Monitor the Carnivore

We don’t know when lynx first arrived in European forests. We believe that felines first appeared in Eurasia 10 million years ago.

These cryptic cats once colonized all of the European continent. The last wild lynx in Switzerland, was killed in 1894. Dysbiosis is a de-complexification In the mid-20th century, after the wars, came nostalgia and tourism and new laws, and the trees return, but then so do deer and chamois, and they keep eating all the treelings, nevermind the looming ticks and the coming lyme and the and the and the and the….
Rewilding is a re-complexification. And so the Swiss ecologists set out fo find some “funder animals.” They capture 34 wild lynx, in the Carpathian mountains - the last old growth forest in Europe. In the east. Captured, sedated, quarantined, radio tagged, and released. These wild aliens were put to work - they should eat and scare the deer, who should in turn eat leaves and shrubs differently, which in turn would affect the soil and water and air and also the return of the birds and bugs and bees and and and...And so the forest will “manage itself” and ‘rebalance’ into something better - something (re)wild - Who benefits? Who lives and who dies? - But there was one caveat that nobody had considered - the humans living in these Swiss mountains, farming and hunting and herding cows and sheep, weren’t thrilled about the arrival of these wild aliens. Lynx kept showing up shot. So, a new government body was created, to protect the lynx and to mediate the human-feline conflicts, to officially, monitor the carnivore.

Who from which there belongs here?

You are hearing the zone of B178 - a descendent of one of the wild alien transformer Lynx brought here from the Carpathian Mountains, in Eastern Europe.

He makes his home here, in this Swiss mountain, named - Les Pléiades - the Seven Sisters. This here is named after a there 444 million light years away. A funny thing about these seven sisters - Nearly every ancient culture has a story about them.  ~ Who from which there belongs here? ~ The Monache people of North America tell of seven wives who loved onions more than their husbands and now live happily in "sky country” - except one, who was lured back to earth. A story (sister) is a positioning device. In Ancient Greece, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of the god Atlas, who turned them into stars to protect them from being raped by Orion - but then one sister fell in love with a mortal and went into hiding. Some astrophysicists have a story. Measurements with the Gaia space telescope show the stars of Les Pléiades slowly moving in the sky. One star, Pleione, is now so close to another star, Atlas, that they are indistinguishable to the naked human eye. 100,000 years ago the stars were further apart, all 7 easily visible to the human eye. 100,000 years ago, all humans lived on the African continent. The astrophysicist story goes, that the story of 7 sisters - Les Pléiades - was born around the campfire - when Africa was all humans home.

As we migrated around the world - we kept this story with us.

A lust that can not be satisfied.

“He’s 80 years old, he’s the only living Molfar - which is the Htuto word for shaman - in Ukraine. He’s going to play old Htuto melodies on the Hajar.” [Mol’far Nechay, Hutsul drymba melodies]

In 1979 34 wild alien lynx were captured, sedated, quarantined, radio tagged, and released. Two years prior Susan Sontag wrote about photography replacing hunting (the shooter; the shot) but already in the 1890s George Shiras was flashing wild animals in the dark. A way to fulfill his ‘lust for the hunt’ outside of hunting season, Shiras learned from the Ojibwa people a hunting technique called jacklighting. A fire is placed in a pan at the front of a canoe, and while the flame catches the animal’s attention, the hunter sits in the back of the boat, hiding in the shadow of the fire, and takes the shot. Shiras replaced the fire with a lamp, the rifle with a camera. A floating camera trap.

“Through these monitoring methods we can now get information about reproduction, home range size, the way they live, who is coming to eat…we then can see how far it disperses, how the population expands, survival, mortalities, all kinds of important parameters about their demography and life history that are necessary for us to manage the species because of course in this human dominated landscape of Europe the lynx needs management.” [Anja, KORA]

I ask one of the biologists, what makes a good image?

He answers: “Well lit, the entire lynx is visible, the lynx spots are clear - no blur! Also, the lynx is in the center of the frame.” Attempts to grid and manage the infinite [Nora Khan, Seeing, Naming, Knowing, 2019]

What is in and what is out? What is centered? What is filtered out? Who is protected from whom?

I recall Sontag: To capture an image, a way of imprisoning reality; of gaining control over the subject; of acquiring something as information rather than as experience; a fast seeing; an assault on reality; a way of enlarging a reality that feels shrunk; a turning of subjects into objects that can be possessed; an attempt to make contact; a lust that can not be satisfied. [Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977]

“Images identify things that we think we should be thinking about. I’ve been thinking a lot about ….Photographic knowledge identifies, defines, makes memorable and it also excludes lots of other things - it not only points us to things we should be thinking about - in fact the repertoire of famous images obscures, occludes and hides at least as many - probably more issues than it draws to our attention.” [Susan Sontag, MIT Images & Meaning Conference, 2001]

Rewiliding is fundamentally an attempt at re-complexification.

