 Hello Teresa Schubert. Hi, I'm really happy to present a talk by Teresa Schubert and let me just give you a small introduction how I got to know you and the work you do. This year in pandemic I was also, I found this new hobby and I went to gather mushrooms and forage around in the forest and actually I looked if other people are doing the same thing or a kind of stumbled into an exhibition that you did because you are a media art artist and you fuse media art, you fuse science with your art and what you did and what you were showing was, it was an installation, it was something that you did and what you did is I think you're gonna talk about it in the talk as well and you took mushrooms and you exposed them to different sounds and you created this immersive installation. It was interactive and that was the thing that amazed me as well because I was standing in front of the screen and I could play sounds to mushroom and see how the mycelium was growing and it was really amazing and it looked amazing and I just wanted to know more about what you do and and that's why I invited you to give this presentation and I'm really excited to yeah to listen to your talk so have fun. That's me. Thank you for the introduction and for having me here today. Yeah as mentioned before I'm a media artist by education and through chance and curiosity I got in touch with a very special forest organism exactly 10 years ago and since then I have been working with moist media in my art and in my research. I just finished a post doc at the Bauhaus University on the technical reproduction of meat and the usage of the human body in bio art and for the past three years I was artist-in-resident at the research project Mind the Fungi between the TO Berlin and Art Laboratory Berlin that just ended with a publication. Coming back to this forest organism that I met 10 years ago you might be familiar with the extraordinary slime mold fusarum polycephalum the many-headed mold. This creature usually lives in our forests and you can see it on decaying wood or leaves after the rain. It is the largest single-cell organism known on earth belonging to the species of protists not molds or fungi like many people believe. I became aware of it through this study by Japanese scientists that was published in 2010 where they were using slime mold to model the transport system. The way the experiment worked was that they inoculated they put the slime mold on the center of Tokyo and put food sources for the spots where the train stations around Tokyo were and then observed over time how the slime mold was connecting the different train stations together through its own body network and then they compared it with the actual railway system map around Tokyo and they found that there were big correlations between the way that slime mold connected the food points and the real railway system was. I did more research and I found this great book by Andrew Adamacki called Fusarum Machines from 2011 where he showed a lot of examples with geometrical computation with fusarum and he also mentioned how in different different stages of its life fusarum resembles at first a decentralized network and second moves on to a rather distributed system which is also interesting to look at. I was so intrigued by the seemingly smart blob that I decided to get my own and start experimenting. I had the chance to do so during a residency on a boat in Linz, Austria in 2010 and since then for the next five years this little organism became something like a pad for me but also a collaborator in my artwork. Because I had no formal education in biology or such, no laboratory access, I got in touch with the DIY bio movement especially I would like to mention the Hecateria platform where the colleagues are also present at the Congress actually for the past few days and also a top lab in Berlin which is a space where you can do biolab experiments also under supervision of educated scientists. So I got fascinated after many years of working mainly with a computer and I was excited to be working with my hands and with living beings and in case of fusarum polycephalon because it's outside the aesthetic appearance and the morphology is also a manifestation of its mechanisms, its functions and reactions to the outside world. Over the next few years I did a lot of experiments. Some are more ironic, some more simple material experiments, some with a more scientific mindset and some developed into even larger conceptual or interactive artworks. I did experiments on more architectural surfaces, experimenting with cubes, with different media to grow the fusarum on. I experimented with color, trying to change the color of the organism through ingesting different pigments or dyes into it. I did some more aesthetic or ironic things, growing it on the structure of a brain looking, comparing the networks of the slime mold. I inoculated it on a sheet of paper mapping Arduino board with food where the electronic components in the board are and looked how what cable connection fusarum would grow. I did a fusarum clock, I experimented with variables and jewelry and glassware and then I came across this quirky scientific experiment that was done in 1948 by a zoologist and a pharmacologist and they were looking to investigate the influence of drugs on the nervous systems of humans. And as a model organism to work with they chose the spider and they fed the spider different kind of drugs and then what I found particularly interesting was that they didn't look at the behavior of the spider on drugs but they looked at the product that they were doing. So at the webs that they were weaving and how functional the webs were still catching flies, meaning ensuring the survival of the