Interspecies Artistic Research Strategies: Biosemiotic Methods and Open-Source Network Technologies

Abstract

Today, most people spend their lives online: browsing social media, watching cat videos, etc. Some consider this a parallel activity—not part of their ‘real’ life. But the truth is that today those whose brains have been rewired through their interaction with these technologies are in fact constructing their reality through these systems of representation. One could argue that they seem so intimately attached to those images that even their reality seems post-produced (Steyerl, 2017). On the other hand, this new collective subjectivity offers new possibilities, as they promote the idea that today—as Joseph Beuys predicted—everyone can be an artist (2004), thus assigning a new role to internet shared images and their producers. The challenges that arise from these scenarios are: Can we embrace the creative potential of these apparently meaningless daily activities as the rich material for new collaborative narratives? Can we benefit from these collective productions to promote new bioethical discourses, or might this perhaps add another footstep towards a new becoming media? This paper will develop these arguments and present the results of the author’s formal artistic research based on open-source network technologies as the material-discursive tool for the articulation, promotion and distribution of collective singular intimate interspecies explorations in a 'new aesthetic' paradigm.