Living Biotechnical Lives: Noise, Parasites, and Relational Practices (version 2)

This article is published as the shorter version in the ISEA conference 2022 Proceedings and the longer version in Artnode journal.

Life in the era of biotechnology opens up opportunities but also
brings challenges related to our values and questions on how we
want to see coexistence on our planet inhabited by many species.
The parasite is our case study and an interesting concept that we
inherit from biology, but which is also addressed in humanism and
philosophy. As humans, we commonly understand a parasite as a
negative concept that suggests that someone or something benefits
at our expense. However, French philosopher Michel Serres has
thought differently about the parasite. According to him, the
parasite is based on relations between different entities and that
there is often noise in these relationships. Michel Serres refers to
biologist Henri Atlan, who has argued that noise forces the system
to reorganize in a way that incorporates noise as a part of the
complex system. The idea of noise included as a part of the system
is quite far from today’s thought-processes with the development
of bio/technology that typically aims at noiseless, error-free and
aesthetically attractive results.
Therefore, although parasites are often associated with terms such
as inhospitable, undesirable and disgusting, and they are seen to be
located outside of art and technology, in this paper we argue that
the concept of parasitical is tightly intertwined into our
contemporary biotechnical lives. The article relates the parasitic
thinking by Michel Serres to an artistic mediation of the biological
parasite, a tick.