The Sound of Microbes

Humans have long had a love-hate relationship with microbes – fighting the ones that cause disease, while nurturing the ones that make our food taste delicious. But recent research suggests that the picture isn’t so black and white – the mixtures of microbes living on and in us are vital to our wellbeing in complex and surprising ways. In this podcast your host Louise Whiteley takes you to visit holistic health coach Adina Beer, chef David Zilber, philosopher Joana Formosinho, scientist Mani Arumugam and artist duo Baum & Leahy, asking them: how we can listen to what microbes have to tell us about our health and food systems, about cultivating care across species and societies? The podcast series is produced for Medical Museion, supported by a Velux Foundation Core Group award for ”Microbes on the Mind” and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR) at the University of Copenhagen. Produced by Marie Chimwemwe Degnbol and Cecilie Glerup Music by Andreas Markus Appearing in the podcast: Louise Whiteley, Adina Bier, David Zilber, Joana Formosinho, Mani Amurugam, Rose Leahy and Amanda Baum. Correction: In the podcast, François-Joseph Lapointe, Rose Leahy and Amanda Baum are mentioned with mistakes in their names; we apologize deeply.

Sensing Holobiont: Flavourful Rituals for Metabolic Companions (2023)

• Holobiont = A holobiont is a collection of closely associated species that have complex interactions, such as a plant species and the members of its microbiome.^[2][9] Each species present in a holobiont is a biont, and the genomes of all bionts taken together are the hologenome, or the “comprehensive gene system” of the holobiont.^[10] A holobiont typically includes a eukaryote host and all of the symbiotic viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc. that live on or inside it.^[9]

Welcome hungry holobionts, assemblages of microbial and human cells. Micro and macro oddkin: Odd in size, kin in cometabolism. Let your billion mouths body absorb this world of symbiotic becomings, taste its potential and digest it into new and tender recipes for reciprocity.

Combining novel gastronomy, interactive installation and microbiome research, Sensing Holobiont explores the vital connections among species, bodies, food and the environment. Taking cues from the growing movement in the sciences to recast multicellular organisms as ‘holobionts’ the work asks: How might a multisensorial ceremony help us to recognise and realise our holobiont selves? And how might this realisation change our relationship to our bodies, to eating, and to planetary health?

Watch video teaser

A holobiont is an ecological unit consisting of a ‘host organism’ – animal, plant or fungi – and the associated microbes, viruses and smaller holobionts living in and on it. While implications of the ecological, evolutionary and daily dynamics of holobionts are being increasingly studied, Sensing Holobiont invites us into a shared exploration of the flavourful complexities of being multispecies consortia.

Sensing Holobiont is a work by artist duo Baum & Leahy in collaboration with culinary researchers Kim Wejendorp & Dr Joshua Evans. PhD fellow Joana Formosinho and Professor Rob Dunn contributed conceptual and scientific input, following from their collaboration with Baum & Leahy on Cometabolise: A Holobiont Dinner in 2021. Associate professor and curator Louise Whiteley facilitated both projects under Microbes on the Mind at Medical Museion, and contributed to conceptual development. Project coordinators: Cecilie Glerup and Simone Cecilie Pedersen, Co-creating assistant: Ella Yolande, Creative Producer: Anna Firbank, Soundscape: room 1: Ella Yolande, main room: Sofie Birch. Biomaterials: Natural Material Studio. Custom glass bowls: Adam Aaronson.

• talking of microbes… I’m xciting about the sort of sound design to relate to them?
• this song was playing which I have been looking at these projects: https://open.spotify.com/track/71ME5y5t4pVJJKm7vyIUzs?si=39cce6b1070a4618

One proposed solution when facing social-economic problems is to make existing technologies and systems adaptable by introducing biological principles. From self-replicating products to complete infrastructures, organic mass will become an integral component in upcoming decades.

Following this thought of a biological driven industry, the standard of our current economic value exchange system will shift from gold to phosphate.

