Jenna Sutela is an artist who works with biology, computation, and communication to access worlds and experiences far beyond human norms. She opens up the bandwidth and wavelengths through which we perceive the world, helping us sense, feel, and understand in many more directions than would otherwise be possible. The components of her work are often language, sound, and signal, linked to micro and/or macro natural phenomena—whether that be bacteria, the human gut, slime mould, animal behavior, or the movements of the sea. She tunes into open systems and surfaces them as frequencies, echoes, movements, and pulses.¹ Artificial intelligence is often the medium with which she does this, but it is the cosmos that she takes us towards. 

Nimiia cétïi (2018) explores the material interaction between machine learning, extremophilic bacteria (bacillus subtilis), Sutela’s own abstracted voice, and the work of nineteenth-century medium, Hélène Smith. The 12-minute film leads us through an alien bio-computational landscape—bringing forth processes and visual tracings in which bacteria trigger the sound of Sutela’s voice and the totemic, immanent letterforms of Smith’s Martian language. Smith, a medium known as the “muse of automatic writing,” captured these letterforms during her trance-induced conversations with alien beings, and here they take new form in the hands of an AI generative model, responding in real time to bacteria itself. What we experience as a result is “bacterial calligraphy” (Sutela’s term) and bacterial voice. 

The choice of bacteria in the work is important, and typical of Sutela’s meticulous exploration of disciplines beyond art as we traditionally know it. Bacteria is a living entity that challenges many conventional philosophical notions of matter as dead and the inanimate structure upon which the human being rises supreme. Sutela shows us that the line between the living and the dead is never quite clear, thus the boundaries of the human are never quite clear. The particular form of bacteria that she uses is also of note, as it is extraordinarily resilient and often used as a test species to study microbial adaptation in space (the landscapes of which partly form the visuals of Sutela’s piece). Nimiia cétïi is a portal that opens up the traditional definition of life and helps us see the many lives we both depend on and physically host day on day (bacillus subtilis included). 

The work is also defined by two female voices—Sutela herself and Smith, as host to alien communication. It takes us far beyond stable phallocentric language structures that split the world into dichotomies—signifier vs. signified, nature vs. culture, mind vs. body, truth vs. artifice—and instead opens new embodied communicational planes, which show the fallacy of those divisions in the first place. We break away from all standard, specular relations and toward modes of tactile perception, new material interactions and unfamiliar becomings. Via Smith’s AI-mediated letterforms, Sutela’s voice, and the machine learning model, we experience the untapped realms of pre-cognition (automatism, speaking in tongues) and non-imitative replication (semiotics which trigger and are triggered by material processes rather than by a transcendent idea of the Real). The work opens up new forms of relation and consciousness, both within and beyond us (or beyond us for now). 

It is a theme in Sutela’s work to enable communication systems and reality structures to escape themselves. As she says: “The world is not limited to human meaning. With my work I often seek to escape human imaginaries and focus on the open system of a planet that’s not our own. I’m always looking for ways to sense the world beyond language as we know it…”² She also brings this critical eye to the systems and limitations of the AI she uses. With this in mind, the context of the nimiia cétïi—the conditions in which it was made—is not insignificant. It was produced in London, as part of a collaboration with Google Arts and Culture, and as such, it shows the subversive possibilities to be found within large scale, large impact, commercial machine learning technologies, relying as it did on unsupervised learning to escape, as much as is possible, pre-set categories. 

Sutela herself continues to be critically reflective on such technologies and speaks with concern about the role such AI plays at societal level, especially in the years since the work was made. She exposes its human bias in the general sense (showing interest, instead, in its power to reveal animal consciousness), and by dint of this, she touches on its invidious bias in privileging one type of human over others—the very power relations she wishes to dismantle. She appropriates, subverts, and challenges as necessary, pushing technologies away from a narrow idea of the human mind, indeed the human mind at all, and towards a more embodied cognition. Recently this has taken her towards experiments with “dressed down” technologies and low tech. 

Her project is vast. She taps into worlds with the care of a scientist but the vision of an artist, and with a powerful mission—to challenge the species hierarchy and invite us to experience kinship with species and realms far different from our own. Tracing the alien is core to Sutela’s work. She sees intelligence everywhere but in terms much greater than human intelligence—the world is “made of brains,”³ as she says—and she is keen that the possibilities of technology not be limited to perceptions and prejudices of the human mind alone. Rather, she wishes to “offer voice to entities which cannot speak” and to reframe our place and behavior in the world. In this sense, Sutela’s work explores social justice in the most holistic and planetary terms. It points towards an equality for all groups but just as importantly, all species and asks us to tune in, outside of ourselves, to find empathy with everything that makes our own life possible. 

Our own bodies are not fully human—human cells make up only 43% of our anatomy. The rest is bacteria, viruses, fungi, and archaea (“microscopic colonists”⁴). Through Sutela’s journeys we are offered a lesson in humility, and an important chance to reconnect with the basic continuum of matter and energy, and its reservoir of infinite possibilities, where we all began.

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Dr. Suzanne Livingston co-curated the Barbican Centre’s AI: More than Human (2019), which launched in London and is touring internationally. Her career spans research and practice at the intersection of humans, culture and technology, and this shapes her work across the arts, museums, education and business. As Global Principal at Wolff Olins, she developed strategy and exhibitions with organisations including the V&A, Whitney, ICA Boston, Qatar Museums, and Southbank Centre. Suzanne holds a PhD in Philosophy from Warwick University and is a founding member of the influential Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). She now works independently, writing and speaking on technology, belief systems, innovation, and evolution.