SOMA: a process of bio-extraction and resynthesis

SOMA is the project of the speculative cyber-performance and bio-memetic product design agency, GOVERNANCE, INC, that uses custom electronic tools, signals, digital DNA, speculative philosophy, and genome sequencing to create hybrid soma-cyborganisms. Anabolic performance machines sequence genomes in order to propose more robust possible cell structure for digital organic life moving forward. SOMA mines ImageNet, a large-scale image database used for machine learning processes, to find its genomic origin and bio synthetic emergent forms. These cyborg cells all present different windows onto an unfolding future.

History of SOMA

Soma, etymologically derived from the Greek sôma, meaning “body”, the biological parts of an organism to be distinguished from the mind, psyche or soul, refers in biology discourse to the body of an individuated cell– that is, a biological cell that is not a germ or stem cell and contains DNA arranged in chromosomes.

The term somatic has also come to be associated with movement based practices in dance, therapy and mindful meditation that concern themselves with internal self perception, the idea of the body in motion as something that might be experienced from within, and understood in a different way as a result of this practice.

An emphasis on kinesthetic performance as a site of knowledge production is a concern of what is known as somatic theory, which emphasizes the experimental neurobiological research of Antonio Demasio. Demasio’s “somatic marker hypothesis” suggests that emotional processes arise in the limbic system of the body and are only later recognized into recognizable emotional states, suggesting that pre-conscious “somatic markers” guide our decision making processes alongside cognitive rationalization.

Between these two definitions of soma, one that is an enclosed, differentiated information processing cell, and one that takes the whole of the body as an open ended information processing system thoroughly imbricated by its surrounding environment, SOMA takes somatic processing as a site for speculative somatic mutation. Through performance, SOMA draws parallels between theories of evolution, and advances in biotechnology like somatic cloning and mutation, and information processing in high level automated machine learning systems. If the processing techniques of machine learning systems might be framed losely through the terms of somatic theory, what might this allow us to infer about the way decisions are informed in such processes? How can performance be a site to reprogram these decisions?

A Brief History of SOMA 
SOMA is the performance project of the speculative audio-visual-bio-mimetic platform agency, Governance Inc, that uses custom electronic tools, signals, digital DNA, speculative philosophy, and genome sequencing to create hybrid soma-cyborganisms. The thematic focus of SOMA grew organically for me from a nexus of the Governance projects (Synthball, etc) that engaged with gesture as a lens through which to view the performing body, especially positioned within the frame of electronic music production and performance, where is it so often erased. I have never been an electronic music performer, and came to experimental performance through a very circuitous route that developed through my interest in live video and signal processing as a performance medium. A concern of my practice in recent years has been to engage with video processing systematically through different inorganic arrangements of machines and technologies linked through feedback loops with my performing body as a sort of “performance machine.” These assemblages are wildly unpredictable and fragile and are composed of anything from broken analog television image color correctors, to RCA cables used to sonify the frequency of video scanlines, to custom software and patches designed to automate parameters that might be used to change image into sound, gesture into image, input into output. My body became a controller, which I captured through computer vision techniques in order to both digitally automate parameters, and literally visually and sonically manipulate analog waveforms

These concerns led me to a residency at Signal Culure in Owego, NY in May of 2018, a week in which a lot of the content that informed my contributions to SOMA took shape.

At Signal Culture, I had access to a wider array of analog and digital video processing equipment, including Sandin Image Processors, Dave Jones’ raster manipulators, and a range of modular eurorack style audio and visual processing equipment. With a week of using these tools, I became quite interested in finding unique arrangements where signals teetered on completely unstable, fragile points of feedback that threatened to short circuits, or overwhelm the display monitor and cease to exist. These points had to be found naturally through weaving a complex web of connections between tools and computers so that they might take on an energy of their own, beyond what I might be able to conceive of or predetermine. Each unique assemblage became its own “body”, a unique somatic organism that could only be experienced and known through its own iteration.

Stills of material produced during Signal Culture Residency, May 2018:

Post residency, I became interested in how similar systems might be set up with a heavier emphasis on software processing elements. Some of the material I produced at Signal Culture appeared very dimensional to me (most often the material that was produced accidentally) and I was interested in expanding this “spatial” dimension of the signalectic video through computationally rendered space. I began to think through how spaces might be rendered using analog techniques, paired with modeling and game engines, like Blender and C4D. These techniques were further explored for a performance I participated in in Beijing in Fall of 2018.

