The “Bichi” Project Symbiotic Food Networks and the Alchemist Kitchen

The author uses symbiosis as metaphor and tool to create food-related projects that critically examine the anthropogenically induced impact of global warming on food chains. She argues that "art-through-food" projects promote an alternative worldview informed by the utopian premise that art can facilitate reflexivity and influence behavior to prevent future massive starvation by safeguarding the future of food. Three projects reveal the workings of energy flows in ecosystems to reimagine hybrid relations with living matter and with systems that are biological, technological, social, and political. They establish sustenance networks in which symbiotic interactions between several actors form the basis for a reevaluation of our human relationships to the planet and the fungal, plant, and animal agents within it. Based on assemblages with multiplicities that cofunction via a viral logic of contagion, projects explore aspects of symbiosis in human/plant/bacterial consortiums (the Bichi project), as well as symbiotic intelligence combining computing with neural networks (@Comestiblemealplan). Informed by research linking various scientific fields with art and technology, projects explore networks of relations between entities tangled in interdependence and involving parasitism, mutualism, adaptation, and resilience. Congruent with a larger systems approach in which symbiosis is the core principle replacing an essentialist conception of individuality, hybrid works contribute research and knowledge production with the potential to assess and generate affective insights and acts in the world.