As one of the key elements in biological life, phosphate is required in a wide range of different aspects, such as the construction of DNA and RNA molecules and the activation of the cell’s energy cycle. Once everything will be organic, the depletion of this vital resource will accelerate and in this process become a currency for economic transactions.

Centred around new achievements in synthetic biology the goal of this project is to create and communicate a scenario of an economy that is based on phosphate.

• an economy based on phosphate….
• what if it was an economy based on nutrients…

Look towards Heavens, an immersive installation conceived for planetary-style projection methods and inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘To the Planetarium’. Within it, Benjamin mournfully comments that the development of astronomical technology has brought about the death of the cosmic experience of the ancients: the more we see, the less we sense; the more we know, the less we conceive.

TECHNOLOGICAL ACCIDENTS, ACCIDENTAL TECHNOLOGIES Joke Brouwer & Sjoerd van Tuinen

Like Nature, Technology is one of our most dangerous words. It’s a metaphysic, a narrative prime mover endowed with supernatural powers.

Such words are never innocent. They are never just words. They are guiding threads for the rulers. For the rest of us, they’re everyday folk concepts. These concepts shape what we see and what we don’t see, what we prioritize, and what we ignore.1 Importantly, they not merely describe the world; they license and guide modern ways of organizing power and re/production. They have real force in the world, because of what they mystify, and because of what they enable. Such ideas present themselves as innocent. They are anything but.

These ideas are ruling abstractions.2 They are ideological constructs that have made the modern world, a kind of software for the “hard” mechanisms of ex-ploitation and extirpation.

Such abstractions are dangerous for two reasons. First, they appear in our imaginaries as agentless forces of history: they are brain erasers for world-his- torical memory. They seem to have “lives of their own” – which they emphatically do not.3 For over a century, these abstractions have seduced the political left no less than centrist and “eco-modernizing” techno-fixers. Technology is par- ticularly tempting; it easily becomes an “idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary development but as an end in itself, almost as a kind of religion.”4

Second, the danger extends beyond false consciousness. Ruling abstractions are material forces, not just ideas but belief structures.5 They are developed, used, and periodically reinvented by the imperial bourgeoisie and their intelli- gentsias to practically reshape the world in ways favorable to the endless accu- mulation of capital. Ruling abstractions are the building blocks of hegemonic ideologies that trickle down to the folk concepts of everyday life. From the Levellers to Blockadia, radical movements have challenged these abstractions. But they must also live with the contradictions – as Orwell underlines. When Lenin moved from the furious denunciation to the critical acceptance of Tay- lorism and Fordism after 1917, he was doing what all revolutionaries must do: wrestle with the contradictions of capitalism.6 Those contradictions are far more than mechanical.7 They are ideological, social, biological, cultural … and plan- etary.

Sometimes demon, sometimes savior, the ruling abstraction Technology conjures something mystical, outside of history yet relevant to it. Its power is the alchemist’s illusion: the magical notion that machinery will produce something out of nothing. My uppercase emphasizes the double register of both Nature and Technology: as ruling abstractions, central to modern mythmaking, and as material processes of power, profit and life. Disentangling and resynthesizing the two moments – the ideological and the material – is difficult.

But these ideas are conceptual hammers of imperial rule and its false promise of Progress. As abstractions, they have material consequences. To liken the web of life to a machine, or the biosphere to a spaceship, is not merely an intellectual problem but a political and ideo- logical project.11 The responsibility of radical critique in the climate crisis is to lay bare the interpenetrating relations of class power, ideology and the forces of production in the web of life. How one thinks about Technology – and there- fore Nature – is fundamental to one’s world-historical conception of the crisis and its origins, and therefore essential to one’s political assessments, “environ- mental” and otherwise.

