – including Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and Peter Smithson – working collaboratively in small groups. This group show featured experimental propositions from some of today’s leading architects and artists responding to twenty-first century challenges to propose our place in the technological world of tomorrow. ‘999 years 13 sqm (the future belongs to ghosts)’ proposed a posthuman apartment occupied only by microbes operating a Microbial Fuel Cell array that called forth digital ghosts from the human past, present and future.

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Fig. 2: 999 years 13 sqm (the future belongs to ghosts), installation by Cecile B. Evans and Rachel Armstrong, for the Whitechapel Gallery Is This Tomorrow? group show, 2019.33

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Strengthening and extending the role of design-led research •

Co-­Corporeality builds on this legacy and long-standing synthesis to reposition the human within a much-expanded realm of influence within a more-than-human world, as in Gwyneth Jones’ novel The Universe of Things, which conjures a glimpse of the possible futures invoked by new alliances: They built things with bacteria, as the mechanic understood it. Bacteria which were themselves traceable to the aliens’ own intestinal flora, infecting everything: every tool and piece of furniture, even the massive shell of their ship world … This oozed drop of self, ­attached to his hand, would not be parted from him if he dropped it. Tiny strings, strands of living slime, would cling and join them still. The air he breathed was full of self, of human substance.34 Featuring experiments that reconfigure relationships between our expanded bodies and reinvigorated world, Co-Corporeality ­negotiates new terms of existence whose outcomes remain open-­ ended. Using twenty-first century technology to contextualise these Western expressions of animism spotlights an age of “living” technologies that – like Haraway’s “cyborg” – do not meaningfully differentiate between technology and organism, but express irreducible blends of human, microbe, machine and artificial intelligence that are constantly probing and (re)making their worlds. Participants are therefore both producers and translators of contexts, morphing their practices into approaches that actively participate in ecological events. Exceeding the production of responses instrumental to specific challenges, they explore new kinds of communication via the manifestation of epistemic things that produce present and ­future knowledge, which develops along with the living realm. Going ­beyond innovation, Co-Corporeality suggests whole new ways of living by negotiating our terms of existence, which include: ethics, synthesis, legitimisation and valorisation. Ethics • The importance of establishing an ethics for working with

microbes – to establish the appropriate frameworks for collaboration, care, consequence and decision making – cannot be overstated. Ethics is the system of moral principles that affect how we make decisions and enables our actions to be concordant with a culture of life. Constantly it is shaping our imaginaries, asserting our values, informing our decisions, developing our concepts, challenging our

QUO VADIS? TOWARDS A MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD

assumptions and establishing new rituals of living. Receiving the world differently through altered value frameworks is not confined to seeing facts, but is obtained by appreciating the nascent expressiveness of an environment that has not already presupposed an outcome. And so, the relationship between human and microbe remains open to sense-making: To experience the texture of the world ‘without discrimination’ is not ­indifference … It is to pay equal attention to the full range of life’s texturing complexity, with an entranced and unhierarchised commitment to the way in which the organic and the inorganic, colour, sound, smell and rhythm, perception and emotion, intensely interweave into the ‘aroundness’ of a textured world, alive with difference. It is to experience the fullness of a dance of attention.35 Synthesis • “Living” agents like microbes generate open textured concepts

Legitimisation • The multitudinous outcomes, principles, values, alterbiopolitics,37 and contexts of the living realm are validated and socialised through legitimisation frameworks, which require organising devices and conventions for establishing fairly negotiated exchanges between morethan-human agents that we can no longer ignore. Infiltrated, contaminated, changed and implicated, we have fallen from our self-appointed position at the apex of the pyramid of life and we don’t like where we’ve landed. This crisis in self-identification is not limited to individuals but is species-wide and to date, the words do not yet exist that fully convey the sense of confusion and loss that our mutated relationship with the planet in the throes of ecocide has brought. These nascent legitimisation frameworks are rewriting the story of life and they may: alter our ideological values and beliefs, define problems, diagnose causes; suggest solutions through the work of problem-identification; make claims, establish attribution; delineate boundaries, create counter-frames, make contracts,

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that generate heterogeneous, diverse outcomes that are always ‘becoming’, constantly transgressing their presumed limits and intermingling with each other. Being alive possesses transformational potency with “unfinished” qualities and epistemological creativity. Constantly testing the boundaries of possibility, these iterative processes are never complete – as that is the definition of death. Designers must resist definitive descriptions and attempts to prescribe or preclude their nature.36 Expressed through everyday rituals, habits and practices the synthesis that arises from these negotiations between agentised bodies comprise what it “actually” means to be a living entity.

