liquid life

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Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500)

liquid life: on non-linear materiality. Copyright © 2019 by Rachel Arm-
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The Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, is a trans-

disciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences,
and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging
technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of
settings.

First published in 2019 by ctm Documents Initiative,

an imprint of punctum books, Earth, Milky Way.
https://punctumbooks.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-17-5 (print)

ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-18-2 (ePDF)

doi: 10.21983/P3.0246.1.00

lccn: 2019935887
Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress

Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

Cover image and the figures in Chapter 09 ‘Liquid Apparatus’ are by Simone
Ferrancina based on original laboratory footage of Bütschli droplets taken by
Rachel Armstrong at The Centre for Fundamental Living Technology in Odense,
Denmark, 2010. All drawings in Chapter 11 ‘Liquid Notations: A Common Lan-
guage of Transitions’ are by Simone Ferracina, Newcastle University, United
Kingdom, 2017. Photograph on pp. 508–9 by Rachel Armstrong of headlamp
light scattered from mineral surfaces at the Smallcleugh mine in Nenthead, tak-
en during the Cthonic workshop onsite field study on 20 July 2017. Photograph
on pp. 514–15 by Rachel Armstrong, from the Being (In)human performance,
advertised as Unquiet Earth: From Victoria Tunnel to Quantum Tunnelling that
took place in the Victoria Tunnel, Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 17 November 2018.
 Rachel Armstrong

with contributions by
Simone Ferracina & Rolf Hughes
Contents

Exquisite Matter xv
Author’s Note xvii
Preface xxi
Protean Prose xxvii
Fourteen Portraits of Life xxix
All but Blind xxxvii

I. CONTEMPLATION

01 Pause 41
01.1 Air 43
01.2 Water 44
01.3 Earth 45
01.4  Invisible Realms 47
01.5 Monsters 49
01.6  Angels and Demons 50
01.7  Language of Angels 52
01.8  Angels and Ethics 55
01.9  Angels and Ecocide 58
01.10  Bête Machine 59
01.11 Entropy 63
01.12  Liquid Bodies 69
01.13  Liquid Consciousness 71
01.14  Liquid Life 73

II. DETERMINISM UNBOUND

02  The World of Machines 79

02.1 Introduction 81
02.2  Laplace’s Demon: On Determinism 84
02.3  Of What Are Machines Made? 86
02.4  Detailing the Bête Machine 91
02.5 Homeostasis 99

viii
 02.6  Ship of Theseus 102
02.7  Cats and Computers 103

03  The Hard Question Of Matter 105

03.1  Origin of Atoms 107
03.2  Structure of Atoms 109
03.3 Darkness 111
03.4 Not-matter 114
03.5  Spooky Reality 116
03.6  Maxwell’s Demon 121
03.7  Time’s Arrow 123
03.8  Symmetry Breaking 125
03.9  Invisible Realms 126
03.10  Theory of Everything 131
03.11 ’Pataphysics 135
03.12 Speck 137

04 Complexities 141
04.1  Making Life 143
04.2  Life as Fundamental Change 145
04.3  Complexity, Cybernetics and Complicating Things 155
04.4 Autopoiesis 157
04.5  RepRap: Self-replicating Machines 160
04.6  Natural Selection 162
04.7  Causal Emergence 166
04.8 Non-linearity 167
04.9  From Hard to Soft Machines 170

III. HYPERCOMPLEXITY

05  Beyond Determinism 179

05.1 Environment 181
05.2  Watery Planet 183
05.3 Ocean 185
05.4  Pluripotentiality: ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ 187
05.5  Ex Mare 190
05.6  Liquid Reality 193

ix
 05.7  Origins of Dissipative Propagation 201
05.8 Transitions 205
05.9  Mind as Substance 206
05.10 In-between 210
05.11  Linking Life and Death 213
05.12  Hydrous Bodies 217
05.13  Origins of Liquid Life 219
05.14  (Al)chemistry of Water 221
05.15  Clay Code 224
05.16  Colloids, Coacervates and Foam 228
05.17  Continuous Media: Ectoplasm 230
05.18  Aqua Vita 235
05.19  Ghost of a Flea 241
05.20  Twenty-one Grams 244
05.21  Weird Liquid 248
05.22  Making Ground 250
05.23  Metabolic Weather 254

