y e l l o w s o u p
by Rae Yuping Hsu
Bacterial cellulose, official documents, hair, mold, text. Web-based experience. 2020.
Investigating the affective and political possibilities opened up by the microbial, this project looks for ruptures to create shifts in sense-ablilities. The project unfolds as a website, an audio-visual-textual assembly of questions, ideas, and reflections connecting my previous body of work with the complexities and potencies of the moment we are living through.
The word “ferment” means a commotion or an excitement; in that regard the website is divided into four scores of commotions. The first commotion is a prologue into kinship, the second is a speculation of microbial persuasions on human desires, the third is on fecal transplant and interspecies queering, and finally the fourth commotion is a meditation on the transgression of identity and boundaries. The site navigates like a virus weaving through the membrane of different bodies and categories—life and non-life, existence and citizenship, text and meaning—and in the weaving, erupts new forms of being.
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Artist from Taipei, currently a graduate student at the Art, Culture, Technology program at MIT. Her practice is materially-informed and research-based, engaging a range of materials from glass to bacteria, to advance research in bioart and endosymbiotic aesthetics. The process of fermentation stands in as a muse for the body, in its abjectness and with its symbiotic affordances, to create a space where empathic gut feelings can emerge, with many entangled forms of collaboration and contamination. Working with the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, recent works speculate on microbial ethics within interplanetary travel, reconstructed against narratives of space colonization. Her works have been shown in Taipei Art Awards, Kaoshiung Art Awards, NTMOFA Art awards, Dubai BAIT15, Taipei Digital Art festival, Medialab Prado, Sakiya Ramallah, Rhode Island convention center, ARTTaipei, Taipei Yiri Art Gallery, Waley Arts Gallery. Residencies include SymbioticA, hangar.org, MedialabPrado, _V2 institute for the unstable media.
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