Gary Zhang

Gary Zhang will develop his current project, ‘A State of Erotic Communism’, which explores the entanglement of bio- and technological networks in material, speculative and poetic imaginaries. The work has emerged from research into the biological network behaviours of a “many headed” single-celled amoeba, P. Polycephalum. Zhang is interested in the relationships between morphology and cognition, especially within distributed social organisations: mycelia, swarms, internets and markets.

The project is particularly focused on relations of parasitical exchange. Michel Serres evokes the parasite as the noise acting upon the signal, ‘the third man’ who ‘eats alongside’ the communication. In the ecological relationship, the parasite who appropriates the body of the host — the louse that replaces the tongue, the flatworm that imitates the gut — is also the principle of new communications, the possibility of new systems. (How tragic is a flatworm without a gut?) ‘Erotics’ explores the infiltration of the ecological imaginary into the sphere of technology: the agents which live intimately alongside and inside us, and the ways in which these systems infest, infect, interfere and invent our own.

Discussions will explore the politics of distributed social organisation — a motif as radically reactionary as it is historically progressive — and the mutualistic and parasitical relations that run throughout. Through a workshop on DIY teledildonics, designing and building devices for networked touch, participants will test the potentials, limits and ethics of networking the body. Hopefully, the residency will be an opportunity to test the waters, exploring some unfamiliar territories of material, political and informational exchange.