06  Life As Restless Flâneur 261

06.1  Chicken and Egg 263
06.2  Liquid Soils 265
06.3 Egg 266
06.4 Placenta 268
06.5 Hydatids 270

07  Liquid Beings 273

07.1 Liquid Paradoxa 275
07.2  Eradicating Monsters 278
07.3  Liquid Development 280
07.4 Siphonophores 282
07.5  Liquid Experiences 285
07.6  Distributed Bodies 289
07.7  Life as Paradox 291
07.8  Living Drop 295
07.9  Bombardier Beetle 297
07.10  Slippery Face 299
07.11  Faceless Fish 302

x
 07.12  Vampire Squid 304
07.13  Octopus Thoughts 306
07.14  Vanishing Circles of the Spotless Mind 308
07.15  Structuring Mind 310
07.16  Liquid Fish 312
07.17  Liquid Fat 316
07.18  Liquid Eye 318
07.19  Double Take 320
07.20 Tardigrade 322
07.21  Blood Stones 324
07.22  Fishing Bats 326
07.23  Back to the Cat 327

IV. MAKING

08  Liquid Technology 331

08.1  Engineering Water 333
08.2  Living Water 335
08.3 Rainmaking 337
08.4  Sonifying Liquid 341
08.5 Glassmaking 344
08.6  Liquid Apparatuses 348
08.7  Soft Robots 350
08.8  Natural Computing 353
08.9  Dissipative Structures 357
08.10  Dissipative Adaptation 360
08.11  Is Dissipation Enough? 362
08.12  Making Liquid Life 363
08.13  Visualising Lively Liquids 364

V. BEING

09  Liquid Apparatus 369

09.1  Lively Liquid 371
09.2  Life Cycle 373
09.2.1  Birth: Field of Fire and Ice 375
09.2.2  Birth: Shells 376

xi
 09.2.3  Life: Organising Droplets 377
09.2.3.1  Fourteen Liquid Stations of Life:
Primary Morphologies 378
09.2.3.1.1  ONE Life:*Droplet 379
09.2.3.1.2  TWO Life:*Osmotic Skin 380
09.2.3.1.3  THREE Life:*Clusters 381
09.2.3.1.4 Paradoxa 382
09.2.3.1.4.1  FOUR Life:*Rose 383
09.2.3.1.4.2  FIVE Life:*Werewolf 385
09.2.3.1.4.3  SIX Life:*Oyster 386
09.2.3.1.4.4  SEVEN Life:*Suckling Pigs 387
09.2.3.2  Fourteen Liquid Stations of Life:
Primary Behaviours 389
09.2.3.2.1 Interfacing 390
09.2.3.2.1.1  EIGHT Life:*Mirroring 391
09.2.3.2.1.2  NINE Life:*Satellite 393
09.2.3.2.1.3  TEN Life:*Chain 394
09.2.3.2.2  ELEVEN Life:*Propagation 395
09.2.3.2.3  TWELVE Life:*Persistence 397
09.2.3.2.4  THIRTEEN Life:*Sensitivity 398
09.2.3.2.5  FOURTEEN Life:*Fusion 399
09.2.4  Life: Populations 401
09.2.5  Death: Quiescence 402
09.2.6  Death: Regeneration 403
09.3  Bütschli Droplets as Computational Agents 405
09.4  Ontological and (Post)epistemological Issues 406
09.4.1  Beyond Classical Categories 407
09.4.2  Notating Life 409
09.5  Conclusion: Bütschli Droplets and Liquid Life 413

VI. TRANSITIONING

10 Angels 417
10.1  The Letting Go (Fourteen Angels), by Rolf Hughes 419

xii
11 Signs 433
11.1  Liquid Notations: A Common Language
of Transitions, by Simone Ferracina 445

VII. REGENERATION

12 Compost 483
12.1  Composting Continuity 485
12.2 Geophagia 488

13 Pause 491
13.1  Principles of Liquid Life 493
13.2  Soul Substance 496
13.3  Towards a Liquid Architecture That
Accommodates the Soul 498
13.4 Epilogue 501

14 Reconstitution 503
14.1 Hiatus 505
14.2  Performing Liquid Life 506
14.2.1 Cthonic 507
14.2.1.1  Compost, by Rolf Hughes 510
14.2.2  Being Human 512
14.2.2.1  Being (In)human, by Rolf Hughes 513