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amplify and construct identity-forming vocabularies or discourses. The kinds of changes this validation process invites are still emerging and new knowledge instruments are needed for developing the necessary ecological approaches that can help us reach escape velocity from a­ nthropocentrism’s gravitational pull. Valorisation • If we are to successfully reconstitute our world through our

inhabitation of it, then we must make new meanings, propose different forms of knowledge, establish alternative economic frameworks and invent rituals for haunting spaces that enable persistence, change and sustained, creative uptake. We must also recognise our own monstrous composition, which is derived from many ancient and present nonhumans. Only when we have accepted our irreducibly complex and non-innocent nature may we ask the right questions, design the right experiments, pay close attention and give care to those lively agents that, like microbes, create the difficulties which make our world liveable. By giving more weight to environmental agendas that promote the overall enlivening of our planet, we can observe our situation from multiple, potentially conflicting perspectives and use them to propose realisable, alternative futures. Towards a more-than-human world • At a time of climate emergency and wide-

spread ecocide, artistic and design-led practices should not be familiar, or comfortable, as they must challenge our fundamental relationships with the living realm. co-corporeality does more than evaluate our bodies, relationships, interests and environments, but also seeks to co-construct values, develop rituals, engage the imagination, create new types of inhabitable multi-species spaces and challenge the accepted values of life at all levels. Such a transition, however, cannot be realised by humans alone. More-thanhuman centred practices are at the foundations of co-corporeality’s ecological values, which reassesses our understanding of ‘life’ in all its manifestations. If we are to catalyse the ordering of the world’s systems in ways that co-create new types of inhabitable multi-species environments which promote the mutual thriving of all species towards biodiversity, then we are also proposing a life beyond our present understanding of ‘human’ development. Such radical inclusivity invokes systems that extend beyond our own relevance and will inevitably bring about profound change in our descendants. Exactly what kind of life-promoting difficulties future humans will experience, is an evolutionary journey upon which we are about to embark. ●

QUO VADIS? TOWARDS A MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD

Fig. 3: Living Wall, a microbial holobiont courtesy of the Living Architecture project, 2019.38

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The Living Architecture project is a 6-partner project funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under EU Grant Agreement no. 686585. It brought together experts from the universities of Newcastle, UK; the West of England (UWE Bristol); Trento, Italy; the Spanish National Research Council; LIQUIFER Systems Group, Austria; and Explora Biotech, Venice, Italy. Proposing a new infrastructure for our homes and workspaces, it uses a strategically coordinated system of microbes that are housed in specific bioreactors. Taking the form of a freestanding, next-generation, selectively programmable bioreactor, each type of microbial ‘building block’ possesses a specific ‘metabolism’, or capacity to transform one set of substrates into another. When they are sequenced spatially, the waste products of one system can become the starting point for another. Through the configuration of both microbial ‘programmes’ (wild type and ‘synthetic’ organisms) and bioreactor sequencing, particular kinds of work can be carried out. Using our own metabolic activities as a starting point (consuming resources, producing waste matter, moving around), the bioreactor complex transforms our liquid wastes (urine, grey water) into useful products (cleaned water, electricity, biomolecules) as well as removing pollutants (nitrous gases)— bringing together microbial and human worlds as a holobiont.

