Jenna Sutela in conversation with Perwana Nazif

Salon de Normandy was organized by The Community and powered by Novembre.global, as a free-to-visit and free-to-exhibit-by-invitation initiative at Hotel de Normandy in Paris, held between October 17 and 20, 2019. The salon is a gathering of an international community of galleries, exhibition spaces, projects, collectives, publishers, and labels inside the 150 years old hotel.

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PAN’s screening series for the multidisciplinary salon, Salon de Normandy, which included international galleries, exhibition spaces, projects, art publishers, and fashion collectives along with experimentally-inclined music labels, included Jenna Sutela’s audio-visual work nimiia cétiï (2018). The video deals with communication with and within interspecies such as machines, bacteria, and Martians. Much of Sutela’s practice deals with language amongst various living organisms, be that a computer or bacteria found in your gut.

In nimiia cétiï we see transitions from what looks like a video of Mars to a red screen filled with scrawls that appear to be words or sounds or neither and both. The abstracted bacteria, its movement, and the computer’s interaction-translation with it follows the Deleuzian idea of the bringing out of something new via the absence of image that we see with blank, black, or white screens in films. Although the abstracted form of the bacteria and its movement here may be more inherent than intentional, it opens up the vast possibilities of forms of communication.

Within our online chat through gmail, a new experiment for both Sutela and myself, I also saw this interspecies communication: my words translated and interfacing with my computer with Sutela and her own computer. This is precisely what Sutela works on amongst other things, language and technology—something we seem to take for granted given that much of our communication amongst ourselves happen with rather than through machines. Sutela’s advocacy for new approaches that decenter the human can actually be quite exciting for our communication amongst each other and the future of communication outside of the human.

Hi, Jenna! How are you?

Hi! I'm good, how are you?

Would you be down to begin the interview by talking about that work that was screened at the salon?

I'm great, eager to begin!

Yes!

So, nemiia cetii is a work that explores interspecies communication, particularly that of an extremophilic bacterium (Bacilius subtilis!)

along with machines/computers, martians via French medium Helne Smith,

and, arguably, humans through the filtering or mediating of the Martian language through Helene Smith

and then voiced by you

Can you tell me more about the reasoning behind the specific choices of species for your documentation?

Yes, so the Bacillus subtilis bacterium is the main ingredient of nattō, or fermented soybeans—a classic Japanese probiotic considered a secret to long life

According to recent spaceflight experimentation, it can also survive on Mars

So it might be an actual Martian that's now also living in our stomachs

Hélène Smith was a late 19th century French medium

She claimed to communicate with Martians

Woah, that's so sublime….

What I found curious about Smith's Martian was that it's also known as the first documented form of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues

Does glossolalia only refer to speaking in tongues for alien species?

Or is it a more general term?

Also for humans

Such a great term

I know, love it

On a similar sort of track I wanted to ask about the AI aspect of the work

It can been as and extension of us, meaning human, via mediation

or as you have put it before, because it is created by us

Would you count it, AI, I mean, as a separate species here that we have traditionally viewed through an anthropocentric lens

meaning projected human behaviors and ideals onto

or truly an extension of the human?

Or neither!

Yeah

Working with machine learning, I've learned that intelligent machines should be approached on their own terms, not anthropomorphizing them too much

There's an interesting link between the project of talking with aliens and the problem of talking with machines—we built at least some of the aliens ourselves and now the challenge is to understand their non-human condition

And they play such a big role in our lives, too

Working as our interlocutors and infrastructure

For example, the black box problem in machine learning means that it's sometimes hard to explain how an AI has come to its conclusions

How can one approach this without creating some sort of hierarchy? I mean is it even possible as humans to be able to approach another species in non-human terms?

Oh, that's a good way to begin what I just asked, haha!

I think it's impossible

Yeah, exactly I see it in the way that I see total empathy as also impossible

Working with text, or narrative on the one hand and microbes on the other, I'm constantly challenged by communication

Trying to find a means beyond language for some kind of an interspecies collaboration

Or even nonverbal language for instance I imagine

Yeah, I've started by trying to break language (as we know it) apart in collaboration with the microbes

Tell me more about what breaking language would mean!

Is it similar to your gut machine poetry project?

Gut-Machine Poetry and also nimiia cétiï

In Gut-Machine Poetry, the idea is to introduce entropic processes into computing by inserting fermenting foodstuff into the guts of a computer

I made a homebrew computer, operated by a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast and producing a new kind of language

So both the organic and the synthetic creatures are present

In nimiia cétiï, a computer is watching footage of the Bacillus subtilis bacteria under a microscope and generating a script, or calligraphy based on an analysis of what it sees

Imagine a pen suspended from a long piece of string, resting on paper that's slowly sliding sideways

Raw force from the movements of the bacteria knocks the pen around, leaving marks on the paper

It's such a poetic and innovative way to see language, communication, poetry

I wonder if this has had any implications for your own use of language/communication in the everyday at all

even amongst humans

Thank you

Hmm, I'm definitely using language in strange ways—also because I'm a native Finnish speaker mainly operating in English

Translation is always a great practice!!

Ha, yeah—I feel like I'm doing that all the time

I mean it seems like you are creating a new genre of poetry/language here with your work

Would you agree?

One could say that

Like microbial poetry cultures or something

I'm already thinking about how poets like CAConrad would be implementing a sort of fermented poetics into their work and even their rituals

yes!

I'm not sure if you are familiar with their rituals, but they offer various daily rituals in order to spark their creative process with writing (and thinking)

I'm certain you would have some great ones too....

I love CAConrad's rituals!

I love the ritual where you are supposed to sit in a bucket in front of your door and not answer the door after asking your friend to ring it

Yes

Shifting gears, I'd love to talk more about the audio in the video because you released the recordings separately as well!

I've actually watched the work many times through without the sound and I wonder what sort of experience you anticipated with just the sound

exclusively

Yeah, the machine learning in nimiia cétiï is very much sound focused and I recently released the Bacterial-Martian sounds as a record, nimiia vibié, with PAN here in Berlin

The audio interacts with the bacterial movements—what you can hear is the computer reorganizing or mimicking Smith's early Martian language

A network trained on my voice looks at each frame of the video and produces a short block of sound that it thinks matches that frame, or the configuration of bacteria in it

Additionally, I worked with the contrabass recorder player Miako Klein and the flautist Shin-Joo Morgantini to sort of breathe life into the machine

I love that rather that producing some sort of hierarchy with translation this is a sort of symbiotic relationship, more of an interaction between the two than one being active and one being passive

Wow

That's what I'm aiming towards

Continuing with that line of thought, I'd love to conclude by asking you about any poets or poetry we should be reading

You would have great recommendations....

I would've probably mentioned CAConrad, particularly because of the rituals

🙂

I'm a fan

Thanks for chatting about the work and your practice, I'm eager to hear about new projects!

Thanks for having me!

It's funny because as we are chatting about language I can see that I've been making typos and this chat itself is also a study on language and communication along with our conversation

Thanks again

🙂

Bye!

;)

Bye bye!