The art of co-existence
The art of co-existence explores the human relationship to all life on earth. We invite artists, designers, scientists and creative thinkers for deep conversations grounded in wonderment. Together we explore what it means to be part of a natural system, and how we can transform our anthropocentric minds to a more symbiotic approach of life on this planet.
The art of co-existence
#7: What David Bowie, Our Gut Brain and Laughing Rats Teach Us About Queer Ecologies - Kathy High
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What do David Bowie, lab rats, our gut, and Queer Ecologies have in common? More than you’d think, and Kathy High is the thread that ties them all together. 👩🏻🎤
Kathy is a BioArtist, educator, and activist whose work reminds us that everything is connected. Our gut is our “second brain.” Rats share how we show our joy through their joyful giggles. And queer ecologies reveal that non-binary thinking is everywhere.
This conversation will spark your curiosity about biology, bodies, and the world we share with other species. 🐀🌿
🐚 Kathy’s souvenir: The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters With Deep-Sea Life - by Stacy Alaimo 📚
Visit this website for Kathy's previous, ongoing and upcoming projects: www.kathyhigh.com
Hosted by: Daphne Frühmann
Editing: Axel Frühmann
Music: Mark Oomen
Instagram: @theartofcoexistence
An Ourcelium Publishers podcast
But also there's been a lot of media around homosexual penguins. Um and, you know, two penguins bonding and taking care of uh an egg and then bringing it raising it as their own. And so this kind of queer parenting is exhibited, and and there's been examples of this in different countries. People just get very thrilled by it when they see it.
SPEAKER_00In a world of hyperconnectivity, we see more disconnected than ever from the living world. A world of natural wonder that has its own systems in place and masters the art of coexistence. We humans have placed ourselves outside this way of living, but it can teach us the biggest lessons and leave us in R. What happens when we reconnect to the nature from which we arose? Will we think with it and coexist in a symbiotic way? Will we make other decisions? Will it change the way we perceive ourselves? What and who can teach us if we are willing to listen? We invite you to be open and amazed by today's guests as they offer a glimpse into their art of coexistence. Kathy Hai is an interdisciplinary artist working with technology, art, and biology. She collaborates with scientists and artists. Her work is about living systems, animal sentience, and ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and medical industries. Kathy is also an activist and educator and teaches courses like biopunk and queer ecologies. Welcome Kathy. Hello Daphne. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. Thank you so much for joining. I'm very excited to have this conversation with you. We we have met before, of course, and we already got into super nice engaging conversations. Um, so I'm happy for everyone else to to join in on us. Great, me too. I'm excited to talk to you. Thanks. I would like to start with you with something light and fun in these uh in these sometimes heavy days that we're we're experiencing with all that is going on. Um, and I'm gonna dive into one of your projects immediately. Uh, because one of your projects is about laughter, animal laughter, and I think this is such a novel thing to talk about. Um and I want to share that there is this uh there is these videos of foxes laughing, and I think they are so cute. I don't know if you know those.
SPEAKER_01I do, they're great. Many many species I think end up laughing, yes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, so do you want to tell me which animal you like to make make to laugh? You you like to you like to tickle and uh and and laugh with. Talk to me how talk about how you got there.
SPEAKER_01Well, the the animal that I've been focusing on is a rat. And um this is particularly looking at laboratory rats who are used in laboratory research. Um, so lab rats are my are my creature of choice for laughter.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And this is also because, as I mentioned in my uh in my introduction about you, because you work with scientists, so this is probably how you got to be working with the rats or how you've how you've seen them. Um where where did you start? What what what were were you working on that you saw the rats, and then what made you decide to focus on their laughter? Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01So um a little bit of backstory. I had worked on a project previous to this one, which is called Embracing Animal, which was including lab rats as well. So maybe we'll get into that later. But that got me interested in the kind of life of la rats that are used in research, that are used um for pharmaceutical research and medical research. And we've all benefited from their work, but their work is really invisible. So I became very much a kind of um advocate for them. And, you know, I mean, I don't think that we can really change animal research yet, but it is happening slowly. Um and so there are lots of alternatives being developed, but still they're used um and kind of not counted. Uh and so I was very naive when I started the original project, Embracing Animal, as to how much lab rats were used in research generally. As a result of that project, um I had gone to a residency at Symbiotica, which was a pioneering sort of very um well-known art and science residency in Perth, Australia, at the University of of um Western Australia. And it was run by Orin Katz and Yunette Zur, which unfortunately the university has sort of cancelled it, and it is moved on. But they still are there and they're incredible thinkers and artists themselves.
SPEAKER_00Oren Katz is a big name in the bioarts uh scene as well.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. You know, and bioarts is a very kind of specific term that's used around artists who are working with biology and art, living things, for example. And it's it's a contemporary art practice that's probably been around about you know 30 years or so. Yeah. So you probably have heard about this before from previous podcasts, but just to clarify that. And Oren Katz, yeah, is still still um practicing. He practices with his partner, Yonet Zur, in their collaborative project called Tissue Culture and Arts, which is working with literally tissue culture, so mammal mammalian tissue culture, meaning making a sort of little sculptures into art, I would say. Long story short, I'll get back to the rats.
SPEAKER_00You were in symbiotica, yeah.