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1. Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2. Lovelock, J.E. and Margulis, L. (1974). Atmo­ spheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: The Gaia hypothesis. Tellus, 26(1):2–10. 3. Dawkins, R. (1999). The extended phenotype: the long reach of the gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 235. 4. Pickering, A. (2010). The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 5. Bird, J. and Di Paolo, E. (2008). Gordon Pask His Maverick Machines. In: P. Husbands, O. Holland & M. Wheeler (eds.) The Mechanical Mind in History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 6. Jones, R. (2006). What can biology teach us? Nature Nanotechnology. 1:85–86 7. Roco, M.C. & Bainbridge, W.S. (eds.) (2002). Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, NSF-DOC Report, June 2002, Arlington,VA, US. 8. Ibid. 9. Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 97. 10 Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In: D. Haraway (ed). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; Routledge, pp. 149–181. 11. Ibid. 12. Von Bertalanffy, L. (1950). An outline of general systems theory. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1:134–165. 13. Hauser, J. (2016). Biomediality and Art. In: I. Hediger and J. Scott (eds). Recomposing Art and Science. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 201–219. 14. Tom Knight. (2003) Idempotent vector design for standard assembly of biobricks. Technical Report, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Synthetic Biology Working Group Reports. 15. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 16. Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. 17. Barad, K. (2014). Deep calls unto deep: Queer inhumanism and matters of justice-to-come. Paper presented at the Drew University Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, Madison, NJ.

19. Sender, R., Fuchs, S., & Milo, R. (2016) Are we really vastly outnumbered? Revisiting the ratio of bacterial to host cells in humans. Cell 164: 337–340. 20. Timmis, K. et al. (2019). The urgent need for microbiology literacy in society. Environmental Microbiology, 21(5):1513–1528.

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18. The Active Living Infrastructure: Controlled Environment (ALICE), is a collaboration between the University of Newcastle, University of the England, and Translating Nature. This EU West of ­ funded Innovation Award No. 851246 prototypes the construction of a novel bio-digital interface using Microbial Fuel Cells and augmented reality experience for “living” bricks developed in the Living Architecture project. The live animation is accessible from the ALICE ­ project website: https:// alice-interface.eu.

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21. Dominguez-Bello, M.G., Godoy-Vitorino, F., Knight, R. & Blaser, M.J. (2018). Role of the microbiome in human development. Gut. 68(6):1108-1114. 22. van de Guchte, M., Blottière, H.M. & Doré, J. (2018). Humans as holobionts: implications for prevention and therapy. Microbiome, 6(81). 23. McFall-Ngai, M. (2017). Noticing Microbial worlds: The postmodern synthesis in biology. In: A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gab and N. Bubandt (eds.). “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 65 24. Fischel, S.R. (2017) The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 25. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 26. The story of the Tower of Babel explains the origins of the multiplicity of languages. God was concerned that humans had blasphemed by building the tower to avoid a second flood, so God brought into existence multiple languages. Thus, humans were divided into linguistic groups, unable to understand one another. 27. The decoding of such impossible conversations invokes the "Babelfish" a term invented by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It referred to a creature which could translate brain waves, and in effect, translate all languages for anyone who had a Babelfish placed in the brain. 28. Miller, M. B. and Bassler, B.L. (2001). Quorum sensing in bacteria. Annual Review of Microbiology, 55:165–199. 29. Clark, N. and Hird, M. (2018). Microontologies and the politics of emergent life. In: Coleman, M. and Agnew, J. (eds). Handbook on the Geographies of Power. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. 30. Walking the boundary, beating the bounds, or perambulating the bounds, is an ancient custom is an ancient custom still observed in parts of England, Wales, and the New England region of the United States, where inhabitants walk the geographic boundaries of their locality for the purpose of maintaining the memory of their precise location. 31. Fischel, S. (2017). The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 32. Hird, M. (2009). The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 33. “Is this Tomorrow?” (2019) used the Whitechapel Gallery’s landmark exhibition This Is Tomorrow (1956) as its model, which featured 37 British architects, painters, and sculptors – including Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and Peter Smithson – working collaboratively in small groups. This group show featured experimental propositions from some of today’s leading architects and artists responding to twenty-first century challenges to propose our place in the technological world of tomorrow. 999 years 13 sqm (the future belongs to ghosts) proposed a posthuman apartment occupied only by microbes operating a Microbial Fuel Cell array that called forth digital ghosts from the human past, present and future. 34. Jones, G. (2020). The Universe of Things. Seattle: Aqueduct Press, pp. 57–58. 35. Manning, E. and Massumi, B. (2014) Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 4. 36. Armstrong, R. (2018), Soft Living Architecture: An Alternative View of Bioinformed Practice, Bloomsbury Academic, London. 37. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 38. The Living Architecture project is a 6-partner project funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under EU Grant Agreement no. 686585, it brought together experts from the universities of Newcastle, UK; the West of England (UWE Bristol); Trento, Italy; the Spanish National Research Council; LIQUIFER Systems Group, Austria; and Explora Biotech, Venice, Italy. Proposing a new infrastructure for our homes and workspaces, it uses a strategically coordinated system of microbes that are housed in specific bioreactors. Taking the form of a freestanding, next-generation, selectively programmable bioreactor each type of microbial ‘building block’ possesses a specific ‘metabolism’, or capacity to transform one set of substrates into another. When they are sequenced spatially, the waste products of one system can become the starting point for another. Through the configuration of both microbial ‘programmes’ (wild type and ‘synthetic’ organisms) and bioreactor sequencing, particular kinds of work can be carried out. Using our own metabolic activities as a starting point (consuming resources, producing waste matter, moving around), the bioreactor complex transforms our liquid wastes (urine, grey water) into useful products (cleaned water, electricity, biomolecules) as well as removing pollutants (nitrous gases)—bringing together microbial and human worlds as a holobiont.

