Biological Individuality
Project Website link \\ Digital Mosaic link
About the project:
What makes you an individual? The Earth is full of different forms of individuality, from colonies of insects that function as one organism, to the many microbes that can switch between individual and collective lifestyles. These unconventional forms of individuality may seem rare and distant from humans, but humans are also dynamic ecosystems of human and microbe cells working together. And since essentially all your matter gets replaced over time as you breath, eat, drink, sweat, poop, pee, bleed, grow, heal wounds, etc., what is it that makes you still you?
As a biology student researching these questions, I came to understand that there are more types of beings out there than I could ever have imagined. From lawn grass, to honeybees, to scobies, to the trillions of mircobes in our own bodies, it’s actually pretty difficult to say what one individual being is for most of the species in our world. There are even microorganisms who live their lives as singular individuals but in certain situations form a collective individual. That would be sort of like if all the cells that make up your body were living independent lives and then one day they all came together and became you and then at some point went back to living independent lives.
I also came to understand that what makes me me, what makes any individual itself, is that I am a continuous process. That the individuality of any grouping of stuff is the power that grouping has to determine it’s own future. All the matter that makes up my body may be different than the matter that made up my body 5 years ago. All my memories may be different as I revisit and alter and reinterpret them. But I am connected to myself from 5 years ago by the continuous process that got me from there to here, a process that I led. Me at one instant created me at the next instant and the next, etc. When I die this process will end and I will stop creating myself, stop getting to decide what happens to the matter that is me. Instead the matter in my body will scatter into the soil and bodies of other organisms.
This understanding profoundly altered my sense of self. It helped me see that what makes me me is not any identity I have at one moment, it is my story. It made me realize that to feel solid in myself what I need is to be able to understand myself as a coherent story.
Seeing individuality as the power to determine one’s own future, a power that exists at many fractal levels, also has radical political implications. Understanding a human as an ecosystem recognizes decentralized power within the body, for example using medicine to work cooperatively with symbiotic bacteria rather than over-prescribeing antibiotics. Understanding a human as part of an ecosystem demands accepting that the communal level has, should have, and must have, some power over the individual, contradicting an individualistic culture which assumes that success, satisfaction, and health can be pursued at the individual level. Understanding a human as a process, a configuration of matter from our environments, elucidates the inherent social justice questions within food, water and waste systems. And recognizing individuals first and foremost as their stories breaks through dehumanizing prejudice and identity politics. It makes it obvious that we are not only capable of change, but that our changes make us who we are.
These realizations filled me with wonder that I wished to share through art. I created 100 posters that I put up in bathrooms. Bathrooms are social equalizers, maybe the farthest possible art space from a white box gallery. Bathrooms remind us that we are physical beings made out of the same food and water that is cycling in and out of countless other organisms. And bathroom wall scribbles don’t pretend to be isolated contextless individuals like a framed painting against a white wall. They speak to each other. They make fun of their gross context. They become part of a collective art piece made of everyone’s bathroom scribbles. So what better place to make art that questions individuality? The bathroom posters linked to a website with more information and a digital collage of art, quotes, facts, diagrams and other provocative snippets on individuality.