An attempt a re-complexification is marked by an uncertainty of what to watch and what to count. [Jamie Lorimer, The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life, 2020]

a lust that can not be satisfied.
an uncertainty of what to watch and what to count.
a lust that can not be satisfied.
an uncertainty of what to watch and what to count.
a lust that can not be satisfied.
an uncertainty of what to watch
and what
to count.

Everything you miss when you only look for what you know.

“Yeah I think that’s true, the more you know, the more you see things you didn't know before, the more you look.”
[Florin, KORA]

"Later, I will straighten out all these uncontrollable fragments of experience, I will turn them into facts sufficiently distilled and stripped down to be manipulated and laid out in relation to systems of thought." [Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild, 2021] “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.” [Donald Rumsfeld, Press Conference, 2002]

Everything you miss when you only look for what you know.

“We have known knowns, we have unknown knowns - we know that we don’t know - and we have unknown knowns - its so much outside our horizon that we even don’t know that we don’t know. What about the fourth term, which I claim is the most interesting one? Not the known unknown but the unknown knows - things we know, but we don’t even know that we know them - that is to say, this is ideology” [Slavoj Žižek, On Donald Rumsfeld (unknown knowns), talk at Calvin College on November 10th 2006: Why Only an Atheist Can Believe: Politics Between Fear and Trembling.] The unknown knowns. These are things we know but we forget we know them. The things we know but we’ve learned are “feeling” and so are not really “knowing”; the things we know but we can’t explain, so we just pretend we don’t know; the things we know but we ignore to the point of un-knowing them; the things we know but are so inconvenient, complex, or painful that we refuse to know them.

“I have 3,000 dots that add up to what this human has called cat.” The algorithm is just a mirror, a scapegoat. [Ramon Amaro in conversation with Jackie Wang), AI Anarchies Autumn School 15.10.2022: Anti-Computing: Models and Thought Experiments] “They are more than ever maybe, beliefs…although we would never publicly admit that they are our beliefs, we as it were, practice these beliefs. They are embodied in our knowledge, in the materials we use, and so on…” [Slavoj Žižek, On Donald Rumsfeld (unknown knowns), talk at Calvin College on November 10th 2006: Why Only an Atheist Can Believe: Politics Between Fear and Trembling.]

“It’s all about what it is to know and what it is to owe and what it is to own, are all tangled up with one another, right?  As if owe and own…I know I owe. Well what do you owe? I know that I owe this thing that I know to someone else. I know that I owe this thing that I know to someone else. I know that I owe this thing that I know to someone else who owns it. Well that’s when it gets tricky. Right? You know you owe this thing that you know to the person who owns that knowledge, but of course the person who owns that knowledge is himself or herself already in a chain of similar acknowledgement. No one owns anything that we know.” [Fred Moton, On collaboration within practice research | Fred Moten & Stefano Harney at the Scottish Graduate School for Research 10 November 2021, located first in Lamin Fofana’s NTS mix 01.12.21]  

What we take and what we owe.
What we own and what we know.
What we don’t know we know, and
what what we know to be unknowable.

“To live with things, of course it's something that has been forgotten now, that we take the effort to live with these species. How do we learn that?  From cultures where they were never extinct, for example - Eastern Europe, or Italy.” [Florin, KORA]

Feeling and not naming

“Of course all these species that have been reintroduced they have value - they are ecologically significant units - they have value to conserve them - what does it mean, ecologically-significant unit? it means they are significant enough, that they should be supported to persist, to grow in numbers” [Manu, KORA]

Seeing, sensing, feeling and not naming. Seeing, sensing, feeling and not naming. Seeing, sensing, feeling and not naming. Seeing, sensing, feeling and not naming.S eeing, sensing, feeling and not naming. Seeing, sensing, feeling and not naming. Seeing, sensing, feeling and not naming. Seeing, sensing, feeling and not naming. Seeing, sensing, feeling. And not naming. Seeing. Sensing - feeling. And not naming seeing.

“If you go into the forest with somebody, you can tell immediately by the way this person walks whether this person is used to being in the forest or not. And this, and some people have the feeling - it doesn’t have to be the feeling for the lynx only, it can be for a bird or a roe deer - anything else, but if you know how to move in the forest, you can tell immediately, some people have it and some people don’t have it - I think it has a lot to do with what you do as a young person, how you grow up, because city people have a hard time to understand this feeling, but I don’t know how to describe it.” [Anja, KORA]

Where dream meets flesh

“They are professional killers…The lynx is an ambush predator so he basically sits and waits.” [Anja, KORA].  “The unspoken law of predators meeting each other in the depths of the forest: their territories collide, they're worlds run upside down, their usual paths are altered, there connection becomes everlasting.” [Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild, 2021]  “Where dream meets flesh” [Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild, 2021] “Attempts to grid and manage the infinite” [Nora Khan, Seeing, Naming, Knowing, 2019]

Lynx are cryptic animals, almost impossible for human eyes to spot. We rely on our sensing, seeing, glitching machines - and quickly arrive, at an avalanche of images. The learning machines are now being trained to see lynx. For now, they can’t. They look for lynx by identifying their absence. The logic goes as follows: if there is a person in the picture, then there must not be a lynx.