spider through this. And I found this approach quite interesting and translated it a little bit in an abstracted form to fusarum pulizephalum and fed a variety of plant-based calming substances to the slime mold such as valerian, San-Jones word, tabacco, but also cannabis and compared the different morphology and network structures that the organism was growing when it was cultivated on these different substances and documented this in larger photographs and time-lapse videos. I was then also particularly interested to look at the membrane structure and being able to look inside the cell and I got in touch with Professor Adamatski who was there also of the before mentioned book fusarum machines and we started to collaborate on a bit of a ironic paper on mapping or imitating the German autobahn with fusarum and making a small map where the slime mold would grow would be inoculated in Berlin and putting food sources for the different cities or larger cities that are in Germany and then comparing it with the original map and we also experimented with 3D-printed terrains of Germany to see how it would actually behave if we're not dealing with a flat surface like it's usually done with some kind of agar-based media but actually having it grow over a 3D terrain and after this I had the chance to join a research project that was a European Union funded project specifically made for looking at slime mold computing, computing with biological substrates and through this I was able to set up DIY Biolab at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and this enabled also students of art and design to experiment with living organisms this was back then back then in 2013 I think a very special thing because usually art and design students don't have access to these kind of equipments. In the video that I'm showing now you can see microscopic videos of slime mold but I captured only the very edges of the cell so where usually the organism starts to move forward or backward and when you look very carefully inside the cell you can see little particles moving and they go in one direction and then they change the direction and this happens at a very specific rhythm every 50 to 60 seconds. Fusarum changes this flow of its cytoplasm and it's quite a regular oscillatory behavior it's called cytoplasmic streaming and I found this very interesting to look at and was also applying another method and trying to observe this further by building kind of very cheap sensors through using aluminum type and putting it into a device that was measuring the electrical potential so the charge on the membrane of the organism and it was growing from there was two aga blobs on the aluminum type and the organism was connecting the two blobs so that it was measured as precise as possible only the charge that was on the connecting tube trying to eliminate surrounding noise and I ended up with a lot of measurements that like look and graphs somehow like this and you can see that there is movement that there is reaction to outside factors this recording was over two days or something like that and together with a sound artist Leslie Garcia we did a collaboration and translated these data into a sonification so we made the life of Fusarum audible over a specific period of time. After this I developed a more conceptual work that was working with Slymald it's an interactive video installation where people can put their arms or other pieces of on this table and it's being scanned and the virtual organism the simulation looks for food on your skin and it recognizes food in darker areas so when you have hairs or wrinkles or moles or space between your fingers or on your elbow or something like that would be recognized as virtual food for the organism and that would then continue to grow and then later try to compute an optimum path to connect all the food points between each other so you would get some kind of alternative way of displaying or mapping your body through the intelligence of a biological organism so after all of these experiments with Slymald I decided that it was time to move on to a new organism and before that I started to do a lot of workshops here in Berlin but also in other places around Germany and in other countries where I was teaching people how to cultivate Slymald mainly in an art and design context also a little bit related maybe to architecture and programming or computing work so I started to cultivate a variety of fungi in my studio pretty much I started with just ordering kits that you can buy on the internet you can grow your own food mushrooms at home and then went on also to try collect fungi in the forest or in the outside and trying to transfer the cultures the mycelia cultures into my studio and then I developed a work which is called growing geometries tattooing mushrooms and the title pretty much says what it is I started to cultivate mushrooms and when the heads would come out from the substrate I would tattoo a very simple geometrical forms in these heads and then observe over time how the geometrical forms would change due to the growing fungi head so my idea was that instead of what you usually want on a human body is maybe to like keep the tattoo in the same shape you don't want it to change really because you're getting older or maybe you gain weight or something like that so the idea was the opposite that the tattoo would actually get completed through an aging process maybe or through the growth process of the fungi as it kept growing and yeah there was a lot of experimentation with trying to keep the fungi growing and keeping them alive and I presented it for the first time then in 2015 at art laboratory in a living installation where I tattooed the fungi for the opening