what an elementary thing it is to worship someone in singularity, 2021

This work, “what an elementary thing it is to worship someone in singularity” is part of Lichenizing, a collective strategy created by the Submergence Collective that uses the model of lichen-lifestyles to better approach how we live, learn and work with each other. Lichen’s complex symbiosis defies and complicates the scientific taxonomic system, and the other predictable constructed categories we humans deploy for biology, gender, politics, economics, society, pedagogy, etc, to distinguish, compartmentalize, judge, and discriminate the like-us and the not-like-us. Agitating the boundaries of individual and multiple, sexual and asexual, life and death, they radically and irreparably reshape our ideas of community and cooperation. Lichenized entities are enmeshed with(in) each other: living-with, making-with, and dying-with. To transcend myopic human-centric frameworks that inevitably retrench inequalities and ignore our own animality, we need a habit change for thinking things differently, for dreaming about the not-yet. Lichen offers a framework for noticing how we are enmeshed in the creative impulses of others—collaborating, agitating, thriving, decaying.

This audiovisual piece imbricates and interweaves a prose-poem collaboratively created using the prompt of “lichen”, field-recordings of lichen spaces, and composed sounds. The visual component entrances viewers into lichen morphology created with a generative AI network. The AI is given a dataset of images and learns how to differentiate between “like” and “unlike”, creating entirely new images based off of its findings. This process trains the AI to “see” lichen, much like we hope to do for our human viewers.

This project is constantly evolving, made by the Submergence Collective in humble collaboration with: Matea Friend (Style GAN and visual assistance) and Diego Gaeta (sound composition)