Denisa Pubalova is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art and science with the main focus on the ecology of relations. Her curious practice involves many disciplines ranging from art, through posthumanities, speculative philosophy, and new media studies, to the fields of science. In her artistic practice, she conceptualizes processes beyond the human experience. To communicate the concepts, she uses generative art as a principle able to simulate these post-anthropocentric processes. Currently, she is a Master's student in Interaction design at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen and at New Media Studies at Charles University in Prague. She is an alumnus of the Festival University program of JKU and Ars Electronica collaboration.
Website and Links: https://indd.adobe.com/view/dd7565f5-4758-4180-b14c-87a912f0e43c
Proposal:
In my current practice, I explored the intra-actions within the human-nature-technology relations. As an interdisciplinary artist affected by the posthuman framework, I work with different types of biological entities and generative code art, using artificial sensors, detectors, and devices as translators. I want to explore this system more with the topic of the posthuman body and its distributedly continuously developing senses. As a method of multi-species world-making, I want to focus on eating and cooking as multi-sensory multi-species activities.
The posthuman body is situated in-between virtual-real, natural-cultural, macro-micro, full-partial, space-nonspace, human-nonhuman, human-more-than-human. Humans have created these conditions and thus become posthumans. What is this experience? What do we sense?
The senses of the posthuman body become distributed in multiple human, more-than-human, and nonhuman entities. The recent probiotic turn in biological sciences emphasizes the ecology of relations within and beyond the body. The cognition is distributed in/developed from the whole natural-cultural environment. The senses of taste and smell are formed by multiplicities of more-than-human micro-organisms inhabiting the body. Vision, touch, and hearing emerge from the entire network of artificial nonhuman devices (screens, cameras, satellites, AI, algorithms, etc.). The body is extended and extending.
The posthuman body is not the host - the entity enabling the life of more-than-humans - it is itself a guest. It is an entity in-between. It is not a bounded unit; it is not an individual. It is a network of different actors that expands beyond the body. The ecology of relations is the structure that constitutes the posthuman.
Eating and cooking are multi-sensory multi-species experiences through which we can experience the networks constituting the posthuman body. Health, science, technology, nature, culture, politics, and many more fields are inherent in the systems of food growth, production, processing, distribution, and consumption. It is the most essential life-sustaining process of all organisms. And it is also a way to realize the deep interconnectedness of the world.
As an artist/researcher interested in the convergences of art and science, I want to research the posthuman body with scientific knowledge about the micro-macro world through food systems. How can we embed eating and cooking - elementary human activities, seriously intertwined with systemic inequalities - in the more-than-human, nonhuman, posthuman framework?
I (posthuman body as defined previously) want to create a kind of speculative artistic cook-book and use the methods of cooking and food preparing as metaphors for more-than-human-nonhuman-posthuman relations. The artwork aims to make, cook, taste, smell recipes to cultivate these multi-species relationships. The recipes would be prepared in collaboration, not just of organic embodied entities typically involved in the collaborative process of cooking, but with the virtual, non-organic ones as well. Companions - cum panis - with bread - like Donna Haraway teach us - to eat together, cook together, at the table, together.