and for the three weeks of the exhibition people could go and see how they were evolving how the forms changed and I was tracking it also with a camera and making a time-lapse movie out of it so that people could actually see the whole progress over time because one difficulty that you have when you work with biomedia in art is when it's still alive in the exhibition that whoever comes to see it you usually only get a few minutes of this process but the whole life cycle of the exhibition or of the installation you actually never get to see because maybe in my case the exhibition is actually planned for three weeks so nobody will stay in the exhibition for three weeks so you need to think of other ways how you can actually make translate this into the perception mode of a visitor yeah these are some photographs that I did then from also to the time-lapse and my studio experiments where you can see the forms tattooed onto mushrooms and I did from the time-lapse videos animation where I took the photographs but then only traced the tattooed forms and removed the rest of the image so you end up with a pretty minimalistic video where you can see how circles or squares start to change and become more amorphous shapes but if you would only look at the video without knowing the context you would not really know how how it was done or what it actually where it comes from also I started to do performative walks in the forest first time on invitation of art laboratory Berlin where I went out with a group of people and we were looking at Fungi but also at other forest organisms we were looking at my chorizo the mycelium that's connecting between the roots of trees and the Fungi mycelium and I was able to do this extensively then through the mind the fungi project that started in 2018 and just ended and together with a group of biotechnologists from the technical University I did these walks around Brandenburg where I was also trying with small performative gestures to intervene the usual scientific approach so that our forest walks would become more than just a Fungi collection exercise but also maybe trigger some kind of different perception or approach towards the forest but also towards scientific tools so I did these temporary tattoos that you can apply on your skin with water and they they were small rulers and the people had to or who wanted could put them on their skin in this case you can see it on the arm of a participant and they had little collection bags that the scientists prepared and they needed to measure the size of it but then they had to apply their body part their arm or their leg or wherever it was and thus get in touch literally with the mushroom and with the environment but sometimes also work together in groups to be able to actually read what was on this ruler and also I did some performative interventions inside the forest during this research project I also developed the work that was mentioned before that just ended the exhibition at Futurium in Berlin it's called sound for fungi homage to indeterminacy and I was looking specifically at how funghi would react to sound when specific sound frequencies were played to them and otherwise what I might have mentioned is that it is not about music, so about music, but actually I tested special sine frequencies and they are also partly in a special rhythm, so on and off phases to see how how these shawls affect the sound and could actually be found in my experiments that I did that there was a certain group of fungi that reacted positively to it, so in that case I now call it as positive that they have grown faster compared to those that were cultivated in silence oh sorry I realized I switched languages yeah in my experiments I realized that there was a group of fungi that reacted positively to the sound frequencies and with positive I mean that they grow faster and there was a smaller group that didn't like the sound at all so they prefer to grow in silence and with some of course I couldn't really find a difference between sound or no sound but also it was a very preliminary and at the end also artistic study and I also did some microscopic work to see whether I could see maybe through the microscope that the network of these fungi was maybe more dense or more loose or that the branching structure of them was somehow different and yeah I was quite fascinated in general also by somehow yeah the beauty of the mycelia structures and maybe one thing while this video is still running the special thing about about my experiment but the mind the fungi project in general was that all the all the species of fungi that me but also all the scientists in the research group from TU used were species that the people in our walks collected in the forest so it was also like a citizen science project where people from Berlin and Brandenburg were able to participate by collecting the mushrooms and also going back into the laboratory with us and learning how to cultivate how to make a clean culture from fungi that you collected in the outside now I'm switching to a different kind of work and organism this series is called a milieu and it's performance based work series where I have a huge petri dish that's 80 by 80 centimeters and I'm using my nude feet to make imprints so what you usually do with the small swaps when you do a corona test for example I have been doing with my feet and I did walks at different places around Berlin with my nude feet and then imprinted them into this petri dish and compared over time the the feet that had collected all the microbes that were in the outside and on the other side also my own micro flora like my my imprints of my feet on clean skin so I did this comparison between environmental microbiome