Nam-Gut (the microbial breakdown of language)
2017, one-channel video, color, sound, 19’01’’ in loop, 16:9 printed poem
Jenna Sutela is an artist who is trying to establish forms of interspecies communication by bringing together biology, technology and poetry. The blue-green liquid on screen is a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast in Kombucha tea, analyzed through a microscope. On the surface of this gelatinous mass is a shuffle of alphanumeric characters. These almost-sensical graphemes take shape from Sutela’s poem, inspired by an ancient Sumerian magic spell called nam-shub. Words combine and break apart on the surface while interfacing with an anagram-solving algorithm called Jumbo. Originally developed by cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, this automatic algorithm for solving word games in newspapers is inspired by the way complex molecules are constructed inside a living cell. The artist draws a parallel between the enzyme, which catalyzes chemical transformations in our bodies, and the phoneme, a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. Both share an enchanting ability to transform something into something else.
The artist thanks the Gut-Machine Poetry project collaborators, Vincent de Belleval and Johanna Lundberg as well as the artist-run project space, Banner Repeater.
Jenna Sutela (Turku, Finland, 1983) is an artist trying to establish forms of interspecies communication bringing together biology, technology, and poetry. She works with biological and computational systems, including the human microbiome and artificial neural networks to create sculptures, images, and music.