Conversations between artists—since 1981

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Jenna Sutela by Cassie Packard

Art that expands the definitions of consciousness and time.

September 11, 2023

For Jenna Sutela, the world is “made of brains.” Devoted to the exploration of nonhuman and more-than-human forms of cognition, the Finnish-born, Berlin-based artist works across artificial intelligence, language, sound, and biological materials, including slime molds and gut bacteria, to challenge the narrow understandings of consciousness that scaffold anthropocentric systems of value and meaning. In New York City, Sutela is presenting a compost heap that powers oracular statements; in Helsinki and Copenhagen, she is exhibiting a bronze fountain that doubles as a musical instrument tuned into cosmic and oceanic sounds. Sutela and I discussed the importance of noninstrumentalized technological thought, the wisdom of compost, and cohabitation in deep time.

—Cassie Packard

Cassie Packard Your work facilitates encounters between different kinds of consciousness. You often knot microbial, computational, and extraterrestrial forms of intelligence; for example, I am thinking of nimiia cétiï (2018), for which you trained a neural network on the movements of extremophilic bacteria and the glossolaliac “Martian” of Swiss spiritualist Hélène Smith. Can you speak a bit about your desire to open lines of communication among seemingly disparate modes of cognition?

Jenna Sutela The world is not limited to human meaning. With my work I often seek to escape human imaginaries and focus on the open system of a planet that’s not our own. I’m always looking for ways to sense the world beyond language as we know it. Even from the human perspective, the cortex is not the limit of our consciousness. The human body is an assemblage of motley life forms interacting at multiple scales. Gut bacteria contribute to our thinking and being. There’s always this entanglement of human and nonhuman intelligences.

As much as nimiia cétiï was about communicating with our bacterial overlords by giving them some kind of a voice that we could hear, it was also about getting in touch with the nonhuman condition of the intelligent machines around us that in the process of working on this project proved to operate according to their own logic entirely. And, maybe most importantly, the project was about the machines getting in touch with the more-than-human world around them.

CP What role does the search for a new or common language play in your larger project?

JS I guess it’s mostly about opening out intelligence to consider forms that are machinically beyond human, as well as organically multispecies or cosmically other. So many forces within our lives outpace our available language to parse what’s at hand.

Someone once described the work of the late poet, artist, and architect Madeline Gins—one of my major art icons—as an exercise to forget language with its mechanisms that structure us vis-à-vis the world, and so stutter our way to divinity. Gins’s writing was all about gaps, leaps, and collaborations—some kind of a softening of language. It’s interesting how there’s a messiness or fuzziness about the language generated by large language models too. One could see it as lossy or intelligent: “a blurry JPEG,” as Ted Chiang described ChatGPT in The New Yorker, of the original text or a sign of computational logic that surpasses our existing vocabularies.

CP What occasioned your first collaboration with biological material, and how has your approach to working with living media evolved over the years?

JS It was really my encounter with the slime mold, a so-called biocomputer, that paved the way for more biological experiments after my training in sound and media art. I then moved on to working with even smaller organisms, namely bacteria, getting obsessed with the gut-brain connection. Creating works with living matter is like creating a laboratory. Organisms need a habitat: not just an installation but an architectural space. I’ve built mazes for slime mold and a bubbling fountain for synthetic human milk, among other things. Most recently, I made a vermicompost-based earth battery, Vermi-Sibyl (2023). Projects like these make the collision of natural and artificially constructed space very felt. They also introduce chance or chaos into the artworks.

CP Let’s talk about that compost-based piece, Vermi-Sibyl, which is currently on view at the Swiss Institute. In the work, energy is derived from food waste contributed by the art organization’s employees. Composting and fermentation—the latter of which drove your project Gut-Machine Poetry (2017), which used wetware to generate text—have recently been held up as generative practices that center collectivity and symbiosis. How are you thinking about these processes and their import?