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BIOGRAPHIES LEAD INSTITUTION Institute of Architecture, Universität für angewandte Kunst, Wien PROJECT COORDINATORS Barbara Imhof is an internationally known space architect, design researcher and educator. Her projects deal with spaceflight parameters such as living with limited resources, minimal and transformable spaces, resource-conserving systems; all aspects imperative to sustainability. After Biornametics, GrAB-Growing As building, ‘Co-Corporeality’ is her third FWF-PEEK funded project she is co-leading. She is the co-founder and co-managing director of LIQUIFER – Vienna – Bremen, an interdisciplinary team comprising engineers, architects, designers and scientists. She has also been teaching at renowned institutes worldwide, for over 20 years. Educated in Vienna (MArch, University of Applied Arts Vienna, studio Wolf Prix), London and Los Angeles, Barbara also holds an MA in Space Studies and a PhD in Architecture. Daniela Mitterberger is an architect and researcher with a strong interest in new media, the relationship between Human/ Body within digital fabrication and emerging technologies. She is co-founder and director of MAEID Büro für Architektur und transmediale Kunst, a multidisciplinary architecture practice based in Vienna. Currently, Daniela is a Ph.D. researcher and A&T Ph.D. Fellow at ETH Zürich at Gramazio Kohler Research, focusing on intuition in digital design and robotic fabrication. Previously she was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne (MSD), ETH Zürich, the Leopold-Franzens University Innsbruck and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been recognised with several awards and has been internationally exhibited including Venice Biennale 2021, Seoul Biennale 2021, Ars Electronica Linz, Melbourne Triennial, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and HdA Graz. Tiziano Derme is an architect and media artist interested in the relationship between architectural design, emergent materials and biotechnologies within digital and robotic fabrication. He is a Ph.D. researcher at the Chair for Digital Building Technologies (dbt), Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. Previously he was an Assistant Professor at University of Innsbruck. His research and work have been acknowledged with numerous grants and exhibited in various galleries, events and institutions such as the Biennale of Venice, Seoul Biennale, Ars Electronica, Melbourne Triennale.Tiziano is the co-founder and director of MAEID Büro für Architektur und transmediale Kunst, a transdisciplinary design practice based in Vienna. PROJECT CORE TEAM Damjan Minovski studied Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Studio Wolf Prix. He was a teaching assistant at Studio Hani Rashid focussing on programming, rapid prototyping and robotic manufacturing before teaching at the University of Innsbruck and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He has been part of a number of large scale architectural collaborations including SeMF and GrAB and has collaborated as part of 2MVD with Valerie Messini since 2017. His work includes research in physical prototyping applied to living and performative architecture as well as the production of architectural visualisations. In ‘Co-Corporeality’ Damjan was responsible for the design and construction of the CNC machines, including the ‘E-feed/er’ and the feeding machines for the different bacterial strains. Xavier Madden is an architecture Masters student at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and has previously studied in London, Brussels and Melbourne, where he completed his Bachelor of Architecture at RMIT University. He is interested in interdisciplinary design and supports the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project with design of/for experimental materials and construction techniques. Nathaniel Loretz is an architecture Masters student at Studio Diaz Moreno Garcia Grinda at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and previously completed his Bachelor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He is interested in interdisciplinary research, art and architecture and supports the project with design work, 3D modelling, 3D printing and hands-on work. Patricia Tibu is a Masters student at the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She