SPEAKER_01I was in symbiotica, and I was following a scientist who was working with rats for some other experiments he was doing on spinal injuries. So I was visiting the rats and they were greeting me, you know, kind of delightfully every time I would walk in there, throwing themselves up against the cage, happily kind of, you know, saying, Oh, play with me, play with me. And, you know, I was beginning to get to know them. And when I would leave at night or at the end of the day, I noticed that the lab technicians kept turning on kind of like country music to entertain them overnight. And I thought, wait a minute, they can't do they really like this? Like, is this what rats want, you know? So shortly after that, um, I came across an incredible video that can be found on the internet by a scientist whose name was Jake Pankset. And it was about the ultrasonic communication that rats have. They have a register of communicating that's above our hearing range in the ultrasonic range.
SPEAKER_00Like bats also have, for example.
SPEAKER_01Bats is a perfect example, and many other creatures too. And other creatures sometimes have subsonic below our hearing range. So our hearing range is kind of limited compared to some other creatures. And when I heard that they did that, I was interested in how they communicated. And then I was also interested because Jake Pankset had found that at register at 50 kilohertz, which is above our hearing range, as I said, they kind of giggle. I mean, they don't kind of, they do giggle. So he had been doing tests tickling rats and making them giggle and recording it. And I this was this was uh in 2009 when I found this video. So it was a long time ago. I was astounded by this fact because his premise was if rats could laugh, there's a kind of hedonic connection to humans. It's like a baby laughing, you know, it's a very guttural kind of like impulse laugh, not the cynical laugh that we often have these days.
SPEAKER_00And is it also is it also then for rats, can you say it is tied to that emotion of happiness or of play. Of play. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. So it's I was completely intrigued by this and somehow came up, you know, on the spur of the moment, which often ideas come to me that way. So what I was interested in was um actually composing then some rat laughter for the rats to hear while they were in the lab, that maybe this would make them a little bit happier than the Western, country western music they've been listening to.
SPEAKER_00They weren't laughing to the music. You didn't hear them laugh when that music was playing.
SPEAKER_01They weren't dancing and they weren't excited. Um, so that took me on a long journey, that whole interest and process. I at the time, so I went to Symbiotica both in 2009 and 2010 for residencies, and I did get uh uh find an incredible neuroscientist who was working with testing different kinds of drugs on rats to see if it what kind of effect it would have on them emotionally. And he was very interested in this project. So we started to collaborate, but at the time, ultrasonic equipment was very nascent, I'll say. We had an audio engineer who was working with us to try and develop some equipment we could use, but then it records tons of other information besides just vocalization that you're looking for. So we didn't get very far. Um, I continued with the project when I returned back to the US and um invested in some small pieces of equipment that were dealing with ultrasonic. So one of them was a bat detector. So it is, as you said, it's it's how bats communicate as well. This can be translated to rats. And there are systems that you can use to in the field to listen to bats, and it's called a bat detector. And it it basically, I'm sort of giving a shortcut to it, but it basically downsamples their ultrasonic sound so that you can hear it. So I could start using this with rats to see if they were making this giggle register. You can see the the sort of signal, the uh in terms of it being at 50 kilohertz, but then hear it yourself. I see. I went with a colleague of mine, Michelle Temple, who's an audio artist and and visual artist as well. And we went to people's houses where they had, you know, their rat pets to get them to be tickled. And we spent literally a couple of years doing this, and I think we ended up with maybe four seconds of material.
SPEAKER_00It was pretty frustrating. When you try to tickle those rats, um, you try to then record the 50 kilohertz. So the sound that we don't hear is what you try to record, but then you would see on the device that it was recording. That's how that works.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. And and I was able to get the same kind of equipment from a guy in in Sweden who was selling this stuff for bat, for bat use, bat detection and bat you know, investigation. So after that frustrating two years, I went back to trying to get Jake Panks up to um, you know, maybe send us some files that we could work with. And sadly, he had passed away. He passed away in 2017 and he didn't didn't answer. So after he died, I also approached his colleague and collaborator, uh Jeff Bergdorf. He actually did send us a huge amount of files on with all of these rat giggles and laughs, and we were just gobsmacked by the gift. And he's like, Here, take this, do what you want. And it was great. And we brought I brought in another colleague, uh Matt Wellens, who is an audio technologist and a composer and musician himself, experimental musician, and he ended up cleaning them up, which was hours of labor to get all the ancillary sounds out of there, and then layer was able to layer them, you know, so they did form this kind of chorus. So we had what we had originally proposed, you know, probably 15 years later. So then it took me a really long time to find a scientist who would agree to let us work with their rats locally. So I did uh at the university where I work, there was a wonderful scientist who, um, Ryan Gilbert, who offered his rats that he'd been using for his own research, for our research as well. This is a practice of kind of, I want to call it scavenging that artists do often in this practice of bioart, because you don't, I don't really want to purchase these rats just for the yeah.
SPEAKER_00So you want them to be available somewhere and that you can then uh use them adjacent to someone else's research.
SPEAKER_01Precisely. Yeah. So he was very generous in donating his rats to us, which are literally just been mothers of pups. The pups were what was of interest to his his research. And the sad thing about, you know, experimental rats used in research is that they are killed at the end of it. And that's their story. So I thought, okay, maybe a little laughter before you die, you know. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Well, I thought it was a happy story, but now it turns out really sorry.
SPEAKER_01Sorry. I shouldn't have ruined it. Um but the thing the good news was we were able to work with the rats um at the animal facility and test this record these recordings with them over two weeks of time, doing it slowly, and with an animal behavioralist sort of watching us to make sure that the rats weren't freaking out and the rats were happy. Okay. And they were ex you know, exhibiting a kind of excitement and curiosity, so so much so that the behavioralist finally said, You guys are on your own, you're doing a great job, they are into it.
