Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt and his theory of biosemiosis are both beautifully explained in: Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men” (1934), in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, trans. and ed. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), 5–80. The idea of bodily “affordances” can be found in James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
Sutela’s practice has already inspired this author to circulate the neologism symbiontics, a portmanteau that combines the “ontics” of technical philosophy (that which is) with the biological theories of symbiosis developed by Lynn Margulis—in other words, symbiosis-as-that-which-is. So far, the sites in which “symbiontics” has been seeded include Olafur Eliasson: Symbiotic Seeing, Kunsthalle Zurich (2020); Jenna Sutela, NO|NSE|NSE, Trondheim Norway (2020); Caroline A. Jones, “Virions,” Artforum 58, no. 9 (2020): 98–101, 196; Caroline A. Jones, “Symbiontics: a view of present conditions from a place of entanglement,” Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2020; Agnieszka Kurant, Collective Intelligence, eds. Stefanie Hessler and Jenny Jaskey (Berlin: Sternberg Press, forthcoming), and various online forums. My polemic deeply respects and joins forces with concepts already in circulation, such as Donna Haraway’s “sympoiesis,” which in turn draws on Scott Gilbert’s “symbiopoiesis.” For my part, because I am after broad cultural change, I want to lodge my polemic directly inside ontology (the study of what it is to exist), rather than theoretical biology. See: Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Scott F. Gilbert et al., “Symbiosis as a source of selectable epigenetic variation: taking the heat for the big guy,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 365 (2010): 671–678.
For “biosemiosis,” see Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men.”
Reference is being made here to Sutela’s many collaborations with microbes, coders, and musicians, from Nam Gut to nimiia cetii. On the latter, see: “Jenna Sutela: Nimiia Cétiï,” Somerset House, September 2018, ➝.
The Buehler-Sutela collaboration was facilitated by my colleagues at the Center for Art, Science, and Technology at MIT, producers of Sutela’s residency at MIT.
An indication of how frequency is modeled in the lab includes Chi-Hua Yu, Zhao Qin, Francisco J. Martin-Martinez, and Markus J. Buehler, “A Self-Consistent Sonification Method to Translate Amino Acid Sequences into Musical Compositions and Application in Protein Design Using Artificial Intelligence,” American Chemical Society Nano 13, no. 7 (2019): 7471–7482; Zhao Qin, Qingyi Yu, and Markus J. Buehler, “Machine learning model for fast prediction of the natural frequencies of protein molecules,” RSC Advances 10, no. 28 (2020): 16607–16615; and Markus J. Buehler, “Liquified protein vibrations, classification and cross-paradigm de novo image generation using deep neural networks,” Nano Futures 4, no. 3 (2020): 035004.
Markus J. Buehler, in conversation with the author, May 19, 2021.
Buehler, “Liquified protein vibrations.”
Buehler calls this method “Protein Inceptionism” (see Buehler, “Liquified protein vibrations”) in evident emulation of Google’s 2015 “Inceptionism” post: Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah, and Mike Tyka, “Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks,” Google AI Blog, June 17, 2015, ➝.
Markus J. Buehler, in conversation with the author, May 19, 2021.
For biofiction, see Caroline A. Jones, “Biofiction and the Umwelt: Anicka Yi,” in Hugo Boss Prize, Twenty Years (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2016), 90–95. On science edging into cultural realms, I note that nanoscience in particular operates through powerful, computationally-enhanced imagery, prompting nanoscale scientists to post “galleries” of images in the way artists update their websites with installation shots. In Buehler, “Liquified protein vibrations,” the scientist openly calls for “nano-inspired art” and coins the neologism “materiomusical” to describe his process.
Buehler: “My modeling methods allows for these molecules to be studied in their dynamic, quantum chemical way … and visualized … and be explored artistically …” Communication to the author, May 19, 2021.
“The first recorded use of a physical molecular model in organic chemistry was by August Wilhelm Hofmann in 1865. In a lecture entitled, On the Combining Power of Atoms, before the Royal Society of Great Britain, he used the metaphor of croquet balls joined by sticks to describe methane, chloroform and other compounds of carbon.” Martin F. Schlecht, “Historical Overview of Molecular Modeling,” Molecular Modeling on the PC (New York: Wiley-VCH, 1998), ➝. Vibrational spectroscopy began to enter in the early twentieth century, and force field analysis contributed to dynamic energy modeling, developing up through DNA’s double helix. In a collaboration of the mid-90s, computation allowed the creation of a “virtual biomechanical environment,” dubbed VIBE, within which the user/modeler “enters this {virtual} theater and interacts with the three-dimensional simulation by means of a wand-link remote control device. The modeler's head and hand movements are tracked with a six-degrees-of-freedom electromagnetic sensor to maintain the correct perspective in the virtual environment. The wand may be used to dock a ligand into a binding site, and bumps and other interactions are experienced as sounds.” See also Carolina Cruz-Neira, Randolph Langley, and Paul A. Bash, “VIBE: A virtual biomolecular environment for interactive molecular modeling,” Computers & Chemistry 20, no. 4 (1996): 469–475, 477.
