whats next nature?

For my rendering this week I would like to highlight some of the work of a Dutch animation artist named Floris Kaayk. I came across his work on an online art/science collective website called Next Nature a few years ago. I have been looking for an opportunity to post his videos and there was a particular chapter in this week’s reading, Life as Surplus by Melinda Cooper (2008), that struck me as particularly relevant to the themes lines of questioning offered forth by Kaayk and the people at Next Nature. I would like to share two videos.

Metalosis Maligna is a documentary about a disease which affects patients with medical implants. Sourcing from such implants a wild metal growth ultimately transforms human patients into mechanical looking constructions.

Warning: This video contains graphic representations of disease.

Nature adapts, even to human actions that seem to destroy everything. The amazing power of evolution has given birth to a new species of insect. Their ideal habitats are old industrial locations. Some call them electrical insects, others simply speak of a miraculous phenomenon, or even better, a self supporting order; the Order Electrus.

There are a number of themes in Melinda Cooper’s book that touch on the sort of commentary that is suggested in these video renderings of life as it is reconfigured by the “unnatural” encounter of living bodies and (re)productive technology. However, it is the issue of surplus productivity that has most structured my framing of these fictitious, and somewhat disturbing, renderings.

It was in the fourth chapter, Contortions, that we are given one of the most succinct articulations of the sorts of biological anxieties captured in the short films above. The inner contradiction of capitalism, re-enacted in the bioeconomy, is that the creation of value from life itself requires a ‘corresponding move to devalue life’ (through imposed limitations). The need to limit the self-regenerative nature of living systems (in order to extract the surplus value) and the continual vigilance needed to guard against the threat of overproduction and excess promise are primarily addressed in terms of the mechanics of the neoliberal shaping of the bioeconomy since the 1980s. However, it is in this chapter that Cooper brings these latent dangers to bear in a more tangible manner in relation to the “extreme mutability, unexpected recalcitrances, and peculiar generativity” (p.124) inherent in the topological models developed by biologists working in tissue engineering.

These bioengineers, Cooper points out, must contend with the challenge of having their tissue constructs adhere to the specifications of the federal regulatory agencies’ definition of “medical device” (which necessarily implies “some degree of stability, reproducibility, and standardized form” p. 124) while acknowledging the reality that products in the regenerative medicine industry, by their very nature, continue to grow and respond to their bodily surroundings well after implantation. As Cooper points out, “Its productivity is dependent on its continued ability to self-transform, to grow, to morph, in ways that are not easily predicted” (p.125). While the problem here seems merely semantic, the sustained threat emphasized in her book is that these extremely plastic , mutable cells should proliferate too well and in the process give rise to potentially lethal cancerous growths.

The videos above go further in developing the notion of emergent ‘biospheric threat’ (p.81). Using techniques of film that have become characteristic of medical/nature documentaries to lure us into a state of comfort and familiarity, Floris Kaayk’s videos offer startling scenarios in which the fundamentally wild, unpredictable, and self-regenerating nature of life itself is brought to the fore. The first film offers a vision of uncontrained growth, contortion and bodily transformation (while curiously avoiding any mention of the threat to the lives of the infected) and, in contrast, the second film puts forward a narrative of abundance, renewal, and vitality. Each explores the possible consequence of surplus life from a different perspective.

In chapter three, Preempting Emergence, Cooper explores how public health and infectious disease came to be understood as an emerging unstable/unpredictable threat in the context of bio-warfare discourse and militarization. She explains how mobilization to preempt potential fallout in the wake of (bio)catastrophe, and the potential to generate capital along the way, takes precedence over the interruption of innovation and scientific development (the ‘precautionary principle’) that may prevent these events from occurring in the first place. True to the inner contradiction of neoliberal capitalism, there is little room for discussion around the potential danger inherent to the biotechnological creation of life itself as a biospheric threat even when it is suggested that “war is no longer waged in the defense of the state or even human life, but rather in the name of life” (p. 98).

Certainly the point of a so-called “catastrophe event” is that they are necessarily unpredictable, but nonetheless, I am left wondering how strategies of full-spectrum dominance, counterproliferation, or even preemption mobilization, could possible prepare us for the sort of ‘next nature’ presented in the videos (as fictitious as they are) when the limits imposed on life are shaped exclusively by neoliberal capitalist interests directed by particular ideas of speculative futures? But, perhaps, that is not ultimately their aim? 

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