SPEAKER_00So you played the chorus, uh, a chorus of rat laughter to other rats and and they noticed yeah, they they responded to it. So there was like a social, a social reply in that sense.
SPEAKER_01Precisely. And we had recorded their responses, but at this point it's very difficult to separate that. So that's still work we have to raise funds for to do. But I'm hoping we can continue with the work. It's it's as you can tell, extremely slow. Yeah, you know, but um here we are, like almost, you know, 20 years later.
SPEAKER_00But it's also very sweet to make rats laugh in the in the short lives that they live in the laboratories, yeah. So yeah, yeah. And so what is it that you want to show or want to to say with this project? Because you are you're doing this from an artistic perspective. There is always a message then if you if you present a work like it, or there's a reason for you to to do this, what is it that you want to say with it? What's the underlying message?
SPEAKER_01There there are really two two different things. One is um to make a people aware of the lives of lab lab rats, the work they do for us, and how much we owe them. You know, we're in debt to them. If you've taken a, you know, a painkiller of any kind or a, you know, Tylenol or something, you've you've probably they're benefiting from a rat, you know, a lab rat or a mouse. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is that this kind of communication that we're learning from not just rats, from many, many, many different animals, um, is really astounding that they have both the capacity to speak in this these other kind of registers we can't understand or hear, but also that they have this link to us through something like laughter. That's making it much more um easy for us to understand both our relationship to these animals and many others out in the animal kingdom. Um, because there's there are these sort of you know, ways that we do the same things, but then also a kind of respect, I hope, for them in terms of their ability to um communicate with sentience, you know, across across to each other.
SPEAKER_00With more feeling towards each other, yeah. Is uh is the word emp empathy is something that comes up for me that we show more empathy um and then if we show that it also means that we can treat them differently, and then like you said, the short lives that they have at least make them fun lives. Is that what you're am I hearing that right?
SPEAKER_01Yes, that's that's right. I think I think empathy sometimes becomes a kind of overused term, and I think that it also there's a way it you know, but I do agree, I think that that's how we um want people to kind of consider n ourselves not just as um exceptional beings. We have been doing that for millennia, but that we're all kind of in this together. So a kind of a kind of empathy, but that develops a kind of respect that equalizes us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's an an interspecies relationship that you're going for.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because I think that I think this is an argument that I've seen, you know, leveled at me anyway. I'm a I'm sort of an an elder now, since I was a child, that you know, animals are beneath us as hu excuse me, as humans. And so if that's the case, you know, how how come they're laughing just like we are? I mean, there's all these questions we have to ask ourselves. So and there are many, as I said, there are tons of examples in the animal kingdom. Us being one us being one of them.
SPEAKER_00And and also why shouldn't they be laughing if we are also laughing? It's like we might have to. And as you said, the foxes too and others. Yeah. I love those videos as well. And I yeah, it's really it's really sweet to see an animal laugh um or giggle, like it's a it's more than a laughter, yeah. It's really that giggle. Yeah. Uh I I'm curious because you are a presser professor of arts, um, but you work in laboratories and you work with scientists. What do you like about this specific work environment um and the people that you work with in that environment?
SPEAKER_01I have really learned a lot from the scientists I've worked with. Um generally, you know, it's it's interesting because you have to form a relationship with the scientists whose lab you're entering. And, you know, I like people a lot. So I I'm very kind of prone to um, you know, becoming friends, friendly friends with the the scientists, and then trying to, you know, ask questions that artists have the capacity to ask, which are sort of more maybe more bigger, more philosophical questions. There's, you know, I'm not a scientist. I literally don't have any science training except uh in these laboratories that I've been sort of investing myself in for the past 20 years. And um, you know, I think that that because of that, there's tons of things that I don't know. I mean, the sciences are vast. Um, I think that artists have a lot more freedom to play with ideas than scientists do because they're on tight schedules, they're on, you know, they have they have requirements from their institutions or industries they work with. And artists do too, but there's they're they're different in their parameters. But I do think that scientists are incredibly creative, on the other hand, much like artists. So I respect them for that. Um, because they're trying to to ask bigger questions about life and and death and what does that mean? You know, and that's those are sort of the same things that I'm asking too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I suppose so so science and then laboratories, yeah, you are you are questioning the status quo because you're doing research, and with research comes questioning, of course. So that I suppose that it's very similar. How do you come across these scientists? Like I I I bet you can't knock on every laboratory and say, Hi, can I do some work with you? How how does this work in this field?
SPEAKER_01Um I mean, in some cases I have gotten lucky, like with Jake Pansept and his colleague Jeff Bergdorf, who responded to me so generously. So that was a knock on the door. Um, but often I meet them through um kind of art and science situations. So, for example, I worked with an autoimmune scientist who was studying the gut microbiome, William DePolo, because I met him at a small conference that uh another colleague of mine had put together for art and science to talk about the gut microbiome from an artistic point of view and then also from a scientific point of view. And I really liked his work and what they were doing at the lab. And I approached him and just said, Hey, would you ever consider having an artist researcher in your lab? And he said he's he paused for a moment and kind of looked at me and he goes, Yeah, why not? Which was really brilliant. And so I spent, you know, quite a bit of time with him in 2016 and and 2017 and 18. And then, you know, we sort of completed some projects and and I moved on. But it was really wonderful. And then another scientist I had some recent incredible um work with was a scientist in um Copenhagen. And I had been lucky enough to receive a a kind of fellowship from the the um medical museum at in Copenhagen that was called the the Metabolic Arts Gathering. There were eight artists who were selected, and I was, you know, it meant that over a year you participated in different workshops. And really fruitful the artists who were participating. That were amazing, as were the curators from the museum. And they introduced us to certain scientists. And one of them was another scientist who was um involved in gut microbiome work at the University of Copenhagen. Manny, are you Mugam? He was really fascinating when he talked about his work. He also had an artificial gut, um, which is uh something I hadn't had heard about, but I hadn't seen this version of it, and I was fascinated by that too. So, you know, we we ended up doing a project together too.