supports the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project with 3D modelling and printing and experiments in the Angewandte project’s biolab. Kyle Peter Koops is currently undertaking his Masters with Studio Lynn at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Originally from Wales, his most recent professional work revolved around the design of specialist medical spaces for a studio in London where he worked for 3 years and continues to consult independently. He has a personal interest in expanding the architectural field to incorporate technologies from other industries and favours adaptation of our existing built environment over new construction. His involvement in the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project was diverse as he contributed to the construction of the lab, experiments and concept proposals. Waltraut Hoheneder is an architect and design researcher with a diverse educational background. She graduated in Commercial Sciences from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, as well as in Architecture from the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Studio Wolf Prix. As co-owner and co-managing director of LIQUIFER Systems Group, she has developed expertise in numerous European research and development projects which have had a focus on adaptive habitat design, biomimetics and regenerative resource management scenarios. She was a core team member in the Biornametics (PEEK-FWF 2010–2013) and GrAB (PEEK-FWF 2013–2016) projects at the Angewandte, Vienna. Within ‘Co-Corporeality’ Waltraut contributed to research and concept development for systems design that integrated microbial life forms. Jennifer Cunningham is a design researcher, writer and editor based in Vienna. With a Masters in material culture and design anthropology from UCL, London, Jennifer writes about materials, sustainable design practices and the relationships between makers, their methods and materials. She has published academic work with Springer and The Design Journal and is a frequent contributor to MATTO Magazine. During a residency at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris she co-authored Two Months (MATTO Publishing 2021) and has an edited book forthcoming with Parole, Copenhagen (2022). In Vienna she is working with Liquifer Systems Group to develop a monograph of their practice. For the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project Jennifer has been managing editor of the book and assisted with organisation of symposiums and exhibitions. PARTNER INSTITUTIONS Austrian Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) Robert Trappl is head of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Professor Emeritus of Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Brain Research at the Medical University of Vienna, a position he has held for 30 years. He has published more than 180 articles and is co-author and editor or co-editor of 35 books. He has been Editor-in-Chief of two international journals “Applied Artificial Intelligence” and “Cybernetics and Systems”, both published by Taylor and Francis, USA. The most recent FWFfunded projects he headed are “LIDA: Spatial Memory and Navigation in a Physically Embodied Cognitive Architecture” (2013–2016) and “CHARMinG: Character Mining and Generation” (2015–2019). He has been elected a full member of the European Academy for Sciences and Arts. He enjoys life. Martin Gasser is a software developer, researcher and media artist working primarily in the areas of Computer Music and Artificial Intelligence. In the past, he was a researcher at the OFAI in the area of Intelligent Music Processing and a Senior Scientist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna/ Cross-Disciplinary Strategies. He currently is a Senior Developer for MuseScore, working in the area of computerassisted music education and a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In ‘Co-Corporeality’, he contributed to the development of interfaces for multi-modal interaction with micro-bacteria, based on computer vision and machine learning technologies. Institute of Microbiology, University of Innsbruck, Austria Heribert Insam is full professor of Microbiology, Head of the Working Group ‘Microbial Resource Management’ and Speaker of the Research Center for Environmental Research and Biotechnology at the University of Innsbruck. His research areas include soil and compost microbiology, carbon and nutrient cycles, biomethanisation, global change microbiology, molecular ecology and SARS-CoV wastewater epidemiology. He is also co-founder of BioTreaT GmbH and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Applied Soil Ecology. His role in ‘Co-Corporeality’ was to add some spirit to microbial visualisation.

