Günes Isitan / artist-researcher in biomedia arts

What if we could communicate with nonhuman entities on a less anthropocentric basis?

Zones de contact / Where Species Meet is an interactive bioart installation that uses our bodies' electrical charge to communicate with electrically sensitive paramecia, literally creating contact zones between human and non-human.

The piece was created to incarnate the expression "getting your hands dirty": as such, it challenges people to put their hands in a 30" wide Petri dish filled with water and paramecia (real live ones and projected ones) to interact with the artwork's living components. Prompted by the electrical field of the participants, the paramecia's projections will generally swims towards them, unless they are too solicited, in which case they stop responding. The projection's live feed comes from paramecia placed under a custom microscope/camera setup.

Taking the form of a relational instigator, this installation offers the meeting of several realities in a shared interworld, where humans observe a Nature that observes them in return.