SPEAKER_00I am curious where your curiosity about the gut microbiome comes from. What is it that fascinates you about its and and made you decide to go in that direction of research?
SPEAKER_01Um, that's a great question. I um had been interested in sort of the medical industries since the beginning of my art career because I I I was a filmmaker originally and then I began to get more into um bio art and sort of back to sculptural work that I'd been doing very early on.
SPEAKER_00So what what would you say your medium is at the moment mostly?
SPEAKER_01I think probably I work mostly in in media, in um film and and also sound and you know, digital, digital imaging. Um, but I but it often gets into other things, you know. So I can't I some do performance and uh other things too. So it's that's why I would say interdisciplinary, but yeah, it does come out of media for sure. Okay. Yeah, I got microbiome. I so I had been making films about the position of patients in relationship to the medical mus medical system and uh kind of very critical of that, also from a pharmaceutical sort of view of things and medical view of things. I also real have been um somebody with a chronic disease around the gut, which is Crohn's disease, for most of my life. And so um when there was research being developed around the um fecal microbial transplantation stuff that started probably around early 2000s, I was really fascinated with what this capacity was for us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So what does this transplantation do?
SPEAKER_01What is being transplanted in the fecal microbial transplantation is uh or FMT, as it's often called in the field, um, is some a way that you can take a stool sample from a healthy patient and transplant it into a patient who's sick. And so what it does is um, I mean, it sounds kind of gross.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you're putting another person's poop in another person, basically. Precisely.
SPEAKER_01And it can be done either direction, literally, coming in the mouth or up the butt. And um it it basically repopulates one's gut with the bacteria from the healthy person if you're sick.
SPEAKER_00So it's a bit like how vaccine also works that you're then building like antibodies, or is it different?
SPEAKER_01It's a little different because the there's hope, if that happens, that there it will repopulate your gut if you're missing certain kinds of bacteria. The gut, we don't really know everything about the gut microbiome yet at all. It's very complex. We are learning it has much more to do with our immune system than we ever imagined. And this relationship is very um profound between the gut and the brain. That means our gut is also possibly our other brain.
SPEAKER_00I see. Okay, yeah, yeah. Oh my God. This is really opening up so many doors now. Yeah. So I was fascinated by all of this. I can imagine, yeah. Really fascinated. Um and also something with identity that you're putting in these new bodies in your body.
SPEAKER_01Is that that was a question that I had early on, you know, because I kind of wondered was it like an organ transplant? Because it is kind of complex. It is literally shifting things. Uh, we have stories of people developing cravings for certain kinds of food after they do this process, you know, or or other things that are worse. You can get some kind of disease from the person you've uh sort of an unexpected disease that you didn't want from that, perhaps. So there's a lot of research around this. And as I said, it's still being developed. But, you know, I was fascinated with the field when I first heard about it, completely fascinated.
SPEAKER_00I can imagine. I am too now.
SPEAKER_01Um, and one of the things that I remember having a great conversation with another artist friend of mine, Kira O'Reilly, who was we were talking about this phenomenon, and this was also a long time ago, and like in 2013. And we were talking about um FMTs, and she said to me, Who would you have a FMT with if you could have it with anybody? And I didn't even think, and I responded, David Bowie.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, oh, I'm so happy that you say this. He is our family idol. So I'm I really need to bridge towards saying his name at some point. I'm glad you did.
SPEAKER_01He was one of my idols too, completely, because I was a queer kid, uh even though I didn't know it, I didn't know I didn't even how to define that. And he was just like, Oh wow, look what you can do. I just was so enamored with him for for so long. And um, so I, you know, I did a project called Kathy is Bowie, and I posed as his iconic album cover personas, which we all know are vast. And the one with a lightning, lightning strike on the face. Completely, and and and others, and then I sent them pictures of them too asking would he donate his poop and me to me for exchange, which he didn't answer because it was 2015 when this was done. Oh, and my good friend Eleanor Goldsmith did the photos of it, and her daughter did my makeup, and it was a really family affair. It was wonderful. He he didn't answer, as I said, because it was the last year of his life, and and I didn't know, and most people didn't know. No. And he was trying to finish up his his life's work and and his Lazarus album, yeah. Totally, and a theater piece and and other things. So, you know, I know he was when I when he died, I realized what was what had happened, and and maybe he thought it was silly too. Who knows?
SPEAKER_00I mean, it's uh it sounds silly, but and being an artist himself, he he may have he may have said yes, who knows? Yeah. Uh so what do you think if you if we speculate on this, what what would then this project continue?
SPEAKER_01I I did think that it was this going back to the concept you mentioned earlier of, you know, sort of this transplantation, and you know, people have made um references to having heart transplantation and feeling the other person, you know, the the person's heart as coming from their, you know, that other person's heart, like what did it carry with it? Um, mem what memories, what kind of, you know, histories did it have. And so I I had imagined the same kind of thing happening with David Bowie's um vecal microbial transplant for me, that I would I would get a little insight into him in some way and become a little bit of Bowie. So that was a real hope. So I can't I haven't I haven't done any follow-up on it um since then to to figure out anybody else to do it with because I'm like, no, that was that was the one. He was the one.