Glossary 519
References 549

xiii
This drop, what will come of it?
Will it be a plant fiber, the light
and silky down that one would not
take for a living being, but which
already is nothing less than the
first-born hair of a young goddess,
the sensitive and loving hair that
is so well named Venus’ hair fern?
This has nothing to do with fables,
this is natural history. This hair
of two natures (plant and ani-
mal) into which the drop of water
thickens, it truly is the eldest child
of life. (Debré 1998, 169)

xv
 Exquisite Matter

We are life; the most exquisite condensa-

tions of sentient matter/energy in the uni-
verse. While most of the cosmic substance
is dark; we shine. Unstable and theatrical,
we are temporary bodies, existing as whirl-
pools, transformers and shape-shifters in
relation to our surroundings. Although
the physical effects of the living matter
we’re made from seem inconsequential,
when compared with the material events
that constitute our expanding cosmos, our
rare experiences confer a quality of ‘being’
that is unique. This is neither a perceptual
position, nor a question of material perfor-
mance, but a value-loaded, unfathomably
complex choreography of events, states
of existence and encounters, from which
we can never fully disentangle ourselves.
An inescapably subjective experience, the
definitions of life lie beyond the reach of
the tools of science to fully rationalise, or
explain. Despite our yearning to ‘solve’
these riddles, life continues to surprise us.

xvi
Author’s Note

I am fascinated by the way creatures work and live together. My

earliest recollections are in the back yard, with a series of empty
jam jars, collecting all kinds of creepy-crawlies and observing
how they responded to change — whether a helpful handful
of soil, or a thimble of water could help them live peacefully
together with adversaries, like spiders and wasps. These naive
experiments failed spectacularly and each evening, my mother
would sigh deeply, as she emptied out my drowned worlds over
the fence.
As I grew, my curiosity for life’s character never left me. Since
synthetic biology, which proposes to design and engineer with
nature, was not on the curriculum at university, I studied medi-
cine instead. During a sabbatical in India, I worked in a leprosy
colony with a hand surgeon who performed tendon transfers
that would restore movement to important muscles by sacrific-
ing the function of not so important ones. Through the rehabili-
tation process, I saw how someone’s quality of living could be
transformed through simple modifications. This exceeded their
anatomical reconfiguration and extended to their social and
environmental reintegration, so people once excluded from a
community through their illness, could now live joyfully, bring
in an income and raise a family.
I began to see how our accounts of the living world shaped
our relationship with it. Modern science has contributed to
many positive narratives that direct our cultural discourses,
values and practices, but at the same time, it has also led to un-
helpful truisms. While I had read Richard Dawkins under the
table in biology lessons at school, by the time I was working
on hospital wards, the whole notion of biological determin-
ism that underpinned the idea of the ‘selfish gene’ was deeply
problematic. It endorsed the idea of social inequality as a bio-
logical ‘fitness’, which trapped people in cycles of poor health
and despair. Repositioning actors differently within established

xvii
hierarchies of order — such as replacing men with women, or
one race with another, and vice versa — was also not enough to
bring about real change, as these inversions simply reasserted
the same kinds of inequality they proposed to address through a
different set of actors. To empower alternative futures, different
technical platforms and alternative ways of interpreting findings
are needed, so we can find ways of thriving together and defeat
the incredible odds against our survival at the start of the Sixth
Great Extinction.
Searching for testable narratives to underpin new stories of
life, I wanted to find an experimental field that was very poor-
ly inhabited by the humanities and awkwardly articulated by
the sciences. The prebiotic context of lifelike events presented
an ideal opportunity, as they operate without the cultural and
historical tropes that frame biological narratives, where life-
like chemical assemblages made from programmable* materials
such as droplets, clays, crystals and nucleotides, can perform in
ways that are not already framed by expectations of species, gen-
der, function, form or aesthetics.
In 2008, I began to work with dynamic droplets in an origin
of life context. The droplets, or protocells, were model systems
for early cells that did not possess any DNA. Exhibiting strikingly
lifelike features, such as being able to move around their envi-
ronment and interact with each other, they also provided a plat-
form through which a theory and practice of protolife based in
material phenomena, could be developed and tested. However,
the conceptual framing of these models of early non-biological
life were already framed by the logic and atomistic construction
principles of machines. For example, dynamic oil droplets were
conceived as ‘soft robots’, which meant that all outcomes were
interpreted according to a mechanistic worldview, referring to
the agency of chemical assemblages as actuators, their material

* In this sense, ‘programmable’ infers a degree of agency and decision-mak-

ing acting within the material system, which is typical of natural comput-
ing.