micro flora and my own and a series of photographs and also video work where you can see how it's growing over time and last I'm switching to my most recent project this is entitled meet me and I was reflecting about the role that animals have in our society and most of the time animals are used for exploitation as products and materials or a stage animals but most of the time we use them for food fashions cosmetics and science so many thinkers of the post humanism stress a non-human centered perspective on the world and that we should assume a more modest role in our dealings with nature so the consequence that I have drawn in the project is that if we see the human as an animal then we should also be food or material this is of course a provocation but it's not science fiction or some mobile dystopia it's a possibility at least technically another background of this project was that according to the food and agriculture organization animal farming accounts for a significant share of greenhouse gas emissions and land use as well as consumption of water and energy and this will probably rise so to solve or as a suggestion scientists came up with a solution which is so-called cultured meat which is basically taking cell culture samples from an animal and cultivating in the lab incubating it multiplying it giving it nutritious and then ending up with a laboratory or in vitro meat that you can then produce for example a burger or sausages from something like that the humanism puts an end to the need to consider whether eating someone is socially proper or not those who choose to reject are free of moral constraints no no then and then we can progress beyond a disembodied solipsistic ego and start to have a fair and just society for all with modern biotechnology it has become possible to grow new organs or tissue from ourselves genome editing in theory allows us to construct a human as if it were a manual this has turned our bodies into a ground for engineering and to a certain degree made it reconstructable in conclusion I am treating my body as a material an impersonal objective structure or architecture in the words of performance artists they lack to experiment with in the performance I am presenting the provocative notion of a biotech era cannibalism to raise awareness for issues around biotics body politics and the inhumane treatment of animals and industrial farming so new and vitro meat production techniques we could use our own body to feed ourselves in addition I wanted to elaborate on the idea of creating a mechanism for self-sustainable nutrition where the meat cells and nutritious medium comes from within yourself your body is externalized production unit cannibalism is one of the big taboos left in our society but it's left for apocalyptic dystopian scenarios in popular culture films series dark zones where we usually don't want to go historically cannibalism was also used to justify the killing of the white western men of indigenous communities and to conquer new territories alleged cannibal tribes for example on the Caribbean islands were compared with animals a human that consumes another human loses its humanity it becomes animal a piece of art rights I found the project me and especially the live performance of the project to be really in line with my own research into ritualistic practices as well as issues of taboo cannibalism being something that is taboo in western society but also cannibalism being something that was practiced in pre-alombian cultures to a point I thought there was an interesting parallel between these two approaches the sounds themselves were reflecting what was going on in the performance and the actions on the piece we also employed like quadrophonic sounds so the the aspect of immersivity for the audience was quite important and especially during the second movement where there is a dialogue between the artist and an artificial intelligence representation for me human beings that could put these visions of the future into practice life just got more peace we're about to stem cells and things are relating along with the financial industry I found a very interesting parallel between cloning the voice of Teresa of the artist and also the reproduction of the cells so in one case you have the the the voice being a biomedical information that comes from the body and on the other side you have the physicality of the cells in a world where all life on earth is a threat to all life and must be eliminated or reduced this position is unchallengeable and there is no disputing it for nature a truly wild world ideals of free thought quality spirituality self-determination is free health care it's all few and in games until you look at the sky we would all be better off without all of this we hate mother nature we hate we only see the destruction of something as if it were some kind of tribute to ourselves you don't have to look so hard to see that there's nothing we were doing or willing to sacrifice to save mother because we need her for our freedom and our health so in this performance I was presenting the provocative notion of a biotech era cannibalism to raise awareness for issues around bioethics body politics and the inhumane treatment of animals and industrial farming I was also using my own body and literally like hacking or opening it up as a ground for the experiment and using my own donating my own cells for this meat and this photograph you can see the petri dish with the muscle cells growing it's approximately the petri dishes that size and the the piece of the cells on the scaffold is approximately that size and it was like that high so that it was pretty much similar to a burger patty what you put on a burger and this was a little