What of the unloved others, the ones who are disregarded, or who may be lost through negligence?
—Bird Rose and Van Dooren [1]
A thing unnoticed—unseen, unacknowledged, disregarded—is a thing unloved.
The composer John Cage loved mushrooms. He hunted, studied, wrote about, and used mushrooms in his compositions. Scored to music, he would read anecdotes about human-mushroom interactions to his audiences. This is the type of engagement anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “passionate immersion,” a key characteristic in the act of noticing [2]. Learning scientific names for organisms is a simple act of noticing. Agaricus bisporus is a white button mushroom. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the name of a microorganism I consume when I enjoy a glass of wine.
For the past year, Shuyi and I have been studying fermentation at Kingdom Supercultures, a company that specializes in microbial communities and their applications for food production. Unlike others in our line of work, our interests reach beyond passion for food and drink. We see transformation in fermentation—love.
On the microbial scale, fermentation and decay are the same process; both involve populations of microbes growing and metabolizing. However, on a human scale, the terms couldn’t diverge more. Just as fermentation makes a wine greater and more flavorful than its constituent grapes, decay unmakes a body so that the elements are less than the whole, the beloved reduced to parts. Fermentation is the becoming, decay the unbecoming. Yet it’s the same transformation—one term representing the loss of what was and the other representing the reward of what will be. Today, people tend to focus on the reward and recoil from the loss: delight for one, disgust for the other. But the two are part of the same whole.
My and Shuyi’s art tries to stitch these contradictions together. By making metabolism visible, our art allows the public to see how becoming and unbecoming are one.
For our upcoming exhibition Shadow Metabolism (March-April 2022) at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, our sculptures, video projections, and holograms make visible the microbial processes at the heart of fermentation/decay. The centerpiece comprises sculptural glass fermentation vessels filled with honey and water and inoculated with yeast and bacteria. At the end of the show, we will drink the mead it produces, a celebration of the metabolism at the heart of our transformative practice. Acts of noticing—seeing, acknowledging, and cultivation of regard—offer opportunities for transformation. The unloved become loved.
Glass, honey, water, bacteria, yeast. The blown-glass vessels act as living sculptures containing active microbial communities feeding on honey and water. The fermentation process is perceptible by bubbles of carbon dioxide and phenolic compounds escaping through an off-gassing valve and the sweet, sour aroma.
(Film Stills) Becoming Less and Less with No Relief, 2-channel video, 15 mins (2022). The video collages found images of microscopic cells, footage of chemical reactions, and algorithmically generated images that abstract biological matter.
Conceptual sketches for Sheer Receptivity, LED hologram (2022) a dynamic sculpture that uses algorithms and animation software to simulate forces of growth and decay on three-dimensional scans of biological organisms, including insects, vegetables, and botanical species.
[1] Bird Rose, Deborah, and Thom Van Dooren. “Unloved others: Death of the disregarded in the time of extinctions.” Australian Humanities Review, vol. 50, 2011.
[2] Tsing, Anna. “Arts of inclusion, or how to love a mushroom.” Manoa, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp. 191-203.
Remina Greenfield and Shuyi Cao are co-founders of Decompose, an art collective and experimental institute for transdisciplinary research, art-making, and education. Remina and Shuyi are current community members of NEW INC and have recently presented work as part of Biophilic Cities at PioneerWorks, as well as the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, and the Times Art Museum, Chengdu. They teach at Parsons School of Design.
Cite This Essay
Shuyi Cao and Remina Greenfield. “Unloved Others.” Biodesigned: Issue 10, 28 February, 2022. Accessed [month, day, year].