xviii
expressions as manufacturing processes and their organisation-
al abilities as (computer) programs (PACE Report 2008).
Liquid life started as a provocation and approach towards an
alternative view of life than the bête machine. Originally it took
the form of a ‘cytoplasmic manifesto’ (Gyimah 2009), which op-
posed notions of genetic determination by looking to the ‘fluid’
character of the body of a cell, by shifting the perspective on cel-
lular control from gene to metabolism (De Lorenzo 2015). This
is achieved by thinking through, and with, the characteristics
of liquids, as well as bodies that are capable of flowing such as
gases, amorphous solids and creatures. ‘Liquid’ also indicates
more than a phase state, or an incompressible fluid that takes
up the shape of its container, and references a metaphorical and
technological platform that draws on the potentiality of dynam-
ic, nonlinear systems. The ongoing extension of this research
is centred on the Living Architecture project, which draws on
the principles of liquid life to investigate a possible framework
for approaching the construction of lifelike systems beyond es-
tablished preconceptions of biological ‘Just So Stories’ (Gould
and Lewontin 1979). I am coordinator of this project which is
funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Pro-
gramme under EU Grant Agreement no. 686585, and brings to-
gether experts from the universities of Newcastle, UK; the West
of England (UWE Bristol); Trento, Italy; the Spanish National
Research Council in Madrid; LIQUIFER Systems Group, Vienna,
Austria; and Explora, Venice, Italy and runs from April 2016 to
April 2019. Envisioned as a freestanding, next-generation, selec-
tively programmable bioreactor composed of integrated build-
ing blocks (microbial fuel cell, algae bioreactor and a geneti-
cally modified processor), which are developed as standardised
building segments, or bricks, the project explores how metabol-
ic agents that are carried by liquid flows can be orchestrated by
advanced electronics and (bio)technologies to perform useful
domestic ‘work’ such as making electricity, clean water, remov-
ing pollution and producing specific substances like inorganic
phosphate.

xix
 This book is, therefore, an accumulation of thoughts, stud-
ies, propositions, experimental texts and transdisciplinary ex-
periments that embody the story of liquid life. The aim is to
establish a set of principles from which the design, engineering
and construction of our living spaces may be brought to func-
tionality, although a detailed study in relationship to architec-
tural projects is not provided and will be the subject for further
publications. Constituting an experimental platform that resists
a linear narrative by fluidly interweaving quotes with personal
observations, experiments, and creative writing, Liquid Life: On
Non-linear Materiality comprises a liquid manifesto that stands
‘against’ the mechanical metaphor of the bête machine. Within
its substance, it documents how native liquid technologies can
support human development in ways that respect the innate
liveliness, ingenuity, and fertility of our planet.

xx
Preface

Every epoch not only dreams the next, but dreaming impels
it towards wakefulness. It bears its end within itself, and
reveals it … by ruse. (Benjamin 1997, 176)

If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a ‘machine’ would

make no sense. Liquid life explores an alternative organisational
infrastructure and experimental technological platform than
the machine, through which the living realm can be imagined,
observed and engaged. It sets the scene for an ecological ap-
proach to design and engineering our living spaces, whereby
the platforms for thinking and making increase the liveliness
of the living realm. Resisting the persuasive logic of Descartes’
Treatise of Man, where conceptual models of humans are made
up of separate elements, the body and (rational) soul that exist
independently of one another, it seeks an alternative integrative
synthesis between them.

Cartesian dualism breaks man up into two complete sub-

stances, joined to another no one knows how: on the one
hand, the body which is only geometric extension; on the
other, the soul which is only thought — an angel inhabit-
ing a machine and directing it by means of the pineal gland
(Maritain 1944, 179)

By removing any element of mentality, Descartes prepared the

way for mechanistically-functioning, ‘brute’ geometrical bod-
ies*, to be better described by the new physics, while the char-
acter of the soul was outlined only its barest details. A mysteri-
ous substance where ‘the animal spirits’ flowed from the pineal
gland through a network of vessels (neurons) like fine air, it was

* In a letter to Richard Bentley, Isaac Newton uses the term ‘brute’ to refer to
an (inert) body (Newton 2017).

xxi
thought to be responsible for higher qualities of existence, like
rational thought, which are distributed across the whole body’s
system of organs. While Descartes did not suggest a formal re-
lationship between the body and soul, Gert-Jan Lokhorst de-
scribes Descartes as ‘an interactionist who thought that there
are causal interactions between events in the body and events in
the soul …’ (Lokhorst 2005). This brilliantly simple act of dual-
ism created the foundations of modernity where matter is with-
out innate agency and therefore requires animation through ex-
ternal agencies such as energy, or computer programs.

