// new media class


Natalia Rivera — Queer Forms of Life - Interconnected Nature

Carte Blanche — Summer 2022

Internet for Bacteria - Phage is a near-impossible mediating device for the symbiogenesis of a digital-bio hybrid organism between bacteria and the internet. A device to create a queer form of life, a hyperconnected bacteria superorganism. In the same way that Bacteriophages mediate the horizontal gene transfer process among bacterias, the IfB-Phage allows bacterial communities in different soils to perform horizontal gene transfer through the Internet of Things infrastructure. Each Phage is able to sequence the DNA released by bacteria to the environment and transform it into digital information to be sent to the cloud, and at the same time retrieve other genes from the cloud to synthesize and release them to the soil, to be available for other bacteria.

Lynn Margulis described how bacteria could, through horizontal gene transfer, quickly recover after a natural disaster, that would take us, humans, for instance, much longer or even fail. What could mean for such an impressive collaborative process of bacteria the access to a human-created global network with the IoT infrastructure? Internet for Bacteria is the exploration of the possibilities of our current digital communication technologies as interspecies/inter-living-entities mutual aid technologies or, even further, symbiotic ones.

mutantelab.com/qfl

Credits:

Co-creation with Mutante

In dialogue with: Juan Diego Rivera, Carlos Acosta, Daniela Brill, Luis Williams-Fallas, Manuel Orellana, Margarita González, Jung Hsu, Carlos Maldonado, Juan Felipe Zapata, Juan Manuel Anzola, Dayana Calderón, Christian Romero, Ma. Fernanda Quinceno, Jeisson Triana, Iliana Hernández, Raúl Niño, Tatiana Avendaño, María Cecilia Medina, Gumercindo Rivera, Sandra Ramos, Takuya Koyama. Queer forms of life (Formas extrañas de vida) creation group [Suratómica], Microcosmos creation group [Suratómica], Other [Tiny] forms of life (Otras [pequeñas] formas de vida) creation groups. CorpoGen Laboratory. New Media Class UDK WS2020-SS22.