Judith Ascher-Jenull, Senior Scientist at the University of Innsbruck, did her MSc in Microbiology at the University of Innsbruck, her PhD in Agricultural Chemistry at the University of Milan and worked for 15 years as a PostDoc Researcher at the University of Florence. Her research in Molecular Environmental Microbiology is focused on Microbial Resource Management and in particular on the fate of environmental DNA. She is active in the Science Centre project MikrobAlpina-MikroMondo and since 2014 is an Editor-in-Chief of the Applied Soil Ecology journal. In the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project, her focus was on the multiple features of cyanobacteria in terms of light triggered oxygenic photosynthesis, pigmentation patterns and phototaxis. Carolin Garmsiri is studying for her Masters in microbiology at the University of Innsbruck. She graduated with a Bachelors degree in Biology and wrote her thesis within the frame of the FWF ‘Co-Corporeality’ project: ‘Co-Corporeality: Architects in motion – A dimensional choreography under the spotlights of science’. She conducted her work under the guidance of Dr. Judith Ascher-Jenull. For the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project Carolin grew Cyanobacteria and revised different growth parameters to identify the optimal Environment for the strain. Institute of Materials Chemistry, Polymer & Composites Engineering, University of Vienna, Austria Alexander Bismarck is Professor of Materials Chemistry and head of the Institute of Materials Chemistry of the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Vienna. The research interests of his group centre around (renewable) polymer materials and composites with a focus on structuring micro- and nanomaterials across length scales for various applications. Our projects are at the interface of chemistry and materials science and involve both fundamental as well as applied studies. His group seeks interactions with artists and designers, which they find to be both stimulating and challenging. Andreas Mautner studied technical chemistry at TU Wien and Lund University. After receiving his PhD, he moved to Imperial College London as a research associate where he worked for two years on composite and membrane applications of nanocellulose. In 2014 he joined the PaCE Group at the University of Vienna to continue his research into sustainable polymer materials including the development of responsive biological polymers. In 2021 he obtained “Habilitation” in Materials Chemistry at the Institute of Materials Chemistry and Research. His research interests include: Polymer materials, Sustainable polymer (nano)composites, Nanocellulose and Nanochitin. In ‘Co-Corporeality’, he contributed to the development of bacterial (cellulose) cultures and supervised students working on this task. Neptun Yousefi is a PhD student in the Polymer and Engineering Group (PaCE). Her work focuses on structural hierarchical composites for aerospace applications. She has a Master in Materials Chemistry at the University of Vienna. In the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project, she conducted the bacterial cellulose (BC) experiments and the development of BC growth on a structural support. Kathrin Weilard is part of PaCE and a PhD student with a focus on nanocellulose and chitin based materials. She has a Masters in Chemistry from the University of Vienna, Austria and a Bachelor in Chemistry from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany. Kathrin worked alongside Neptun in the development of hydrogels, silicon forms and printing inks as well as in the processes of culturing bacteria for the production of nanocellulose. Anne Zhao is a chemistry masters student at the University of Vienna who works in the Polymer and Engineering Group (PaCE ). In the ‘Co-Corporeality’ project she worked on the development of bacterial cellulose on a structural support. Department of Microbiology and Ecosystem Science, Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science, University of Vienna, Austria David Berry is a Full Professor at the Department of Microbiology and Ecosystem Science, Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science, University of Vienna. His research topics include the function of the intestinal microbiota in health and disease, novel modelling approaches to study microbial communities, development of molecular and isotope-labelling methods for studying uncultivated microorganisms in their natural environment. David is also the director of the Joint Microbiome Facility of the Medical University of Vienna and the University of Vienna and a scientific advisory board member for the Austrian Microbiome