People — who themselves are in fact a process — are afraid

of whatever is impermanent and always changing, which is
why they have invented something that doesn’t exist — in-
variability, and recognised that whatever is eternal and
unchanging is perfect. (Tokarczuk 2010, 110)

Simultaneously a metaphor and technological apparatus of fluid

forces, in this book the term ‘liquid’ is used both literally and
metaphorically to denote a testable philosophy capable of pro-
ducing new kinds of encounters and artefacts (Stengers 2000).
Its ‘new’ materialist discourse embraces those aspects of the liv-
ing realm that are relevant to an ecological era, which cannot
be accounted for by the bête machine, and include the ‘soul sub-
stance’. Although this conception of soul is not a literal deriva-
tion from Descartes’ model, where the soul was gaseous*, it is
compatible with the Aristotlean-Thomistic conception — as the
substantial form of the human body which penetrates all living
matter — and shares allegiances with Rosi Braidotti’s notion of
the posthuman†, since it is not an exclusively human agency.

* Descartes’ theories are actually inconsistent with contemporary anatomical

theories of the brain, which established that the brain cavities, or ventricles,
‘are filled with liquid rather than [an] air-like substance’ (Lokhorst 2005).
† Braidotti considers life as a monistic expression of a universe of matter, not
as the property of individuals and points to a zoe-centric worldview that
decentres bios as the measure of all things (Braidotti 2013, 61).

xxii
 This book is a monster: an uncategorisiable treatise and trans-
disciplinary synthesis of text, quotations, provocations, images,
conceptual slippages, voices, ideas, writing styles, events, poetry
and narratives. As its arguments unfold, its loose body plan re-
sponds to its context — where sections support, contradict and
hybridise with each other. An orchestrated cacophony, it is an
ecological project — a Babel in the making — that, despite all its
inherent conflicts and paradoxes, seeks to maintain its diplo-
matic coherence.
The compositional strategy of this book possesses a liquid
character. Intermingling quotes within the body of discourse
and observations, it emphasises conventions of thought and
their contradictions, pertaining instead to an active investiga-
tion of the nature of lively matter by embracing its; scientific
understanding; incorporation within creatures; associated tech-
nical developments; experimentation with nascent apparatuses;
as well as the regenerative processes of decomposition. Through
these juxtapositions, interminglings and fusions, new kinds of
agencies begin to appear, where — for example — portraits of
creatures with liquid and monstrous character, generate a coun-
terpoint to the modern view of the bête machine, rendering it
strange and unsuitable for a third-millennium notion of the liv-
ing realm. Angels (see section 01.5) also act as vectors of liquid
life, establishing a language with the potential for ‘angelfication’
(Lokhorst 2005; Maritain 1944, 179) that resists the reduction of
its constituent concepts into a series of finite explanations.
In keeping with an alternative philosophy of the living realm,
the parts of this book embody an alternative life cycle of events:

CONTEMPLATION  This section constitutes an elemen-

tal pause, where the terms, key concepts and conditions
used in this study are established that re-problematise the
character of living matter.

DETERMINISM UNBOUND  Enlightenment concepts;

the world of machines, the hard question of matter and
complexity, are outlined and juxtaposed against a third mil-

xxiii
 lennial understanding of the material realm including the
concepts of quantum physics, non-linear phenomena and
astronomical observations. These juxtapositions infer the
existence of strange substances such as dark matter/energy,
which cannot be readily described by the laws of classical
physics and raise further questions about what kinds of
discourses are ‘missing’ from our understanding of the liv-
ing world.

HYPERCOMPLEXITY   Through a study of states of ex-

istence that go beyond determinism, a portrait of life that is
difficult to completely reduce, or solve, within a mechanistic
discourse is presented, and juxtaposed with the notion of
life as flâneur and the possibility of liquid creatures.

MAKING   The possibilities for working with liquids as

materials and technologies are explored.

BEING   This chapter establishes the conditions for alterna-

tive ideas, languages and grammar that engage with the
concepts of and encounters with liquid life. The Bütschli
system is introduced as a liquid apparatus through which
these proposals can be tested and directly engaged. Juxta-
posed with quotations that speak to a range of known and
imaginary phenomena, this section explores the trans-
dimensionality and peculiarity of the living realm.

