Miriam Simun: Welcome to the Contact Zone

Welcome to the Contact Zone. The zone is changing all the time. A satellite or drone’s eye view will not suffice, the zone must be charted topologically. The zone is where here and there overlap; where they interpenetrate each other. We attempt to make contact in this zone: with ghosts of the translocated wild; with sensing, glitching, sense-making machines; with the fine line between love and domination; with what we take and what we owe, and what we own and what we know, and with what we don’t know we know, and what we know to be unknowable.

Rewilding is a post-conservationist ecological approach that aims to re-stabilize imbalanced ecosystems by releasing keystone species (such as lynx) who serve as “ecosystem engineers.” Building on research I have been undertaking around the rewilding of western European forests through the introduction of eastern European lynx, and the use of remote sensing technologies to track the lynx and their survival, the Tailor-made Fellowship was an opportunity to bring alternative modalities of research and processing to the work. Namely, to use movement research, vocal play, and attention-deconcentration as a way to expand upon my field, theoretical and image-making-based research into the topic of rewilding. What does it mean to study closely with my body the movement of the lynx we track with machine vision? What happens when the words we use to describe ecological crisis and species management are stretched, pushed, squeezed and more generally played with until new meanings emerge?

Attention-deconcentration became crucial to my process. Describing the technique of attention-deconcentration, world champion freediver Natalia Molchanova explains, “it means distribution of the whole field of attention—you try to feel everything simultaneously. This condition creates an empty consciousness.” The author of this technique and a specialist in the psychology of extreme situations, Oleg Bakhtiyarov, describes how the deconcentrating of attention to the entire field of experience —visual, aural and somatic— enables one to grasp the whole (rather than concentrating element by element) and to wiggle oneself free from the ideological frames that cloud perception.

Crucially, the fellowship was a time to spend training and practicing in attention-deconcentration practice, and to explore its potentials as a research methodology to investigate the relationship between rewilding, computational sensing, planetary knowing, human and non human migration, belonging and control. Attention-deconcentration showed itself as a rich and generative tool in exploring, through entering an altered state of perception, how ideologies embedded in both human and machine intelligence (aka bias) shapes what, and how, we know.

Further, the residency enabled me to continue working on the related zine ZONE, and present a first in-progress showing of the performance ‘Welcome to the Contact Zone’ as part of the Onassis AiR Open Day #3. The final iteration of 'Welcome to the Contact Zone' will include interspecies motion capture (myself mapped onto a 3D Lynx model and a housecat mapped onto a 3D model of me), which I will undertake at ONX studios in New Yοrk in order to further continue to build on what the practice of attention-deconcentration can offer in this newly machine-mediated movement practice.

‘Welcome to the Contact Zone’ is part of a larger body of work centered around the forthcoming video work, WILDING OUT, which toggles between the rewilding of the microbiome of a human gut and the macrobiome of an alpine forest. Next step is to undertake the research for the rewilding of my microbiome, through the growing and fermentation of the ancient and sacred Mayan drink, Tepache de Tibicos. I attempt to re-stabilize my microbiome by rewilding my gut with bacterial-yeast symbionts that I grow by fermenting grains extracted from cactuses native to Mexico—a place through which thousands of humans attempt to migrate to the US for survival, and are refused entry. The same computational monitoring systems enforcing Lynx survival inside Switzerland are used to track and exclude humans at the US/MX border.

WILDING OUT asks: What kind of knowing does computational sensing and intelligence enable? Of the planet, of other species, of ourselves? Can we ever fully know the non-human other? How does ideology shape our knowing? What are the ideologies that shape “the wild,” and where does multispecies justice come in?

The final video will mix footage from satellites, automated camera traps, a capsule endoscopy pill camera that I will swallow, microscopes, computational simulations of microbiome host-microorganism interactions, 3D worlds created by VQGAN + CLIP neural nets, extreme macro footage I film myself while in a state of attention-deconcentration, and interspecies motion capture (myself mapped onto a 3D Lynx model and a housecat mapped onto a 3D model of me). The multiple modes are an attempt to triangulate various ways of sensing and knowing. I attempt to trace the ideologies embedded in diverse forms of representation, and develop new aesthetic modalities to reposition humans and our technologies as fundamentally entangled in the ecologies and multi-species relation that are crucial to our survival.