SPEAKER_00He was the one, I can imagine. And how would you then present that as artwork? Would you then um like monitor what is happening to you and making a presentation about that?
SPEAKER_01How how would you make that that would probably have been a performance and um you know, and then presented uh in film because you you know it would be a a one-time thing that could be viewed, but then I would probably document it. That's I I actually hadn't thought about that myself.
SPEAKER_00So that is what I would answer you now. I uh want to ask because you just mentioned also the uh the word queer, you being a queer kid, and we're talking about David Bowie. You have this amazing class that you teach called queer ecologies. Um can you tell me a bit a little bit about your the the educates the educative person that you also are? What is it that you educate and what do you like about it? And please tell me about queer ecologies.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, thank you for asking that. I mean, I I you know I try, I used to separate all these things, and now I'm like, oh no, they're all the same thing. They're all kind of part of the same thing. The teaching, the the you know, activism, the the art. I I moved from New York City where I was teaching in kind of liberal arts and arts uh universities, up to this position further outside of New York City in the Hudson Valley at uh engineering and science university, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. And I and I, you know, it was a full-time job, a tenure track job, and I was very interested in that. And but I was also kind of curious, like what would be, you know, what would it be like to just teach engineers and scientists? And as an artist, and they, you know, they had a very heav, very intensely beautiful uh arts department of people who were working with technology, including people like Igor Vamos of the Yes Men and Pauline Oliveras of, you know, who's an amazing uh composer, experimental composer who passed away, and and Brandon Miller, who's a media person, and others. And so, you know, I I I thought, okay, this is a great place to go. So in that time, I had taught lots of different things there, but I ended up moving more deeply into art and biology and art and science. And with that, I realized that I had a a kind of captive audience because the the students, some of them major in art, but some of them are, as I said, you know, doing other disciplines in STEM, um, science, technology, engineering, and and math. You know, to add the art into it would be really exciting. They have to take some of the humanities courses. I started realizing that if I make titles of my classes more interesting and weird, the students were attracted to it. So Biopunk was one you mentioned also. That's a kind of DIY practice of biology and and biohack around biohacking and things. And students read that and they are like, oh, it's partly science. I can take that. And it's the same with queer ecologies. Queer ecologies is a field that's pretty nascent, but it looks at queer theory as part of it, and then also how kind of weird and queer nature really is. So this um as queer people, we have received this message for for decades, centuries, that you know, we're not natural. So we don't fit into nature, our behavior is not natural, which is which would be a heteronormative kind of um to a very binary dictated way of behaving. There's a male and a female, there's a human, you know, there's nature and there's culture. In this field, you begin to see the blurring of those areas, very much so. Because if you look at nature, there are all kinds of species that do amazing things and can either switch their sex, literally, out of demand, and or they they practice a kind of queer love all the time. So, and it's not a mistake, it's it's what they are choice, they have made that choice.
SPEAKER_00But queer queer theory is not just about the the love and the mating part, right? Queer theory is also like you say, it's about putting nature against culture, but then letting the two uh merge as well. Is that yes? You can the queer theory is something you can put on anything that you're not putting as opposites towards each other. Is that how I'm explaining it right?
SPEAKER_01Uh that's yes, that's one way to look at it for sure. And and I think it's also a way to think about things like um people who are who are trans people, people who, you know, have multiple partners, et cetera, et cetera, all these different ways that we expressed ourselves in terms of our sex and our gender, we can we can also see that it's it's happening quote unquote naturally. Um people are born, you know, with two sexes. People are born um, you know, and then and then doctors sometimes make the choice for them, but also people may change their sex later on and as if they transition. So these kinds of questions have been coming up for myself and for other students all the time. And this class gets into artists who are related to the work of this class and and whose work either deals with animals or other other fields that that I bring to them. That's sort of the the thing that I offer. But we also read academics who are writing about this. Um and it's kind of it's kind of a very high level, it's like sort of like a graduate course that is taught like a seminar, and these undergraduates take it and they do quite well. They really excel. I just finished I just finished teaching it for the the last time because I'm retiring from the university at the end of December.
SPEAKER_00So that's sad for all your students, but and me too.
SPEAKER_01Okay, yeah, yeah, I'll miss them, but it's the end of a I you know I've taught for 40 years, so I'm like, okay, that's good. Time to go.
SPEAKER_00That's fair enough. So but but but with this course, uh, I'm I'm calling it a course, but now, but um, is there what where do you then put your artistic hats in again?
SPEAKER_01Like where do you challenge them to be to have an artistic view or how does that so they are asked to make uh to choose early on in the class an animal that expresses this kind of queer ecology, you know, and and so they're asked to do a mask of this animal and then wear the mask for us and perform the animal. And and they really get into it. I mean, and you know, they even do things like mushrooms. Mushrooms have, you know, there's some mushrooms that have 28,000 sexes. So it's kind of astounding. And the students are just, you know, one of the assignments that they keep coming back to then later in the in the semester, because they kind of really get into then what are the creatures that they're looking at and how do they how do they exhibit this kind of queer behavior and what does that mean?
SPEAKER_00I really like that. Um also because you're putting people in a position that they're probably not used to, you know, act acting or performing as an as an animal. Yeah. Well can you remember one that made the most impression on you or some something that you were most excited about?
