Holobiont considers the idea of embodied cognition on a planetary scale, featuring a zoom from the outer space to inside the gut. The video documents Planetary Protection rituals at the European Space Agency and explores extremophilic bacteria in fermented foods as possible distributors of life between the stars. Bacillus subtilis, the nattō bacterium, plays a leading role.

Luciana Parisi: I wanted to talk to you about the panspermia theory. The term seems not only patriarchal but also illusionary to me: a sperm, by itself, cannot produce life. If the sperm doesn't have a body to invade, it dies. Its lifespan is very short. An egg is different. An egg is full potential. It is already there, and all it needs to do is to unfold. I prefer to imagine the beginning of the universe through the theory of parthenogenesis, a reproductive strategy where a female sex cell develops without spermatic fertilization.

Jenna Sutela: The theory of panspermia, literally seeds everywhere, is that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids, and spacecraft in the form of unintended contamination by microorganisms. The term is somewhat misleading, as it doesn't necessarily refer to human seeds, or sperm. In fact, some believe that life was purposefully diffused by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. There is, however, also a group of people who propose "directed panspermia" to secure and expand the human life form by seeding new planetary systems with microbes from Earth. But my video speaks against such an interpretation. For example, I'm portraying the Planetary Protection activities at the European Space Agency as a ritual to get rid of ourselves and let different life on other planets to develop in peace. Also, in the end the egg is there to contrast the sperm—as much as it is a reference to a self-replicating egg shaped biotechnology spacecraft imagined by Freeman Dyson. I love the idea of an egg as full potential! Maybe the theory should be renamed as panovium.

LP: Yes. The egg contains all bodies and all universes. It's like a universe within a universe.

JS: It's simultaneously a whole and a part, like 'holon' according to Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine. The name of my video, Holobiont, stands for an entity made of many species, all inseparably linked in their ecology and evolution. There's also a reference to Ursula K. Le Guin's “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” where she sustains that the first tool in our evolutionary history was not a weapon but a carrier bag. I'm exploring the human body as this carrier bag—a tool for an embodied social commons. In the video, the body opens up to other, foreign bodies, like Bacillus subtilis, the nattō bacterium.

LP: It's fantastic how the woman eats the nattō, or fermented soybeans. This scene feels very parthenogenetic. Here, production is autonomous; it doesn't need to be stimulated by some other intelligent force, like sperm. What bothers me most about using the term 'sperm' is the control that it implies. Unlike bacteria, a sperm is a cell with a nucleus, carrying genetic information. It is on a very specific mission. Instead of asserting that everything can become human, that we can find human life everywhere, or that we can transform human life, I think it's more relevant to focus on constructing spaces where the alien of the human can unfold—such as the embodied social commons that you speak of. The egg has full potential to be reprogrammed by the nattō bacterium.

JS: Also, we were never only human to begin with. Our bodies consist of at least as much bacteria as our own cells. Bacillus subtilis, the bacterium featured in the video, is used to test the limits of life on spaceflights. It's extremophilic, fit to function in outer space—a potential Martian. And it's also present in our microbiomes via nattō, this classic Japanese probiotic considered as a key to long life. What I'm trying to say is that the alien is in us. And it may regulate our thoughts and emotions through the gut-brain connection.

LP: I believe that the human is one alien species among many others that have nothing to do with us, including machines. We still cannot reconstruct the human as a machine. In trying to do this, machines are actually developing cultures of their own. I would like to think of the human, like the machines, as an incident amid the complexity of techno-biological forms. Recognizing a species as alien means that they are not consolidated as eternal. The aliens are temporary. They are always an alien to another. They appear and disappear.

JS: While we're here, among other organic and synthetic alien species, we should focus on developing a culture based on some notion of interspecies symbiosis rather than the survival of the fittest narrative.

LP: To think of the human as an expanding and mutating carrier bag is definitely something to start from. Through this image, we can also start thinking about ways to program the embodied social commons.

Credits

Jenna Sutela, Holobiont, 2018

Video, 10'27''

Featuring: Tarren Johnson, Nile Koetting, Ming Lin, and Colin Self

Planetary Protection: Gerhard Kminek and Life, Physical Sciences and Life Support Laboratory at the European Space Agency

Ferments: Markus Shimizu

Camera and Video Editing: Mikko Gaestel

Sound Editing: Martti Kalliala

Recording: Ville Haimala, Adam Laschinger, and Gold Mountain

Supported by Kone Foundation and expanding on a performance for Serpentine Marathon 2017. Thank you Ella Plevin and Elvia Wilk for linguistic support.