Summit Research Repository (Simon Fraser University)

Wright, Morgan

English

A typology of hydraulic barriers to salmon migration in a bedrock river

Bradshaw, Peter

Graph colorings with local restrictions

Prabhu, Chintana

Selective decompression for high-performance compressed pattern matching using Parabix algorithms

Zinovieff, Freya

Aceves Sepúlveda, Gabriela

DiPaola, Steve

sun, prOphecy

 
ECOCENE 
CAPPADOCIA JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES 
 
• 
Volume 3/Issue 2/December 2022 
Ecocene Arts 
• 
 
Connective Tissue and Bacterial Echoes: Four Artists, a 
River, and an Artificial Agent  
 
Freya Zinovieff  
Simon Fraser University, Canada  
fzinovie@sfu.ca  
ORCID: 0000-0002-9201-6602   
 
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda  
Simon Fraser University, Canada  
gacevess@sfu.ca  
ORCID: 0000-0002-7854-8178  
 
Steve DiPaola  
Simon Fraser University, Canada  
sdipaola@sfu.ca  
ORCID: 0000-0001-7549-9545 
 
prOphecy sun 
Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Canada 
sunp@ecuad.ca 
ORCID: 0000-0001-7151-8825 
 
Zinovieff, Freya, Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, Steve DiPaola, and prOphecy sun. 2022. 
“Connective Tissue and Bacterial Echoes: Four Artists, a River, and an Artificial Agent .” 
Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities 3, no. 2 (December): 173–78. 
https://doi.org/10.46863/ecocene.87. 
 
Artwork/ Received: 19.10.2022 /Accepted: 09.11.2022 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 
  
 
Connective Tissue and Bacterial Echoes: Four Artists, a River, and 
an Artificial Agent  
by Freya Zinovieff, Steve DiPaola, Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, and prOphecy sun 
 
• 
 
 
About the Artists 
 
Since 2018, Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, Steve DiPaola, and prOphecy sun have 
collaborated in the production of a series of artworks and research-creation projects that explore the 
creative uses of machine learning, both practically and theoretically. Informed by feminist 
methodologies, and combining their diverse backgrounds as scholars, cognitive scientists, and visual 
artists, they develop large-scale and immersive works using video, sound, performance, and 
computational creativity. 
Ecocene 3.2 December 2022      173 
 
 
 
Connective Tissue and Bacterial Echoes: Four Artists, a 
River, and an Artificial Agent 
 
Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, Steve DiPaola,  
and prOphecy sun 
 
 
Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets 
forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world: we 
are bodies of water. As such, we are not on the one hand embodied (with all of the cultural 
and metaphysical investments of this concept) while on the other hand primarily 
comprising water (with all of the attendant biological, chemical, and ecological 
implications). We are both of these things, inextricably and at once—made mostly of wet 
matter, but also aswim in the discursive flocculations of embodiment as an idea. We live at 
the site of exponential material meaning where embodiment meets water.  
—Astrida Neimanis 
 
 
Carbon bodies are nomads. Time moves through them, and eventually, the cells, fibers, 
and organs wilt, rot, and die, becoming fodder for something new. This perpetual 
recycling of physical matter excretes tendrils of smoke, dirt, dust, and spores. As bodies 
are buried, burnt, or sent into space, their traces and cellular legacies become absorbed 
in everything and exist everywhere all at once on this celestial body. In this way, human, 
vegetal, and more-than-human bodies become sustenance and cellular traces for 
generations.  
Immersive Ecologies: Body as Border 
Body as Border: Traces and Flows of Connection (2022) is an immersive, large-scale generative 
site-specific video projection that responds to notions of cellular traces and legacies (see 
Fig. 1–3).1 The piece was commissioned by the Surrey Art Gallery and installed as the 
final artwork for their decade-long project, UrbanScreen. Located at the Chuck Bailey 
Recreation Center in Surrey B.C. Canada, the artwork was visible from sunset to 
midnight from February 10th to May 1st, 2022.2, 3 
Freya Zinoveiff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, and Steve DiPaola 
Ecocene 3.2 December 2022    174 
 
 
Figure 1. Zinoveiff, Freya, Aceves-Sepúlveda, Gabriela, DiPaola, Steve, sun, prOphecy. 
Body as Border: Traces of Flow and Connection, 2022. Installation view, Surrey UrbanScreen. 
Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda photo. 
 