SPEAKER_01Um a lot of them look at fish. And um, there was a really brilliant one this this past semester, for example, that was a beautiful three-dimensional fish that had, you know, was kind of uh and I give them all the materials to use in class that they can make it with, so they don't even have to spend any money on it. And we watch a film that's kind of related while they're making the the projects. And it's it's quite a fun activity, you know. And I'm and I'm forgetting the name of the fish of the type, but he he performed with this fish in such a way that was so beautiful, like sensual. And I was like, that was great, visually and performatively. So that was one. There's there's lots of others. People do worms, they do snails, they do insects and uh plants, as well as as well, you know, other creatures like penguins. Penguins always a favorite.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_01Well, how is so because they have a funny walk or there's that, but also there's been a lot of media around homosexual penguins. Um and you know, two penguins bonding and taking care of uh an egg and then bringing it, raising it as their own. And so this kind of queer parenting is exhibited, and and there's been examples of this in different countries, and uh people just get very thrilled by it when they see it.
SPEAKER_00Is there in this course for you also is that your activist mind at work as well that you want to send this message of we need to look at ourselves differently and we need to look at the animal kingdom differently?
SPEAKER_01And there's a I I give them a final project that is called How do you take I don't remember the exact title, but it's something like how would you use this the premises of this course for your community? And when I say your community, that can be anything because I don't want them just to make it for the class. I want them to think outside the class and who who do they resonate with? I had, for example, one student who um did a poll of their um colleagues. They were part of a s sorority or fraternity kind of living situation that was queer, but they but they asked their colleagues what did they feel about their situation there? Was it open? Was it safe? Was it, you know, promoting their lifestyles? You know, is there anything we need to change? And sent a survey around to the students to ask them what this what this was like, and then was trying to promote this space as a living space to other people. So she made these painted cards that she would give out to people promoting this, I don't know if it's called a fraternity or sorority, but a living living house on campus. Um, I had other ones who did that even further for the whole university, and it was a project called Queering RPI, and it and it was just the acronym used for my university. And you could fill out a form and say, how is the university responding to your being queer if you are, or queer people in general, well or not well? And then I had other people, one student teaches at a summer camp for kind of teenagers, um, and she's doing a queer ecologies project with them this summer, where she will take different plants and and creatures in their local area where they're having the summer camp and then talk about what their queer life is, which I thought was really beautiful. Another student works with autistic students, and he realized that um these students, but it's over 50%. 50 to 60 percent of uh the statistic he found was that uh 50 to 60 percent of people who are autistic might also be queer, and they don't get much sex sex education at all. So he's he made these little books, which are, you know, for people who are extremely on the spectrum extreme to, you know, just be able to sort of understand how some animals might also be, you know, have this kind of queer behavior. So it's very kind of light, you know, light-handed, but just to begin to introduce this idea to them. So he's gonna try to see if he can show this to the students when he goes to his work.
SPEAKER_00That's beautiful. And a wonderful legacy that you leave as well, that your students pick up this work and they continue with their own projects for communities.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I I'm really impressed with the upcoming generation. I just think that they have a lot of understanding of the kind of climate crisis that we're in, and they also have a deep empathy for, you know, people who are different from themselves, including and it might be queers or they might be queer themselves, but there are students who are not queer in this class who are really respectful and also want to protect their colleagues, which are under assault at this point.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I'm hearing that this this is an activist side of you that is fighting for for queerness. But then you now you you also mentioning climate crisis. Is there also an activist in you that is fighting for the climate? And how to how what does that look like?
SPEAKER_01Um, yeah, so that's another story. We have a lot of time. No. Um I was lucky enough while I was when I moved here to work with some friends of mine who were really, you know, much it's they taught me a lot about activism. And um we we started an organization that was outside the university that was a not-for-profit or kind of like an NGO, um, that uh was about community and also art um and media. And it was called the Sanctuary for Independent Media because we ended up with an old church as the first building that we were in that was really dilapidated, but now it's really beautiful.
SPEAKER_00A sacred space, an old sacred space, the church. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And and we've done we this was 20 years ago when we started. So it's been around a long time. And in that time, we moved from being interested in social justice and and and media as a way of a teaching tool for students and for the community to also include environmental justice. And so, because of my background at that point of in bioart and working with art and science, I was very interested in science literacy for people in general, and then also doing research on our local urban community. So we started an arm of the organization, probably about 12 years ago it started, but we got the official building open for this. It was called Nature Lab, and it stands for North Troy Art Technology and Research in Urban Ecology. That project I'm co director of. Today with uh Ellie Irons is the other co-director, another artist who's interested in these same issues. And we do air research on air, soil, and water. And it's really an amazing project because now the Sanctuary for Independent Media, the parent project, is interested in media, art, and science. So it's a great, it's a great way to have people think about, you know, the climate, climate issues that we have on hand and also um how to start looking at what are the problems and how do we address them, both in terms of a lab. We have a small community laboratory where we do research at biosafety level one, meaning it's very kind of, you know, we can't work with human or animal cells or anything kind of higher.
SPEAKER_00It's a scientific lab with protocols, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, but it's autonomous, it's not part of another institution, it's part of the sanctuary. And um, and then we have a people's health sanctuary as another part of it, another arm of this uh kind of environmental side. And they that came to us from a meeting with the whole community to ask, what do you think of this community lab if we want to do it? And they said, that's great. We like that kind of you know, local research, but we're gonna be digging up stuff about what's in our water and soil and air, and how do we process that? So they wanted a space that was more about healing and you know dealing with trauma, which they face, this particular community faces a lot because it's very much a low-income community and it's very underserved. So um the so we have the People's Health Sanctuary, which offers healing days, it has doctors who work there, um, acupuncturists. We're starting, we have a herbal apothecary, you know, and it goes on. So it's a it's a beautiful, to me, it's it's a joyous project because it really has um touched a nerve for all of us at this point when we have this climate crisis on hand as to how to really dig in and begin to think about mitigation and an effect to change things.