piece that was left over after frying in this photograph and this what bring me pretty much to the end of my talk and I would leave the rest of the time for discussion questions from the world I put a few links and resources there from platforms DIY biology movements and bio hacking groups that helped me along my way and yeah thank you so far hello world hello Teresa thank you for your nice talk sorry for the technical difficulties we will fix everything in post okay let me start out with this I've got a couple of questions lined up and to my understanding and I guess that's what the audience also perceived is that you managed to perfectly fuse the science part in your work but also the the art part you work a lot with yourself your own body how has the feedback been to your work how has the wider audience reacted to what you present well I think you would need to concretize this to specific projects because by now I have such a variety of projects that spend also back a long time but I showed you now some of the works are actually really old I don't really show them anymore unless I'm really really asked to but I prefer to show new works and the slime mold works for example usually everyone loves because it's such a nice looking interesting organism also even if you just look at in the petri dish it's a microorganism so you can see it with your own eye you don't need a microscope it's not dangerous you can like have it at home etc so that's usually very popular to to show and to deal with something like my last project of course I'm using my body for in vitro tissue culture and the creation of laboratory ground meat is something that's much more controversial and obviously and I remember that Dreyse did an interview with me and after the show I got an email by somebody who was so offended or disgusted by the project that I now have a Wikipedia entry on the German page of Ekl discussed so but that's for example I rather I wouldn't even say that that's a negative response because in somehow with this project every response is a good response and it's clear that that that there that it will be edgy and like not something nice because it's not just dealing with pure aesthetics or something like that it's actually a critical and conceptual approach right I think that people get that it's not just about the aesthetics and yeah but let's say you want to you want to convey this larger picture maybe different worlds you do a lot of interdisciplinary work where do you find research partners how do you find people that you want to collaborate with in the best case I'm invited and then I just have to decide whether the project or the people interest me enough and I agree in other cases it might actually be that it could be a specific call for a funding project a work that I didn't present because it's a purely video based work I did last year through a funded residency program with a personal super computing and networking center in Poland and it was a immersive video production for example and I specifically applied to work with them so they kind of hosted this residency program we're looking for an artist and I wanted to work with them and apply that it worked out so that's how it happened in another case so it could vary or in the very first cases the for example the collaboration the slime old paper that I did with the German Autobahn to together with Andrew Adamatski I actually contacted him because I had so many questions about the book that he published before and then we did a few things together so it could be everything Is it easier to find people on the science side or is it our museum's interest in this I mean you exhibited in so many different places you now talked about this video art in Poland that's again something different who's the easiest to approach who's open to these ideas the most what you say I'm not sure scientists are usually very open to collaboration then at the end it depends what you want to get out of it because then when it comes to actually time that they need to input and if it's like their spare time then it can become very difficult but they're very open usually to discuss and share knowledge but for actual real collaboration as we would talk about it in a more artistic context then it can be much harder because then they also want funding that gets along with it whereas maybe as artists and designers we're much more used to work on like a low budget level or something like that but also that I could not totally categorize it there was another talk that was quite interesting about how museums are becoming more and more digital fortunately you work with media art as well which can maybe be translated or yeah presented in a more digital or virtual setting now with the pandemic this this has been fast forwarded do you see do you see that your work will benefit from that will you go into more like an even more digital approach will you present or produce work that will take place in the virtual world does it affect you at all it hasn't affected my work process or my works yet but I am relying actually on real world engagement and physical spaces where I can work so obviously my studio but that is independent but maybe laboratories then collaborations with scientists festivals of course are a big platform for me which now don't happen anymore the show I had at Futurium was ending before Christmas but the last yeah nearly two months it was impossible to see it so in that sense I mean one might think that especially because I'm doing a lot of video work or simulations as well that this might be very easy to just show online in a sense which at some part is true but because I also make installation and immersive media work that is actually much more sensorial