This performance is taking place within the PEEK research project "The Performative Biofact" of the University
of Applied Arts.
This performative installation touches upon the millennia-old question about
the materiality of language and the creation of the world through it. It incorporates the current research on the holobiont,
which shows our dependency on the living microbes that form our inner ecosystem.
Can we train this system by speaking
certain words? The installation explores this in showing the mutuality of the phonemes and oral flora of the visitors through
speech-induced variation in salivary acids. In the resulting ecolinguistic system, the visitors are “spoken by their microbiome.”
This system is trained by pheromone addition based on spectrogram patterns until it is epigenetically anchored in the visitors’
oral microbiome and finally output as a speaker-generated designer probiotic.
Project Credits:
- Medical
University Vienna
- University of Applied Arts Vienna
- Austrian Science Fund
- Jürgen Ropp (Interface design)
- Joseph
Knierzinger (Media-Arts)
- Katherina T. Zakravsky (Ecolinguist)
- Mark Rinnerthaler (Cell Biology)