“If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the-” [Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, 1983] “The big reality is going to be difficult to grasp by one human, but I’m sure computers could help us.” [Luc, KORA] “We have constructed…a massively distributed accidental megastructure,” [Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, 2015]. In this configuration, we become a sort of a surface level goo, sticking data from all our planet’s sensing machines together. Trained machines can see and name images 3,000 times faster than a human.

“Cuz literally, it’s mathematically saying, I have 3000 dots that add up to what this human has called cat. You know - ok, fine. 3,000 dots - cat. What’s next?...And it’s like, how do we live in those spaces, where - in the potential of the algorithmic, as it itself tries to escape the reductionism of human violence.” [Ramon Amaro, Anti-Computing: Models and Thought Experiments] “Where dream meets flesh” [Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild, 2021] “I have 3000 dots that add up to what this human has called cat.” The algorithm is just a mirror, a scapegoat. [Ramon Amaro, Anti-Computing: Models and Thought Experiments] “Attempts to grid and manage the infinite” [Nora Khan, Seeing, Naming, Knowing, 2019] "3,000 dots - cat. [Ramon Amaro, Anti-Computing: Models and Thought Experiments]

The wilderness creator. “Could a deep-learning system sustain the autonomy of the rewilded zone without direct human interventions? Rather than priorities defined by humans, the wilderness creator derives its priorities from direct interaction with non-human beings and processes” [Designing Autonomy: Opportunities for New Wildness in the Anthropocene Bradley Cantrell, Laura J Martin, Erle C. Ellis, 2016] An evolving learning machine, a feedback loop, a synthetic garden, the machine as gardener [Cantrell, Martin and Ellis], an automated landscape [Cantrell, Martin and Ellis], a HUMAN EXCLUSION ZONE [Benjamin Bratton]

“I have 3000 dots that add up to what this human has called cat.” The algorithm is just a mirror, a scapegoat. [Ramon Amaro, Anti-Computing: Models and Thought Experiments] Reflecting to us, our unknown-knowns. The wilderness creator. “The intelligence is designed…creates its own solutions…its own shifting priorities…develop and implement a dynamic…steady flow, steady flow, steady flow [Designing Autonomy: Opportunities for New Wildness in the Anthropocene Bradley Cantrell, Laura J Martin, Erle C. Ellis, 2016]

“It’s always like that here; nothing ever turns out how you want, it resists” [Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild, 2021]

Intercellular Lifestyles

The Swiss alps are hardly the only place on this planet to undergo a catastrophic regime change. Missing microbes have triggered a contemporary epidemic of absence [Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty, Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health, 2021]. Searching for civilizations, we pivot from stars to guts.

I don’t have far to look, only right just inside. Inside my gut. De-complexification leads to dis-regulation I, too, attempt to re-complexify. I decide to rewild the world that is inside me. A world that is a folding of the outside world into myself. A processing. An unfolding then, of myself back into the world. A continuous exchange from soil to plant to animal - including me - and then on to water, to air, and back to soil again. “Intercellular lifestyles” [Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty, Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health, 2021]. Bacteria are the original colonizers. [Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty, Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health, 2021]. Colonizers. Colon—izer

Intercellular lifestyles. Bacteria are the original colon-izer

Gelatinous little spikes balls, that get big when they’re happy and healthy, and sometimes float to the top of the sugar water they grow in. They’re called tibicos. - or tibi grains. “They’ve become my little friends, they won’t stop multiplying,” [Bryony Dunne, who gifted me my first Tibicos told me]. Tepache de Tibicos is one of the Tepaches considered sacred by the Mayans, and used in ancient ceremonies. They’re called Tibicos, or Tibi grains - except they’re not grains at all, they are a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast held in a bacteria-created biofilm matrix. Grow on the pads of the nopal cactus. I provide them sugar and some minerals inside sterilized water and they provide me with a tasty drink full of symbionts and enzymes that - A year into our growing-fizzing-drinking dance, I realize I’m becoming kinder.

Except maybe its not me, but them, inside of me, hijacking my agency for their own desires.

Intercellular lifestyles. Bacteria are the original colon-izers. [Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty, Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health, 2021]. A hybridization took place - and yet - I am still myself. At least I think so.

Part of the series an attempt/it is hard to leave sense unmade

an attempt/it is hard to leave sense unmade is Part III of Survival Trilogy, a Creative Capital Foundation funded project

an ongoing series, including:

GHOST B178 (Live performance on the Swiss Mountain Les Pleiades)
Welcome to the Contact Zone (Live performance at Onassis AIR)
Welcome to the Contact Zone (Essay)
Fully Automated Contact Zone (in development)