Initiative (AMICI). He supported ‘Co-Corporeality’ with experimental set-ups for microbial communities. Andreas Heberlein is a Masters student of Biotechnology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences BOKU Vienna and supports teaching activities at the Department of Microbiology and Ecosystem Science at the University of Vienna. As part of ‘Co-Corporeality’ Andi supported experimental set-ups utilising E. coli. ADVISORY BOARD Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Regenerative Architecture at the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Belgium, Senior TED Fellow and a Rauschenberg Fellow for the Rising Waters Confab (2016). A pioneer of living architecture, incorporating living technologies into design and construction, her work explores the foundations of a fundamentally living and regenerative architecture that optimises resource use, enables open material transformation and explores new protocols for space-making that enable ongoing adaptation and change. Alex Arteaga is an artist researcher who combines and hybridises aesthetic, phenomenological and enactivist research practises through an inquiry into embodiments, environments and aesthetic cognition. He studied music theory, piano, electronic music, composition and architecture in Barcelona and Berlin and received a PhD in philosophy at the Humboldt University Berlin. He has been visiting professor in different universities and educational centres such as the University of the Arts Helsinki and the Berlin University of the Arts and has developed long-term artistic research projects such as Architecture of Embodiment (www.architecture-embodiment.org) or Contingent Agencies (www.contingentagencies.net). Philip Beesley is a multidisciplinary Canadian artist and architect. Beesley’s research is recognised for its pioneering contributions to the field of responsive interactive architecture. He directs Living Architecture Systems Group (LASG), an international group of researchers and creators. Collaborations with LAS artists, scientists and engineers has led to a diverse array of projects, from haute couture collections to complex electronic systems that can sense, react and learn. He is a professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo and the European Graduate School. His recent work Grove is currently featured at the 2021 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Petra Gruber is an architect with a passion for biology and biomimetic design. She holds a PhD in Biomimetics in Architecture from the Vienna University of Technology in Austria and worked internationally on three continents in inter- and transdisciplinary design, research and education, at the intersection of biology, architecture and art. She is Adjunct Associate Professor for Biodesign at the Biomimicry Research and Innovation Center BRIC at The University of Akron, US, where she founded the Biodesign Lab. Her work on spatial and functional aspects of biological structures for biomimetic innovation in architecture and the built environment has been published widely in books, journals, exhibitions and documentary films and she holds lectures and workshops worldwide. Currently she is a programme manager at FFG, Austrian Research Promotion Agency. Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology who consulted the ‘Co-Corporeality’ group on the conceptual and theoretical grounding of the project and its relation to the notion of microperformativity that he shaped. Hauser is currently a researcher at University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, a distinguished affiliated faculty member at Michigan State University and a researcher and guest lecturer at Danube University Krems, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the University of Innsbruck, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and at École Polytechnique ParisSaclay. At the intersection of media studies, art history and epistemology, he has curated around 30 international exhibitions and festivals.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With thanks to all members of the wider ‘Co-Corporeality’ team as well as Gerald Bast, Rector of the University of Applied Arts Vienna; Alexander Damianisch, Marainna Mondelos and Felipe Duque of Zentrum Fokus Forschung and Baerbel Mueller and Roswitha Janowski-Fritsch of the Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Barbara Imhof, Daniela Mitterberger, Tiziano Derme (Eds.) Co-Corporeality www.cocorporeality.net

The research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): FWF AR 534 in the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK)

University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria www.dieangewandte.at Project Management “Edition Angewandte” on behalf of the University of Applied Arts Vienna: Roswitha Janowski-Fritsch, A-Vienna Content and Production Editor on behalf of the Publisher: Katharina Holas, A-Vienna Managing Editor: Jennifer Cunningham Proofreader: Jo Lakeland Design & Layout: Hannes Mitterberger/Lukas Ullsperger Printing: Holzhausen, die Buchmarke der Gerin Druck GmbH, A-Wolkersdorf Image Credits: All images are credited to the Co-Corporeality team unless otherwise stated. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify the owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Editors’ note: All instances of latin bacterial terms are not italicised in captions due to the chosen font. Co-Corporeality website and identity designed by Andrea Reni. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935974 Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

ISSN 1866-248X ISBN 978-3-0356-2585-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-0356-2588-2 Open Access DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035625882 © 2022 Barbara Imhof, Daniela Mitterberger and Tiziano Derme, published by Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published open access at www.degruyter.com. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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