SPEAKER_00And change, yeah. And it's uh this also sounds like a very collaborative project if you mention all these different disciplines that are involved.
SPEAKER_01So many different people working on this. I mean, I can't even list tenth of them. We do have, as you said, we do have scientists. We collaborate with an organization called Riverkeeper, and they test the waters of the river. We we collaborate with lots of different groups and and individuals. So it's it's really quite productive.
SPEAKER_00And so you are the the co-director, but you also still have that background as an art professor. Is this where you also teach art or artistic research?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we have artists, we invite artists to come and do projects with us as much as we can raise money to bring them. And then, yes, we'd give workshops around uh art and encourage the students to do that. We work with high school students primarily in this a lot of the programming. Some of the students that I work with from the university, the graduate students who are doing a PhD in art, might come and work with the students. But then we have other artists from outside who come in and we'll make projects about so many different things like microplastics or you know, listening to your waters, the waterways around us, and you know, all kinds of different things is really great.
SPEAKER_00So this is very much the role of educators still. Um I'm I guess so. Right. I I I mean, as in you are not creating art there yourself. You are um guiding the process of of creating for others, mostly.
SPEAKER_01Mostly. Yeah, I do have a project that we're looking at um, and and we're get beginning to get off the ground, and we have some grants outstanding um to try and develop uh some floating wetlands that will be a kind of mitigating project for the waters that are outside of these pipelines that are called combined sewage overflows that has overflow during heavy rains. So the way the sewer systems work in many parts of our country, they have a divided kind of wastewater system. The way the the pipes are done, it was a very old system built in the beginning of the 1900s where there's a a dividing line between these two halves. Half of the sewage goes to the the treatment plant for that. And then the other half is like the the rainwater that comes in off the streets, you know, or whatever. If it rains a huge amount, which we're getting more and more rains like that, there's an overflow of these two sides. Of these two halves, they mix then. Because the barrier only goes up about three-quarters of the way in the pipe. If that happens, you can get raw sewage into the river, which is where they all dump. That's a problem, you know, as we all know. And so that's where the things called floating wetlands um have this kind of possibility of mitigating some of the toxins that are going to be introduced into the water through uh other kinds of fecal bacteria being introduced, et cetera. And they literally begin to change, you know, they have there's there's projects, I should back up and just say there are projects like this going on all around the country, and they're showing evidence that they really do affect the health of the rivers with these particular kinds of water aquatic plants that can begin to bioremediate and change the profile of the water over time.
SPEAKER_00Right. It's sort of a natural filtering system in a way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, precisely. Yeah, well put. Thank you. And um, and so you know, we're we're hopeful that we we're gonna begin to um develop this uh the summer. We we've already gotten the idea from a colleague of ours who runs a kind of sister organization in a city across from the river. So we're at in Troy, New York, up the Hudson, and he's in Albany, and he runs an organization called Raddox Sustainability Center. Scott Kellogg, and he did this on the Albany side, and we want to expand it. He's part of our research group and do it, you know, with him. I consider this a project that I'm passionate about and and pushing. So I consider this partly a partly an art project in some way. I'll have I'll have the students look at what creatures actually begin to live under these floating wetlands. Who does it protecting from? You know, they they develop roots and tons of creatures like little baby eels and fish and other kinds of even back good bacteria help go into these little undersides and stay there.
SPEAKER_00And like it's their whole stay there and then also contribute to the water ecosystem and making it healthier. Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_01You know, if we can get this to work, I think it'll be really great and then upscale it, you know. But it's a long, it's a really long-term project, I have to say, since um since I think since the pandemic, I've just slowed down and decided, uh, things take as long as they take. You know, things just happen slowly.
SPEAKER_00I suppose so, yeah. I was also asking because I realized that we've been talking a lot about your work as an educator, and we we discussed two projects, but there's so many art projects that you have done. Um, and I realize we like barely touched the tip of the iceberg there. But um maybe maybe you want to share something about an art project that you are excited about yourself that we can still talk about if you have a little, we have a little bit of time left, but just so that people understand the the range of types of art projects that you've done. I mean, this is going way back.
SPEAKER_01I um while I was at Symbiotica, I also did another project um that I that I just was involved with uh yesterday. Um so again, spanning a long time, it it involved a young artist who was um whose name is Pia Intelandi, and she's a fashion designer who was also on residence when I was at Symbiotica. But she was interested in doing her PhD work, which she was finishing up at the time, her PhD, um, because she develops, she's very interested in in death, the the idea of death, and also how we care for bodies as we bury people, the disposition of dead bodies. And she was developing garments for the dead, you know, like what do we wear to get buried in? But particularly the reason she was doing this is because she really wanted to develop garments that could decompose along with the body so that they weren't polyester or dyed or anything that would be kind of negative, um, have negative infect uh uh effect if they went if the the you know kind of desolution of that material went into the ground. I saw this project of hers while I was a resident and got to know her, and I was so impressed with it that I decided to make a documentary about her. And the project was that she was going to work with a forensic scientist, the guy who was then head of the forensic school, and do her garments on pigs that they were burying. And I was like, wait, what? You're gonna bury pigs and beyond just dressing them and burying them, they were gonna dig them up every 50 days to see how the composition was going.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that's that's research. You need to know what's happening. Yeah, it's research and it is gross.
