The Multispecies Salon migrated from San Francisco to New Orleans in 2010, as oil from the Deepwater Horizon spread in the Gulf of Mexico. Freshly blasted by multiple disasters, the urban landscape of New Orleans became a place where a multitude of thinkers and tinkerers were bringing critical attention to the idea of hope.

David Sullivan, a local ecological artist, exhibited digital animations of oil refineries at the Salon. Bright clouds of green, orange and yellow bled into dripping tar balls and hazy dark smog in Sullivan’s “Sunset Refinery.” Frog calls, peeping in the background, fuse into noise of passing traffic and pumping pistons. This piece illustrates ambivalent hopes that have emerged with industrial capitalism.

The bright cascade of colors in the background invokes oil industry marketing images that portray refineries as aesthetic objects of beauty. At this slowly evolving lightshow illuminates toxic chemical reactions, it offers an opportunity to reflect on the ambivalent properties of the pharmakon—a poison that can double as remedy, an obstacle or an opportunity. Glowing forms of life growing on this digital sculpture, Spanish moss and fleshy tumors, are monstrous figures of hope.

Sunset Refinery excerpt by David Sullivan on Vimeo.

Three chapters in the book speak to the theme of BLASTED LANDSCAPES:

• Chapter One: Hope in Blasted Landscapes

  by Eben Kirksey, Nicholas Shapiro, and Maria Brodine
  

• Chapter Two: R.A.W. Assmilk Soap

  by Karin Bolender

• Chapter Three: Blasted Landscapes (And the Gentle Arts of Mushroom Picking)

  by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing for the Matsutake Worlds Research Group

Edible companions were served up at the Multispecies Salon as artists, academics, and significant others came together to break bread. The word “companion”, Donna Haraway reminds us, comes from the Latin, cum panis or “with bread.” Our table was spread with multiple species of organisms that are not just good to think with (as Lévi-Strauss had it), or simply good to eat (as Marvin Harris countered), but also creatures that are good to live with (as Haraway maintains).

A painting by one of the Multispecies Salon curators, Myrtle von Damitz III, decentred our discussions by personifying morsels of food.

The facts of life are becoming increasingly malleable in the age of biotechnology. We conducted a biodiversity survey at the Multispecies Salon to take inventory of organisms that have been created by humans.

The exhibit featured Andre Brodyk’s “Alzheimer’s Portraits”, which were painted with transgenic bacteria created by this Australian artist. Lines of living bacteria in Petri dishes illuminated the faces of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The portraits started out bright and distinct (left). As the paintings aged, they faded into darkness—just like the memory and personality of people afflicted with Alzheimer’s (right). They suggest a longing for lost identities. Brodyk says they depict no-one in particular. Dredged from Brodyk’s own uneven memories, they are images of what any of us might become. Ghosts from the past merge into prognostic futures.

The transgenic bacteria that Brodyk created to paint these portraits included “non-sense” regions of the human genome, or, in popular parlance, “junk DNA.” He isolated a 158 base-pair fragment from the human gene for apolipoprotein E (APOE), a protein that helps to carry fat in the bloodstream. One form of this gene, APOE ε4, is associated with a marginal increase in the risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s. Instead of using DNA that actually codes for the protein, however, Brodyk chose his fragment from one of the four segments that are regarded as junk, since they have not been ascribed a biological function.

Genetic junk interests Brodyk since it lies at the very edge of the boundary between living and inanimate matter. “Can non-coding DNA be given a new lease of life through modern biotech processes?” he asks. The uncertain hopes Brodyk places in these genetic fragments, speaks to broader dreams and nightmares that are orbiting around emergent forms of life. Amidst speculation about scientific breakthroughs on future horizons, new forms of life are running wild.

Three chapters in the book speak to the theme of LIFE & BIOTECHNOLOGY:

• Chapter Five: Life in the Age of Biotechnology

  by Eben Kirksey, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, and Dorion Sagan

• Chapter Six: Invertebrate Visions: Diffractions of the Brittlestar

  by Karen Barad

• Chapter Seven: Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations

  by Donna Haraway