Microbial Keywording

Abstract

Drawing on object-oriented-ontology we aim for a hybrid language that not only processes formal symbols but interacts with the microbes in the speaker’s mouth. We argue that the metaphors historically used to frame the relationship between oral microbiota and speech cannot account for the co-creative material relationship between human speech and microbial, environmental and biotechnological needs. In our performances we harvest oral yeast microbes from the audience. Via a spectrogram, repetitively spoken phonemes drive pattern pumps, which add pheromones to the microbes, the latter which then are faded out. In the microbes, for some replication cycles an ecological adaptation to the individual phonemes persists, affirming – in our definition – some phonemes and deleting others, thereby improving the eco-sphere in the mouth by changing the alphabetical order of the input phonemes. The audience observes the adaptation by respelling words. We propose ‘microbial speech’ as a category between semantic and phonetic meaning, with a transcorporeal mattering between speech and the body as a new ecolinguistic quality. We aim at a language becoming a biological state in order to protect its own ecology. We consider these collective posthuman forms of relationality, subjectivity and biopolitical praxis as multiple ecologies of belonging and a more ethical mode of microbes existing in-common with language, affirming the transversal relations of all living and non-living matter.