The dominant intellectual and ideological view fragments the world into discrete concept boxes: Nature, Society, Economy, Technology, Race, whatever. The fragmented worldview – deeply indebted to the Cartesian primacy of parts over wholes – leads to interpretations of the climate crisis through causal plu- ralism, systems theory, and generalized schemes of interactivity rather than dia- lectical interpenetration and totality. In such approaches, parts trump the whole – or the whole overwhelms the parts (two sides of the same epistemological coin). The result is an intellectual and ideological impasse that fails to do what any radical climate critique must: identify the emerging “weak links” in the chains of imperial power and class exploitation in the unfolding planetary crisis.12

why do we still mines copper?

Copper conducts electricity, bends easily, and is recyclable – which makes it a critical material for most forms of renewable energy, from wind and solar to electric vehicles. But when “clean energy” relies on the extraction of metals like copper, it can also pollute the surrounding environment.

Companies dig huge holes into the ground, going deeper than the water table. Heavy machinery kicks up dust, polluting the air. Chemicals are used to leach the mineral out of ore, and exposed water is forever contaminated. Some operations, like Freeport’s Tyrone mine, will have to pump water in perpetuity, even after there is no longer copper to be found, so that contaminated water from the mine site doesn’t flow back into the wider water table.

As demand for copper increases, local employment could grow.

• life cycle analysis of copper in iphone… could look up youtube of extraction of copper from e-waste or something….

• how much copper is there in an iphone, what do they do to copper to get it into the circuit board…

Copper is a tried and tested material – used since Roman times. It has excellent anti-bacterial qualities. On test, after 7 days of immersion in water, 80% of stainless steel and plastics were coated in a biofilm, while copper showed little or no biofilm. Biofilms are harbingers of E.coli 0157 and other microbiological bugs and pose a significant threat to human health. In a recent article Copper is called the Vital Element of Life – “Copper could be more important to the health of an unborn baby than folic acid, giving up smoking or abstaining from alcohol, say, scientists. Trace amounts of copper are present in all body tissues. It is needed to process oxygen, generate energy in cells, allow the nervous system to transmit signals, grow blood vessels and develop skin, tendons and hair.”

Panning back to the beginnings: flint, of the silicate mineral family and thus a salt, is not only the first tool used by man- and womankind to carve, cut, and dig, but is, more than thirty thousand years ago, also the first substance to be actively mined (an early indication of the circular spiral of our silicate dependency).

Jump-cut to our present-day obsession with silicon and its uncanny valley: birthplace of the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, home and HQ of countless Fortune 1,000 businesses, a lot of capitalism, and a growing hamlet of neural networks. The metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistor, or MOSFET, was invented in 1959 and has since become the most widely manufactured device in our history, ushering in the Silicon Age.

Method of finding things, often hidden or underground, with a simple device such as forked stick or a pendulum. The dowser holds the tool and watches or feels for movement that indicates the sought material or obiect. Perhaps most commonly known as a way to find underground water sources, dowsing has also been used to find petroleum, gas, and other minerals; lost obiects; locations of secret treasures or mines; and even missing people-although most dowsing is performed for nonliving things. The common image of a dowser is that of a man holding out before him, by its forks with stem pointing ahead, a Y-shaped stick or “divining rod” and walking around until the stick quivers and points downward. The place pointed to is where the water or other object of the search may be found. Good dowers are said to be able to tell how deep the water is and to gain a general impression of quantity from the way in which their stick moves.

Not all dowers use forked sticks. Some use a pendulum suspended from a thread or chain. The pendulum is allowed to hang straight down and is often held over a map. When the pendulum begins to move, it leads the dower to his or her object. Other things may also be used as dowsing tools; it is thought that the power of the technique rests not so much in the tool as in the user. Some dowsers use no tool at all.

Dowsing has been done for centuries. Recorded descriptions of it go back at least as far as ancient Egypt, and it was commonly used as a way to find water and other things until the 20th century, when scientific skepticism dismissed it. Most scientifically minded people consider it more of a superstition than a true detecting technique. Even so, some petroleum companies, govern-ments, and water-well drillers still use professional dowers today to help them in their work. It is extremely expensive to dig oil and water wells, so employing a dower may be considered adding to the probability of the accuracy of the geological reports. Some claim that dowsers are more accurate than geological reports.

