Jenna Sutela x New Mystics text is co-published with AQNB, a non-profit editorial platform working across visual art, music, and critical thinking.

Looking out over the regolith surface of Mars, there’s a footprint in the burgundy-stained topsoil – then another, and another. The edges of this pixelated landscape curl up and blur over the horizon; you’re crawling along a shallow trench, undoing a process: from microscope to movement, speech to language, language to letters. Prokaryotic alphabets squiggle across your field of vision, first in bright white, sharp, then glowing diffuse like a sparkler, while the chanting intensifies – it’s ineffable but something loosens up, subtitles blot into being, you begin to float. Zooming out from the topsoil, it forms bacterial imprints: unknown letters written on the surface. Bacteria in motion like an electric field pattern teach their language to your neural self.

nimiia cétiï (2018) is a three-way collaboration between the extremophilic Bacillus subtilis nattō bacterium, a nineteenth century mystic’s Martian tongue, and a neural network, together facilitated by a computer as medium. Conceived by Berlin-based Finnish artist Jenna Sutela with Memo Akten and Damien Henry, the audiovisual work could be understood as an act of transmuting data across subjects and hosts – both microscopic and interstellar – to generate a multispecies language through a machine oracle.

To create the world of the work, slides of wriggling Bacillus were filmed through a microscope. Their movement was then observed by a computer, which encoded it to high-dimensional latent space, or representation of compressed data, using a GAN (generative adversarial network). These data maps became a language, which ultimately became text, handwriting, and speech. By feeding snippets of Sutela’s own readings of Hélène Smith’s seance-induced Martian language – one of the first recorded cases of glossolalia – into the computer, it learned that voice, and began to communicate the bacterial data trails into a spoken language.

Sutela works from a position that understands intelligent machines as a kind of alien; so too are slime moulds, algae blooms, and single-celled bacteria a type of natural computer. Informed by an interest in wetware that began through an encounter with many-headed yellow species of slime mould, and an ongoing fascination with the cyberpunk idea of computing lifeforms, Sutela’s work sutures together the spiritual and biological across (inter)planetary scales. Engaging both primordial and future-speculative collaborators, Sutela disentangles anthropocentric readings of body and environment; consciousness and language.

“I’m interested in the idea of the gut-brain connection and the fact that we consist of more bacteria than so-called human cells,” shares Sutela. “This sort of multiplicity or idea that we’ve never been fully human to begin with was really interesting to me, but also this widening or opening aspect to that.” With Bacillus subtilis – which is believed to survive life on Mars as happily as it hangs out in our gastrointestinal tract, and could well originate from other planets – as its collaborator, nimiia cétiï shifts away from the predominantly anthropocentric imaginary of the Red Planet, transforming it into a site for speculative interspecies communion.

Human genomes are only found in around ten percent of all cells in the human body; the rest comprises of bacteria, fungi, and other protozoists. Bacteria were the first to breathe air and to swim; through fermentation and other macroscopic processes, they perform the backstage metabolic acts that sustain all forms of life; they carry with them traces of material histories of the Earth and quite possibly other planets. Sutela uses deep learning to translate the motions and embodied knowledge of Bacillus subtilis nattō into a nascent language. Set on a rendered plane of the Red Planet, nimiia cétiï also references an interstellar theory of the origins of life, panspermia.

“It suggests that life is distributed by space dust all across the universe,” says Sutela. Using the theory to explode our inherent ideas of humanness or the origins of the Earth, the concept of the Martian enters a bacterial plane. “I’m interested in questioning the idea of humans having this necessary right or lineage to the future, which we’ve seen in the form of the billionaire space race and terraforming Mars to look like our own planet. Perhaps we’re already aliens to begin with.”

Watching nimiia cétiï feels something like entering an algorithmic trance, an act of thinking through the neural net as it alchemizes language into data, data into language. Twists and turns around the simulated landscape of the Red Planet are interspersed with microscopic imagery of accelerated bacterial motion that expand and collapse into data dramatizations. At some point in the twelve-minute-long video, the relative unknowability of Smith, Sutela, and the bacteria’s shared tongue becomes irrelevant – language splinters open and becomes as living, mutable, and mutual as you, me, and Bacillus.

“A lot of my work is trying to go beyond language – I want to dismantle it as much as possible – and find instances in the human world where there are those more unconscious utterances or forms of communication,” suggests Sutela. “There’s something in being able to mix in some unintelligible or non-anthropocentric data into machine learning processes – like bacteria movements – that wouldn’t normally be given to the machine. Perhaps we can find out something interesting beyond our capacity of understanding that the machine can do with it.”

On a wall in San Francisco, 100 lava lamps keep 10% of the internet secure. Known colloquially among tech acolytes as “The Wall of Entropy”, web security company Cloudfare’s rehash of 1960s psychedelic lore transfers the random energy of paraffin wax globules into impenetrable code. Cameras track the pattern-shifting blobs in real time, transmuting their movements into numbers, and voila – the most hacker-proof cryptographic seed data is born.

Interested in using living material as a random number generator, Sutela honed in on the OG Wall of Entropy – a psychedelic experiment emerging from 1990s Silicon Valley that first took stock of lava lamps’ application as an oracle of true randomness (computers, relying as they do on human-coded patterns, perform badly here) – as fodder for developing a two-part project called I Magma (2019-). Understanding lava lamps as a symbol of neuroplasticity – wherein the trippy globs are akin to grey matter in the human brain – Sutela developed a series of lamps shaped like her head, with an immaterial attaché in the form of an iOS app (co-developed with Akten and Allison Parrish), that together use machine intelligence to divine daily cosmo-technic readings.

“Using the app tracks your body movements, which modify the flow and shape of the lava blobs, almost like magnets,” explains Sutela. “Meanwhile, the AI component – which I think about as this kind of mechanic spirit medium – makes up predictions or pieces of poetry based on what it sees in the lava lamp blobs.”

Trained on the Sacred Texts Archive, the intonation of the app’s daily deliverances veer into the mystical – akin to a folkloric take on the AI-enabled astrology app, Co-Star. Enmeshed in a dreamy haze of neon globules, machinic incantations appear on the interface: “the seed is the fruitful”, “our consciousness, when it is beginning”, “if I could be the earth”. Dreamy and studded with an aura of incompleteness, I Magma’s predictions – like much of Sutela’s work – take stock in the poetic opacity and fractal hybridized intelligences of AI when it’s not made to complete a human-oriented task. Adding a geo-temporal layer to the work, the machine’s visions in the primordialprimordeil goop are influenced by the many heads’ changing locations as much as yours – and the app remains dormant while the heads are not on show.

Devised as tentative architectures to augur messages from entities that cannot speak, both nimiia cétiï and I Magma work to deconstruct and move beyond language as we know it. Working within the space of the unknowable – the so-called Black Box Problem of machine learning – the computerized responses to random movements of bacteria and wax globs could perhaps be a conduit or oracle for another form of communication that centers the unintelligible. Embracing the black box of our homemade aliens turns us into more generous hosts for the multitude of organisms within our own bodies – ultimately germinating a symbiotic relationship with other alien species on our shared Spaceship Earth.