The artwork is a collaborative effort between the artists, the Fraser River, and 
custom-built computational systems. Developed in response to the global COVID-19 
crisis and the ways that human bodies occupy bordered spaces, the research reflects on 
the ways that the virus has colonized countless human bodies across the world. Under 
pandemic conditions, human bodies are objects of state and bio-capitalist interest, where 
the macrocosm of global geopolitics and the smallest of all microbes intervenes and 
entwines with one another. In this way, the body has become both a statistic and a 
borderland space for the meeting of macro and microorganisms. 
Building an imaginary, in which viruses have the ability to travel through countless 
entities, we draw attention to the ways that water is also a substance that can move 
through us. Water thus is an agential carrier which forms part of the constantly in-
motion system that sustains us all. It carries memories of the carbon life and death forms 
it has washed through, simultaneously imprinting their records and washing them away 
anew. 
Through developing these ideas about the ways that substances trace histories 
through humans and all other carbon bodies, the artwork was made in tandem with the 
ebbs and flows of the Fraser River, or Stolo as it’s called by its traditional custodians.4 
Connective Tissue and Bacterial Echoes 
Ecocene 3.2 December 2022         175 
The river weaves through S'olh Temexw, the traditional territory of the Stó:lō people, 
and the cities of the Fraser Valley, out to New Westminster, Surrey, Richmond, and 
Delta, out to the Salish Sea (the Georgia Strait). We imagined the waters of the Stó:lō 
river as physical and metaphorical substances of connection between these local 
histories and our current global crisis—teasing out connections between the movements 
of those early settlers and our histories of migration to the region, which are entangled 
and complicit with colonial and settler histories, and the ongoing violence against the 
First peoples of Canada. 
 
 
Figure 2. Zinoveiff, Freya, Aceves-Sepúlveda, Gabriela, DiPaola, Steve, sun, prOphecy. 
Body as Border: Traces of Flow and Connection, 2022. Video still.  
  
Visual and Sonic Archival Processes 
Over 3 months, in turbulent rainy, snowy, and calm conditions, we gathered visual 
and sonic data sources from around the Fraser River region. Using an array of different 
microphones and recording devices, we collected imprints of the water as it moved across 
pebbles and mud, gathering logs and parts of our own submerged bodies such as fingers 
and toes. As well as working with the water to sound its traces, we also collected organic 
microsamples from the river in order to generate bacteria in petri dishes, as a way to 
Freya Zinoveiff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, and Steve DiPaola 
Ecocene 3.2 December 2022    176 
explore further the multiplicity of worlds inhabited by and within the river. Practices of 
field recording and water growing were accompanied by the gathering of visual footage, 
again using a selection of different digital recording technologies.  
This archival footage, sonic, visual, and bacterial impressions were then mixed with 
existing images and videos from our personal collections to create the foundational video 
composition for the next project stage. Highlighting the agential interplay between the 
computational and the biological, the foundational video composition was used as source 
footage for DiPaola’s custom-built generative AI tools. In tandem, we wrote keywords 
and short poetic sentences and gave these to the generative system, which used them 
alongside existing digital images and texts to generate new poetic stanzas and 
abstractions. We incorporated the stanzas into the sound and final video composition. 
The original soundscore was broadcast through UrbanScreen’s outdoor speaker system 
and dedicated FM radio. 
 
 
Figure 3. Zinoveiff, Freya, Aceves-Sepúlveda, Gabriela, DiPaola, Steve, sun, prOphecy. 
Body as Border: Traces of Flow and Connection, 2022. Video still. 
 
 
Connective Tissue and Bacterial Echoes 
Ecocene 3.2 December 2022         177 
 
Future Propositions 
This research speculates about possible futures in which algorithms demarcate the 
boundaries between the biological and the digital.5 By building on the methodology and 
tools used on earlier projects, we employ AI-built poetic stanzas, sonic decay, and 
narrative iteration to explore the ways that COVID-19 highlights our connections, whilst 
also requiring of us varying degrees of isolation. In the aftermath of these relations 
between together and aloneness, we foreground the bacterial, the microbial, and 
countless communities of non-human life forms that each carbon body hosts. Through 
these lenses, the body as a multispecies animal resonates in relationship to machine-
learning processes and the ways that acts of care might generate discussions about 
kinship with non-human others.6 
 
 
Notes 
1 See the work: https://vimeo.com/680254022 
2 Body as Border (2022) was the final piece to be shown at the Surrey Art Gallery’s offsite venue. 
UrbanScreen ran from 2010 to 2022 and showcased digital and interactive pieces after dark on 
the Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre’s west wall (UrbanScreen, Website). 
3 Other notable artists featured at UrbanScreen include Sonny Assu, Julie Andreyev, and Simon 
Lysander Overstall, and Paul Wong, to name a few. See UrbanScreen website at 
https://www.surrey.ca/arts-culture/surrey-art-gallery/digital-art/urbanscreen 
4 The river was one of the first sites that British settlers colonized in the mid-1800s.  
5 Informed by media archeology (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011), and feminist materialist 
approaches to media and ecologies of production (Ahmed, 2006; de la Bellasca, 2018; Mondloch, 
2018; Braidotti, 2016; Haraway, 2016) our artwork explores the porous boundaries between 
humans and non-humans through custom-built AI tools, performance, soundscores, bio-art, and 
video.  
6 See Mitochondrial Crossings (2021) at https://feralfeminisms.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/3-
FF-ISSUE10-sun-2.pdf 
 
References 
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University 
Press. 
Bellacasa, María Puig de la. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. 
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/50528 
Braidotti, Rosi. 2016. “The Critical Posthumanities; Or, Is Medianatures to Naturecultures as 
Zoe Is to Bios?” Cultural Politics, 12 (3): 380–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3648930 
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke 
University Press. 
Freya Zinoveiff, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, and Steve DiPaola 
Ecocene 3.2 December 2022    178 
Mondloch, Kate. 2018. A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art. Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press. 
Neimanis, Astrida. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury 
Academic. 


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