One explanation for dowsing is that the dowser, more sensitive or more perceptive than others to subtle energies emanating from different elements, is able somehow I° tune in to the energies from the sought object; the dows ing tool may enhance and focus this energy for the dowser. One problem is the apparent subjectivity of the craft: Different dowers use radically different methods and often arrive at different conclusions. This inconsistency, along with the inability of science to verify the supposed subtle energies, calls dowsing into question. Skeptics suggest that dowers who do find water, oil, or treasure have merely been lucky.

Another term for a dowser is “water witch,” reflecting the historical view that dowsing is a paranormal ability akin to witchcraft and occult divining.

For further reading: Christopher Bird, The Divining Hand (E. P. Dutton, 1979).

Derived from the Arabic al-kimia, the Egyptian art that strove to change substances from the known and commonplace to something other in the attempt to uncover universal secrets. It began in ancient China and was practiced in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe for millennia until it gave way to modern science about 400 years ago. It was based originally on the idea that everything was made up of four elements earth, air, fire, and water– -mixed in different proportions in different sub-stances; changing their proportions would change the substance, also known as transmutation. Medieval alchemists searched to uncover the following universal secrets:

1. the elixir of life, which would confer immor-tality;
2. the panacea, which would cure all ills;
3. the philosopher’s stone, which would turn base metals into gold; and
4. the alkahest, which would melt anything and be very useful in experiments and also in war.

Although regarded with some disdain today, the work of the experimental alchemists should not be dismissed lightly. In their searches they heated, pounded, mixed and tested everything they could find and in doing so discovered much about many different materials; they established many of the chemical processes

• distillation,
• fusion,
• calcination,
• solution,
• sublimation,
• putrefaction,
• fermentation
  that we take for granted today. They accumulated expertise and knowledge that formed the basis for much of modern chemistry.

However, there was one striking difference between the new mechanical philosophers and the older alchemists: The mechanical philosophers were opposed in principle to secrecy and increasingly adopted a conception of knowledge as something for the public benefit. They believed that everything should be published and open to public scrutiny. In this way obscurities and mistakes could be exposed and eliminated in critical public discussion. One figure in this story is especially interesting Isaac Newton, perhaps the most famous natural philosopher of the 17th century or any century. His achievements are taken as paradigms of scientific research. His published work was disciplined in method nothing was claimed that had not been argued for by a combination of induction and deduction, the latter modelled on the deductive method of geometry.

• I’m seeing a correlation between alchemist secrecy and modern corporate opacity – lacking transparency.
• inductive vs deductive reasoning in geometry – the former is coming to conclusions based off observations while the latter is coming to conclusions based on pre conceived facts.

In his private life, however, Newton was deeply interested in alchemy. He took copious notes on alchemical books and manuscripts and he carried out prolonged and detailed experimental studies, believing that his own experiments would be most productive if they proceeded in conjunction with the study of records of the ancient past.

As part of his natural philosophy, Newton was interested in the interactions of very small particles, knowledge of which he believed to be hidden in allegorical form in alchemical writings. It was the most mythical alchemical writings that he thought were the most important to study as these were thought to represent the oldest part of alchemy.

Newton’s studies and experiments provided important insights into what was and was not possible by alchemical manipulations. Nevertheless he never published anything directly concerned with alchemy.

Today we tend to regard alchemists as “knaves and impostors,” happily now a thing of the past. However, like Newton and the contemporary mechanical philosophers, we should draw a distinction. There were two distinct groups: the genuine seekers after knowledge to whom today’s scientists are indebted for their contributions to scientific understanding, and the rogues and villains who exploited claims to secret knowledge for their own ends, the pseudoscientists of their day.