JS The project is inspired by a character I remember from my own childhood, Marjory the Trash Heap from The Muppets/Fraggle Rock, which are shows that also feel very New York to me. Marjory is a large, matronly, sentient compost. She sees all and knows all. In fact, Marjory is all: “I’m orange peels; I’m coffee grounds; I’m wisdom!” She serves as an oracle to the Fraggles, and her aim is for them and other species to come together in harmony. The compost heap is a microcosm of the cycle of life: the end and the beginning, the past and the future. A realm of infinite potential. Organic matter releases electrons as it decomposes, and I’m using them to power a kind of an oracle that, in Marjory’s voice, imparts wisdom related to the cycles of compost life. I’ve become very interested in low tech. For example, there’s this website that runs on solar power. Sometimes, when it’s not sunny where the server is located, it goes offline. Scarcity and endurance seem important. Likewise, learning to live with the idea that not everything can or should always be readily available to us, which means living closer to the cycles of the wider environment.

CP Akin to the compost pile, your I Magma (2019) series involved prognostication, as blown-glass lava-lamp heads delivered divinations via a phone app. I’m curious about the intersection of the occult and the biological or technological in your work, and what aspects of our relationship with these phenomena you might be critiquing or drawing out.

JS I Magma addressed the ways in which machines reach outside of themselves for true randomness through the esoteric history of using lava lamps as random-number generators. But I turned this around and had a neural network trace patterns, signs, and meaning in the blobs of liquid and color in motion inside the lava heads, which are also my neuroplastic portraits. The idea of machine-generated divinations draws from the origins of binary code in the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who discovered the language of computing, was influenced by this ancient Chinese divination system. He argued that all matter can be represented as ones and zeros, or, as it was expressed in the I Ching, yin and yang. It’s important to understand yin and yang as complementary rather than opposing forces. They interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Instead of binaries, in computing as in other areas of life, I think infinities would be a better term.

By focusing on the mystical in computing, I want to hold space for noninstrumentalized technological thought. I want to focus on things-in-themselves, beyond their use value. And since you asked about biology, I’m often thinking about how we’re actually some kind of spirit mediums channeling our gut bacteria. I guess I’m generally preoccupied with the unknown and the otherworldly in both organic and synthetic forces that shape our lives.

CP Sound has featured particularly prominently in your recent work. The synthetic human-milk fountain HMO nutrix (2022) was accompanied by biomimetic song, and your commissions for the Helsinki Biennial and Copenhagen Contemporary involve bronze, water-filled instruments that produce chains of sound, including cosmic reverberations, which in turn made me think of Pauline Oliveros’s 2000 manifesto Quantum Listening: “We already see and hear far into outer space and into micro space.” What does the aural, specifically, open or make available to you?

JS I spent the winter playing and studying an instrument called Wasserspringschale, or “spouting bowl,” which is what my vibrating, rainwater-filled bronze sculpture takes after. In the spirit of HMO nutrix, it is simultaneously an instrument and a fountain. Its shape is reminiscent of a head, an open one, and I’ve called it Pond Brain after the “alt” cyberneticist Stafford Beer’s idea about a pond ecosystem as a homeostatic controller. Like him, I’m interested in systems open to the wider environment: a world made of brains. In addition to producing vibrating overtones, interaction with the object, namely rubbing it, creates patterns on the surface of the water inside. As the sonic vibrations increase, water droplets start to bounce up from the surface.

In the context of this work, I’ve also been training an artificial neural network with sounds and sonifications from outer space and under the sea, among other places. The network will sort of tune into the sonic frequencies from the sculpture and play back an array of otherworldly resonations. Oliveros’s Tuning Meditation, first performed in 1981, is certainly inspiring here. I’ve also been looking into synthesizers that generate sounds by simulating the physical properties of something fantastical. Imagine the sound of an instrument body the size of the Earth or a string so long that it could reach Mars from here.

Zooming in, in the past years I’ve also been exploring the sonification of microscopic, even nanoscale phenomena in science. Observing life by listening instead of only looking: this makes a lot of sense to me.

CP How are you thinking about futurity in your work?

JS I like the explanation of futurity in the dictionary as renewed existence. I think it was Carl Sagan who called us transitional creatures at some vague, intermediary position between the primeval mud and the stars; and this was on the day after the birth of his child. I’m all about cosmological narratives in which we share a place with each other and other life forms in a broader, open system and on a deep timeline.

Jenna Sutela’s work can be seen in the Helsinki Biennial 2023 in Helsinki until September 17; Sutela’s work can also be seen in the group exhibition Yet, It Moves! at Copenhagen Contemporary in Copenhagen until December 30, and in the group exhibition Spora at the Swiss Institute in New York City until March 10, 2025.