E.2.1 "A Hotter Compost Pile": Anicka Yi's Fermented Umwelts

Yani Kong, Simon Fraser University

This presentation explores the experience of scale through the protean creations of Anicka Yi, a Korean-American artist who works with bacteria and microbiome as a medium in her large-scale installations. Her artworks, Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita) and Biologizing the Machine (tentactular trouble), exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale, develop a symbiosis between nature, bacteria, and Artificial Intelligence. In the former, gigantic chrysalis pods made from kelp leather hang in a swamp-like environment, enclosing the buzz of robotic insects. In the latter, Yi encases AI-controlled soil and scent experiments that follow the life cycle of bacterial stasis, decay, and growth. Each work swells and swarms with active cellular assemblies that adapt with the bacteria in the galleries, indeed, altering to the presence of the viewer whose own biome mingles with the microorganisms in the room. Yi's work demonstrates scaler extremes by exhibiting microbacteria in a macro-installation form to ask how something as imperceptible as bacteria can proliferate to the degree that it both overwhelms and excites. In medium, Yi reminds us of the microbial formations that are not only shared across living entities but blur the lines between animal, vegetable, and human. Just as Donna Haraway (2016) writes that life in our era is closer in form to a compost pile than anything resembling a post-human epoch, Yi imagines "a hotter compost pile," fermented biospheres that allow the viewer to find themselves among an open, mixing, decomposing life world.

E.2.2 and, something like fire dancing

Ella Dawn McGeough, York University

The world is heavy with the weight of its lightest entities: fungi…ants…butterflies, viruses. During the rainy season, in the southern Peruvian Amazon along the Tambopata River, bright yellow fungal polyps appear on the bark of certain trees. Caterpillars arrive to feast on this bright fruit. They are accompanied by a mass of ants-as-bodyguards who drum on their rear gland, extracting a sweet syrup in return for some protection against predation. This affiliation can be called myrmecophily, love of ants, a common mutualism. During metamorphoses, the caterpillars assimilate all the eating, drumming, and licking so that, consequentially, when they emerge as butterflies, these processes are externalized, imagistically — as a picture of sun-bright-orbs blazing the back of their wings. An image that looks and feels like the parasitic fungus that calls them home, an image called the colour orange set free in three dimensions. Relations such as these go by many names: "extimate existence" (Elizabeth Povinelli), "entangled existence" (Karen Barad), "symbiogenesis" (Donna Haraway). But, however called, whether via critical theory or an insect's mimetic qualities, being becomes apparent as densely woven living knots held together through shared sympathy and endurance.

What else imagines ontology on these terms? What else makes this stuff make sense, sensible? Does colour? Specifically, the colour orange? Drawing together stories from the realms of art (Anne Truitt, Robert Ryman), insects (the previously described, Terenthina terentia of the Lycaenidae family), and safety markers (hunting, fashion, construction), this performative lecture will play cat's cradle with the thought-experiment: What if orange is the only true colour? What connections? What emergencies? What vivid worlds would emerge? Perhaps, something like fire dancing.

E.2.3 Craft-Thinking to Save the World: Some Personal Reflections on Textiles

Brandi S. Goddard, University of Alberta

**insert obligatory and all-too-frequently stated statistic on the destructive nature of our contemporary clothing choices that include worker exploitation in the global south, environmental destruction, and the loss of traditional manufacturing jobs in the global north**

By now, it is common knowledge that our obsessions with online shopping and "fast fashion" trends are destructive in many ways. In my presentation — equal parts historical research, memoir, social experiment, and theorization — I will draw from my doctoral research on traditional Irish homespun textile production to introduce my concept of "craft-thinking." Existing somewhere between nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts ideologies and uber-contemporary "design thinking" paradigms, craft-thinking, as I envision it, involves four tenets: quality, holism, authenticity, and skill. Situated within our contemporary globalized consumerist world, I will explore the complexities of craft-thinking in relation to reflections on my own personal clothing habits, the broader current enlightened movement towards sustainable manufacturing and consumer practices, all the while viewed through a historical lens of traditional textile crafts and their ecologies of production.

Craft-thinking, I contend, is a historical concept but also a call to re-evaluate how our sartorial decisions affect our self-representation to the world, and also how these choices reflect our own complicity and inaction in the face of destructive industrialism, exploitation, and catastrophic environmental change. The textile and clothing industries are among the largest in the world, and at some point, the role of clothing became reversed — instead of our clothing being a creative reflection of our identities, we have come to allow our clothing to define us.