Under “3D Status” for the synthetic form of oxytocin—the in vivo molecule of which was mapped in 1952—it reads: “Conformer generation is disallowed since too many atoms, too flexible.” Conformer generation refers to the process of building a 3D simulation of a molecule that covers what is called its “conformational space,” or how many clear positions the atoms can hold. (Different conformations of the atoms can have different chemical effects.) See National Center for Biotechnology Information, “Oxytocin,” PubChem, 2005–present, ➝.
Sutela writes: Oxytocin triggers an oceanic feeling / This is a dopamine fix / Serotonin being and serotonin cooking / Cycles of norepinephrine action / ATP energy tap / Bathing in growth factors brings plasticity / An antibody for protection
This “bonding hormone” has broad effects among primates. See Roman M. Wittig et al., “Food sharing is linked to urinary oxytocin levels and bonding in related and unrelated wild chimpanzees,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1778 (2014): 20133096. To translate: oxytocin is found in the urine of non-kin when these unrelated chimpanzees engaged in rare food-sharing, community-building activities. The authors are agnostic as to cause or effect.
Buehler disagrees with this characterization, and has clarified that these are not sine wave tones. True: I am a naïve listener with older ears, unable to hear separate tones, “timbre,” or dynamic variation in what are monotones for me. Compare Buehler’s conviction of multi-tone stability to the decisions of composer Henry Jackman, who when scoring these chemical effects on humans for the film Cherry (2021), said “By the time I got to the P.T.S.D. and Oxytocin, the losing your mind part of the film … I became so obsessed by having a sound that wasn’t stable … I started {using} loads of flutter and shoving things through seriously old, mid-’70s synths where the oscillators are a bit damaged and the filter’s a bit noisy … to just fuzz things up.” Henry Jackman, quoted in Amon Warmann, “Henry Jackman Modifies Sounds Using Broken Cassette Players for Apple TV+’s Cherry,” Composer, February 2021, ➝.
See Sutela’s poem, footnote 15.
Designed for research purposes by Hermann von Helmholtz, this type of siren was described in Friedrich Wilhelm Opelt, Allgemeine Theorie der Musik (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1852). Opelt’s illustrations served as the template for Rudolph Koenig’s mass-produced apparatus. Interestingly, the siren disc apparatus both demonstrates the known musical intervals and the relation of pitch to frequency, but also helped to clarify the function of autocorrelation in psycho-acoustics—e.g. how the mind translates and correlates distinct frequencies as being “the same” as one another.
Alexander Rehding, “Of Sirens Old and New,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, vol. 2, eds. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
So uncannily persuasive are the wavelets discerned by the machine learning system that initially I took them as indexical; I am grateful to Markus Buehler for clarifying the process for this effect.
This is extrapolating from Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory topics in the philosophy of natural science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hacking does not posit that “reception” allows either representing or intervening. Rather his now classic argument is that physicists’ capacities to “spray electrons” to move something gives them both agency and robust confidence in the electron’s existence, despite the great efforts that must be made to “see” electrons.
Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, “Si’ren,” in Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Co., 1898), ➝.
“…first I will discuss those things which are in some part to be trusted, and then let each judge for himself the following material, because throughout these monster-filled caverns I shall paint a little picture of a sea-girl or siren, which if it has a head of reason is followed by all kinds of shaggy and scaly tails.” Translation from the Old English: “Liber Monstrorum Translation,” in Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 257.
Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell’imprese military et amorose (Lyon: Guillaume Rouille, 1574), quoted in Ian Wardropper, “Siren, Rome, ca. 1571–1590,” European Sculpture, 1400–1900, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 90–92, ➝.
“They are mantic creatures like the Sphinx with whom they have much in common, knowing both the past and the future … Their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that song is death.” This reading of the role of the siren in Homer’s Odyssey comes from literary scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (London: C.J. Clay and Sons, 1922), 199.