Jenna Sutela

One of artist Jenna Sutela's regular collaborators, Physarum polycephalum, is often referred to as a natural computer. This yellow, ‘many-headed’ slime mold is an ancient, decentralized, autonomous organism that processes data without a nervous system, operating via communities of coordinated nuclei that demonstrate advanced spatial intelligence. If the slime mold cannot find the resources it needs, it hibernates until better conditions arise; theoretically, it is immortal. Over the years, Sutela has, for example, ingested the slime mold in her performances as a form of artificial intelligence, letting its hive-like behavior program her own.

Sutela's work for Samara reactivates this line of work, delivering co-existence with the slime mold to people's homes in the form of a dried sample of Physarum polycephalum as well as related performative instructions. Inside the box, the audience receives everything necessary to grow slime mold at home, and witness the behaviour of this fascinating organism. With the set of performative instructions, Jenna Sutela proposes the ways of co-existing and engaging with Physarum polycephalum.

Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.

Protoplasmic Flow contains everything required to activate the slime mold in a location of your choosing.

Duration: take all the time that you need
Language: Instructions are in English and Italian.

A collective book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views.

The Vita Nova editorial project had its genesis in the Fórum do Futuro: a programme of debates, artist talks, and performances, held annually in the city of Porto, that brings together guests from different artistic and scientific practices to reflect on fundamental issues for contemporary societies. Given the impossibility of holding the 2020 edition, due to the challenges posed by the pandemic, the Fórum do Futuro is instead presenting a book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views. The book consists of four thematic sections that combine different artistic, scientific, philosophical and technological perspectives in written and visual essays, stories and interviews.

Texts by Sophia Al-Maria, K Allado-McDowell, Shumon Basar, Guilherme Blanc, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, GPT-3, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kirsten Keller, Filipa Ramos, Tabita Rezaire, Jenna Sutela, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Treister, Aby Warburg, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Feifei Zhou.

Through work by artists and poets of various generations and geographies, as well as additional contributors, SIREN (some poetics) considers the ways in which language is increasingly employed by artists in works that trouble the line between language as a literary practice and language as a visual one. Both human and nonhuman forms of language-making and poetics are insisted upon, from precolonial myth to scientific speculation, fungal networks to gut bacteria, text to textile, poem to algorithm. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Amant, in Brooklyn, SIREN (some poetics) figures language in manifold forms: poem and essay, score and script, list and litany. All, though, emit and evidence a kind of parapoetics: poetry as opaque metabolic structuring or as some wild surfacing.

With texts by Hana Noorali & Lynton Talbot, Ruth Estevez, Quinn Latimer and excerpts by Don Mee Choi, Anais Duplan, Franz Kafka, Christa Wolf, a.o., and with artist contributions by Katja Aufleger, Patricia L. Boyd, Bia Davou, Sky Hopinka, Liliane Lijn, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Nour Mobarak, Senga Nengudi, Rivane Neuenschwander, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Aura Satz, Ser Serpas, Shanzhai Lyric, Jenna Sutela, Iris Touliatou, and Dena Yago

DANGEROUS DEPTHS

DAISYWORLD MAGAZINE is an independent art publication questioning antrhopocentrism.

Contributions by:
Zazie Stevens (ed.) with Heleen Blanken, Brackish, Fiona Glen, Carolin Gieszner, X Arias, Annika Kappner, Eszter Koncz, Hattie Morrison, Maria Naidich, Michaela Spiegel, Jenna Sutela, Timaeus, Stef Veldhuis, Hedwich Rooks, Hannah Rose Whittle

This beautifully designed diary and week-to-view planner is filled with historically significant magical and sacred dates from around the world. Drawn from events such as the Buddha’s birthday, esoteric festivals and artistic and occult history, the diary touches on the lives of characters such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ithell Colquhoun, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Jung, Simone Weil, Leonora Carrington, Maya Deren, Aleister Crowley, George Bataille, Timothy Leary, Hilma af Klint, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, William Blake, W.B. Yeats and Octavia Butler.

Contributors:
Acupressure by Maria Christofi, Astrology by SJ Anderson, Ayurveda and Prajna by Mira Manek, Dreamwork by Jennifer Dumpert, Herbal Remedies by Paige Emery, Kriya Yoga by Rachel Okimo, Korean Ink Illustrations by Jungran Kim, Mushroom Guide by Ellen Percival, Prayer Guide by K Allado-McDowell, Regenerative Farming by Elias Haase, Rituals by Pam Grossman and Himali Singh Soin, Ritual Spaces by Leila Sadeghee Seed Bombs by Jenna Sutela, Soji by Shoukei Matsumoto, Sonic Meditation by Pauline Oliveros, Spellcraft by Bones Tan-Jones, Tarot by CAConrad and T. Susan Chang, Weather by Jay Drinkall