Stills, soma organisms, summer 2018

The SOMA project was informed by all of this content. Using C4D, I began to create “cellular organism” type objects, which could be automated and transformed via any input parameters. We began to think through these organisms as performatively generated, through input processing that might take video, audio, gestural, or any other parameters. With an upcoming performance opportunity, we expanded the SOMA idea as a project of Governance Inc.

SOMA and Governance Inc. 
In posing as a pseudo-scientific bioengineering startup, Governance Inc. became the umbrella project for us to situate the idea of “performing discourse”. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of governance, a regime of power in which knowledge production itself is subject to instrumental governmentality. The project is concerned with how power, executed through machinic and automated reasoning processed conditions knowledge production and contemporary aesthetic regimes.

For the development of SOMA, the idea was to create a performative electric machine that synthesizes human DNA with different types of captured biological cell structures in order to create hybrid speculative “soma” that stand a better chance of surviving post anthropocentric conditions. We are creating a machine that “sequences” genomes in order to propose more robust possible cell structures for organic life moving forward. These cyborg cells all present different windows onto an unfolding future. This performance grew out of a residency we had at the Rubenstein Art Center in Summer 2018, which gave us the space we needed to grow this performance system through a combination of audio and video processing techniques, preprocessed material, and creation of a performance installation environment, which became interwoven with the automation of various parameters of the performance. Through performing the database we question the nature of this taxonomy of knowledge and ways in which the historical processes of decision making that shape it are erased in its utilization in machine learning applications.

Stills, SOMA, Rubenstein Arts Center, August 2018

SOMA continued
This project has now undergone multiple iterations, the largest scale of which was a performance installation in the Von der Heyden black box theater during the conference organized by Governance, Max Symuleski, and Jordan Sjol in March of 2019 titled Incomputable Futures. Prompted by recent research into the taxonomical structures of large scale machine learning databases, we created a performance structure to explore the database as a site of knowledge production, and what it might mean to apply the SOMA analytics of performing automated decisionism to deconstruct ImageNet as an instrument of governance. We mined ImageNet, a large scale database frequently used in training computer vision image classification systems, in order to performatively evolve its taxonomical structure through semi-automated audio and visual processing. Our approach remains highly collaborative, dispersed and altered through the transformations of signal that occur in the synapses between 2 performers and an expansive and open ended body of machines.

We present the following abstract to frame our current thinking around this project, to be expanded into a conference style presentation:  

Noise Performance as Knowledge Production: A Speculative Database Aesthetics of ImageNet 
Rebecca Uliasz and Quran Karriem
PhD students, Computational Media, Arts & Cultures, Duke University

SOMA is the performance project of the speculative audio-visual-bio-mimetic platform agency, GOVERNANCE INC, that uses custom electronic tools, signals, digital DNA, speculative philosophy, and genome sequencing to create hybrid soma-cyborganisms. Anabolic performance machines sequence genomes in order to propose more robust possible cell structures for digital organic life moving forward. SOMA mines ImageNet, a large-scale image database used for machine learning processes, to find its genomic origin and biosynthetic emergent forms. These cyborg cells all present different windows onto an unfolding future.

SOMA is an engagement with performative knowledge production. It seeks to “shift the frame” away from the norms of scientific discourse to question the conditions of the production of knowledge itself. How does performing a discourse– engaging with it visually, experimentally, or narratively– allow new readings of the taxonomies contained within? How can performance, as a form of knowledge making, decode or change these taxonomies? We suggest that noise performance can stand in as a “proxy” for the performativity of knowledge production within computational machine learning and image recognition databases. Through rearranging, selecting and manipulating the material that machine learning systems metabolize to produce “truths”, we seek to produce different affective relationships with the archive. We suggest that the archive might be reproduced differently through experimental engagement.    

SOMA considers performance as proxy, or stand-in, for the computational algorithms that typically automate the processing of machine learning databases. It is suggested that engaging the body and activating the framework of experimental noise performance might allow a different expression of the database logic that increasingly undergirds and orders our aesthetic regime, visual culture, and social norms. What bioforms might emerge from the flesh of ImageNet when it becomes a performed object?

Stills, SOMA at Incomputable Futures: A Symposium on Computation, Representation and Experimental Scholarship