Jung HSU + Natalia RIVERA
Bi0film.net: Resist like bacteria
- 2022, mix media
- Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.
Curatorial Perspective
In 1970s, Michel Foucault’s critique of biopolitics has foretold the influences of the pandemic and vaccines on humanity in the contemporary time. Bi0film.net: Resist like bacteria, which won the Golden Nica of the Interactive Art + category in the 2022 Ars Electronica, adopts the DIY philosophy, and embodies the maker spirit advocated by the contemporary art scene. Through sharing and with an anarchist attitude, in the era that has witnessed Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement and survived the pandemic, the work employs bacterial technologies and biological behaviors to formulate possible means of human protests or resistance against authoritarianism and centralized systems in the future. In this process, bacterial intelligence beckons a bacterial mode of affect, which offers a way to co-create a technology of connection and communication. It is a technical solution informed by the spirit of “be water,” which creates highly unifying connection and interaction in protesting crowds despite being leaderless and decentralized.
The artists took one of the Hong Kong movement’s icons, the yellow umbrella, and adapted it, based on an open resource created by Andrew McNeil, into a parabolic WiFi antenna. In addition to covering, hiding, and protecting users, Bi0film.net: Resist like bacteria helps them to communicate. The umbrella can act as an antenna for a mini server, a repeater, or a router, increasing the communication range, while building a nomadic network that accompanies street demonstrations. Hsu Jung, who does not come from an artistic background, develops this work based on her personal experiences and observations of the Sunflower Student Movement and the political fate of Hong Kong; and in a precise way, this work also echoes the topics of technics and affect explored by this edition of the Taiwan Biennial.
Creation Description
By late 2019 and early 2020, border closures and confinement measures abruptly interrupted the protests that were emerging around the world. This paralysis of widespread demonstrations during the pandemic generated the need to rethink and create alternative forms of civil resistance, while radically transforming our narratives, metaphors and understandings on the living systems and their ways to break through, especially in microorganisms.
Bi0film.net, an open project created by Natalia Rivera and Jung Hsu, praises bacterial resistance in contrast to the reductionist discourse of war. We took one of the Hong Kong movement’s icons, the yellow umbrella, and adapted it based on an open resource created by Andrew McNeil, to be used as a parabolic WiFi antenna. Other than covering, hiding, and protecting the user, Bi0film.net helps them communicate. The umbrella can act as an antenna for a mini server, a repeater or a router, increasing the range, while building a nomadic network that accompanies the demonstration in the streets.
Self-organizing, collaborating, and communicating in a decentralized and distributed way are some of the wonderful actions of the living to break through, and that is what “resist like bacteria” means.
This project has recently received the Golden Nica of the 2022 Prix Ars Electronica in Interactive Art+.
Work
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Bi0film.net: Resist like bacteria2022, mix media, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.
Artist Bio
Jung Hsu, researcher and new media artist based in Berlin. She attempts to combine interdisciplinary knowledge with artistic research to create heterogeneous encounters. In her process, she responds to the current social situation with multiple perspectives and uses metaphorical objects to create a speculative scenario. Her recent work has focused on micro-biopolitics and crypto-guilt.
Natalia Rivera, artist of emergent-media currently exploring the possibilities of digital technologies as inter living-entities mutual aid media. In the context of indeterminate/queer knowledge creation, their processes are indisciplinary, open, collective, collaborative and communitarian, through the Mutante laboratory (Bogotá) and the global Suratómica Network for creation - art and science.