SPEAKER_01So I was just astounded she was doing this. She was quite young at the time. And uh, you know, I was like, that's bold. I love it. Let's document that. That's a project. So I got another colleague of mine, Cynthia. So Pia Interlandi, as I said, was the artist. And I got another artist, um, Cynthia White to come along with me, and we shot it together, filmed it together. And we were in the trenches with it. They we went to visit the little pigs before they were killed at the slaughterhouse because they were going to be killed anyway, because they had hernias and they were kind of going to be made for dog food or something, you know. I was terribly sad, terribly, terribly sad. And Pia was uh is a who was you know a vegetarian, uh, was completely distraught about the whole process, but she was going through with it and she treated the pigs as if they were humans. I mean, she really respected them. She washed everybody, she dressed them, she put a name tag on them so she could identify them individually that way, not just by a number, and and then anointed them with rosemary oil. I mean, it was it was quite a beautiful process and a laborious process. And so I ended up doing a lot of the filming, but but Cynthia White, who was still in Australia, ended up doing the really gross parts. I kind of skipped out of those. And um, we made it made a film about it, and Pia just did a retrospective of this whole project in Australia, in Western Australian Perth, and at Curtin University. And she invited us along with Orin Katz and Yunette Zur and others, their deans, to talk about it, and the scientist Ian, who was there to talk. And and it was quite great. It was quite great to revisit it because I hadn't thought about it for a while. That taught me about the funeral practices that we do and what kind of ecological footprint it has. Um, because from you know, embalming is a really bad practice. Those chemicals go back into the ground and they're quite toxic. And we bury people who are embalmed typically in cement, also not a great idea. There's also cremation, which uses a lot of fossil fuels to burn a body. So she was talking about natural burials also in her practice. Yeah. And now we have, you know, human decomposition, which is um literally composting humans and turning people back into soil or basically compost and then adding that to soil. So you can enrich forests with human bodies. So it's there are all these different practices that I think I feel like Pia opened up to me. And you know, I was very grateful for working with her on that project. It was it was a hard one, but really uh fruitful.
SPEAKER_00I can imagine. And uh so she in the end, she she found a way to have a uh call it a fabric, but it was maybe not made, it was maybe not fabric, uh composting beings.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and decomp decomposing as it was being you know underground. Um she was working with Muslim, and and of course, many other religious practices do this kind of practice already and and had done so for for a long time. Um, Muslims, Jews, you know, we'll take a body and wrap it in something simple and then put it directly into the ground. So she was she was modeling her practice after that, but she was also testing things like buttons. If you do any kind of polyester embroidering, what does that do? How does that decompose? You know, even things like the tags she had on the animals, how how would they decompose or not? So it was it was, and then the the scientist was throwing in things like somebody's wallet, you know, and and look to look at how a wallet or credit cards might decompose. There's a whole field of research that in forensic science that looks at how bodies decompose in general.
SPEAKER_00What was the material she eventually used?
SPEAKER_01Uh I think it that in that project she was working with Muslim mostly, but I think she's still gone on to continue that work into other other kinds of garments and such. And she's actually now a funeral celebrant. She doesn't just make the the the uh I almost called them costumes or not exactly costumes, but the burial clothes. She also walks families through a kind of process of care for bodies and and burial.
SPEAKER_00That's really interesting. And I'm hearing that a lot of your projects come back to you. You're you do like these boomerang projects that you start with something and then decades later they return.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, I think we all have a certain set of things we are kind of begin doing, and then we just keep going with them and we're doing them again and again and again. I think that's kind of human nature. You know, you've got a few things to say and and do in your life, and life is short, and so you just keep going with it, repeating it.
SPEAKER_00I like that. Well, and in repetition, there's also learning, I suppose, in a way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um before we wrap up, we always ask our guests to give us a souvenir from this conversation. Um, I want to ask you if there is something, it can be a theory, a book, or a thought or an act that we can do today. What is it that you would give us?
SPEAKER_01Oh, what a great question. Um I would like to propose that people look at this book that just came out recently by a theorist whose name is Stacy Alimo. She wrote, she's been fascinated with deep sea uh animals and our practices with deep sea, like are we gonna mine and extract everything, or how are we gonna deal with this body of creatures and and entities that we don't really know? So she wrote a book that just came out this year, The Abyss Stares Back. I think that's it. Hold on. Let me just look. Yeah. Yes. The Abyss Stares Back, Encounters with Deep Sea Life.
SPEAKER_00And what is it that's that we that you're taking from this and why should we read it?
SPEAKER_01I really love the way that she talks about how we really need to be invested in our deep seas, um, and that people don't don't really care. We don't really care because we don't really understand. It's very hard for us to understand them. We're not sea creatures, although we came from being sea creatures. How do we make people, and back to your comment about empathy, how do we make people begin to develop a kind of empathy for these kinds of life forms? And so she goes through different examples in the book of things that are not maybe as successful and things that are successful that have been done by artists. And it's really philosophical and but also critical, and it's great. I really like her arguments and the way she talks about it, you know, the whole the our whole need for this kind of concern. So that's that's what I would propose.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for the souvenir and thank you so much for our conversation. I really enjoyed talking. I'm sure we'll talk more in the future, but for now, thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. It was a pleasure, Daphne.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for listening to the Art of Coexistence, a podcast produced by our Cilian publisher, editing by Octo Frumann, music by Mark Oman, and hosted by me, Dr. Fruman. Find us on your favorite podcast app and give us a follow, like, subscribe, andor share, and we'll see you again soon.