or that builds on the spatial experience as well and the perception of your own body in space that is something that you can also not conceive transmit through a screen because you still kind of want the space actually yeah I was I was thinking about that as well I was I wanted to ask you if some of your work I know you did these walks where you took people along or you went outside to to look at different types of mushroom or molds I was thinking some some museums tried that and they tried to expand what they were showing and maybe make have people participate at home and growing mushrooms is not that difficult you yourself said you started buying all these mushrooms started packs would you do you see that there can there's like a field to be explored or what would you tell somebody if they want to grow mushrooms at home is that something they should do could do is it dangerous will there be mushrooms growing growing all over how would you what would you give them as a tip that's so many questions sorry sorry it's because I also started growing mushrooms and I'm a bit afraid no I don't think you have to be afraid that like like molds and fungi like I don't know fungi that you have on maybe on the ball whatever they're totally different I mean fungi need different substrates and different nutrition so you can choose for example shiitake mushroom it will only grow on a very specific substrate and even if you wanted it to it will never grow on your couch or in your bookshelf but oyster mushroom for example has a much broader spectrum this is something you can see sometimes funny pictures how people actually grow it in their books and then the mushrooms come out from the book pages or something like that you can grow it with your used coffee from your espresso machine for example so it's also a great way to design circular economy and recycle within your own home and well my suggestion for people that want to try for the first time is definitely just by an oculated substrate kit because it's like clean and you won't have to deal with a lot of contamination and it will be very successful fast cool sounds awesome I have another question from the internet and it touches on something you said before now that we might go into a more virtual realm but some of your work needs this kind of takes place in a certain space or needs this I don't know if it's necessarily interaction but or immersiveness I'm throwing out some of these more art related topics but somebody was asking if you have explored the field of intimacy especially in the sense of multi or cross-species work I don't know if it necessarily touches upon what you did with your meat work Katja yeah maybe not so much with the meat work well one could say that at parts I did have an intimate relationship with slime mode because I worked with it so many years and sometimes very intensively as I said at the beginning doing it in my home taking it on holidays when I was going away so that it wouldn't die like you know having it carrying it in my bag and feeding it or trying to find neighbors or friends who would feed it when I was away or something like that so um they definitely was a stronger connection than it just being a material that I used or something like that I'm not sure whether that's intimate enough it wasn't erotic um but I know other artists who would apply into that field but um yeah it also touches obviously on the topic of of ethics and emotional connection then because everyone who will start to experiment with living organisms be it art or just simple fungi cultivation at home you realize that this thing will die yeah especially in the beginning you have a lot of failure and you need to find out specific methods and it's just trial and error and obviously then you come to the question okay the slime mode doesn't really have a brain so you know it's not really a big deal if it dies but at the end how can we allow ourselves to judge which organism is rather than more more useful more intelligent or more versatile living you know is it a plant or I don't know you know so it becomes a difficult question if you actually want to investigate it on an ethical level in the consciousness level I was I was thinking of um when you first start to grow plants that you kind of develop start to develop a relationship to them as well and with moles and fungi even though they are as a species might be further away from us you start to anthropomorphize them and and yes you are actually growing something and um I kind of had that feeling that in some of your work be it the tattoo one or um yeah different ones it it did touch or it did build this kind of relationship and it was interesting to see that being explored where is where do you have an idea where you want to go with your work how you wanted to be presented in the future um well I don't want to have this real life spaces only digital I think would not work for us and I think everyone who sees the massive amount of digital conferences that we are having or workshops online workshops or whatever online talks that we're having since spring um it has advantages of you know being available so readily and at whatever time but I mean real life engagement sitting next to a real person and looking into the eye nevertheless is an experience that you can't replace on the same I think applies to artworks cool then thank you very much I think that's all the questions that we got so far um is there is there any last words you you want to present or how can people find your work um just go with my name there is a true word and you will find me stay safe and healthy and happy new year happy new year from us as well then have the talk the next talk will be in an hour so see you then bye