TRANSITIONING  In this section, transdisciplinary

practices engage with the concepts and experiences of liquid
life. Rolf Hughes constructs an ‘angelology’ of language
through the transformative invocations of prose poetry,
while Simone Ferracina explores how graphical notations
can help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling and
designing with fluids.

REGENERATION  Through a technique of composting,

new encounters with liquid life are generated, where content

xxiv
 is (re)worked and reconstituted from the present explora-
tion.

Setting out to provoke change in thinking and dreaming by

opening up hidden landscapes (real and imaginary) that may
be accessed in uncertain times, this book creates an expanded
portfolio for navigating unfathomable terrains and conjuring
forth alternative futures than are possible through the Anthro-
pocene’s omnipresent paradigms. No formal conclusion to the
experiments and explorations is proposed, which, by implica-
tion, would be a conversational dead end. Nor is there an at-
tempt to fully resolve the strangeness of our existence with a
distilled set of principles through which we may create life on
our own terms. Rather, this ‘monster’ provides an alternative
framework for observing the living realm than the bête machine,
which through its (re)examination, sorting, ordering and valu-
ing, aims to provoke new conversations about the nature of liv-
ing matter and how we may imagine, construct and inhabit our
living spaces at a time of ecocide.

xxv
Protean Prose

The following section is a starting point for

an exploration of liquid life, where four-
teen quotes by major voices in the study
of life sciences depict different concepts
of ‘life’. These evolving and sometimes
incongruous perspectives are viewed
through the contemporary theories and
technological developments that frame
them — from the rejection of magical or
divine influences, to mechanical principles
of organisation, or extraterrestrial sources
of ‘information’. The (monstrous) contra-
dictions exposed in this study, provide an
initial embryology of thought, reaching
into the core of our contemporary view of
life and attesting that its nature remains
very much unresolved.

xxvii
Fourteen Portraits of Life

1 Ironically, the idea that life requires an explanation is

a relatively new one. To the ancients, life simply was; it
was a given; a first principle, in terms of which other
things were to be explained. Life vanished as an explanatory
principle with the rise of mechanics, when Newton showed
that the mysteries of the stars and planets yielded to a few
simple rules in which life played no part, when Laplace
could proudly say ‘Je n’ai pas besoin de cet hypothèse’;
when the successive mysteries of nature seemed to yield
to understanding based on inanimate nature alone: only
then was it clear that life itself was something that had to be
explained. — Robert Rosen (Rosen 1991, 11)

During the Enlightenment, the rise of secular atomism prompt-

ed investigators to provide a material explanation for the phe-
nomenon of life. Through their rationalisation, the characteris-
tics of living things needed to be accounted for by the properties
of ‘brute’ (Bennett 2010b, 64) matter, without recourse to a vital-
ising agency. Although the concept of spontaneous generation
was rejected, where non-living matter like dust could give rise
to creatures like fleas, or dead flesh to maggots, Louis Pasteur
demonstrated that life could not be accounted for by the forces
of ‘brute’ matter alone. Concluding that vital agencies were in-
volved in the making of living things, his experiments estab-
lished a new rigour for the investigation of previously invisible
forces (microbes) at work.

2 I took my drop of water from the immensity of creation,

and I took it filled with that fecund jelly, that is, to use
the language of science, full of the elements needed
for the development of lower creatures. And then I waited,
and I observed, and I asked questions of it, and I asked it
to repeat the original act of creation for me; what a sight it

xxix
 would be! But it is silent! It has been silent for several years,
ever since I began these experiments. Yes! And it is because
I have kept away from it, and am keeping away from it to
this moment, the only thing that it has not been given to
man to produce, I have kept away from it the germs that are
floating in the air, I have kept away from it life, for life is the
germ and the germ is life. — Louis Pasteur (quoted in Debré
1998, 169)

In the first part of the twentieth century, John Haldane con-

ceived one of the most important scenarios about the origin of
life on Earth, which offered a material explanation for chemi-
cal evolution that occured in Earth’s early seas. Proposing that a
hot dilute soup of inorganic substrates was capable of producing
organic molecules, he freed the actions of matter from the need
for vital forces (Tirard 2011).

3 Until about 150 years ago it was generally believed that

living beings were constantly arising out of dead matter.
Maggots were supposed to be generated spontaneously
in decaying meat. In 1668 [Francesco] Redi showed that this
did not happen provided insects* were carefully excluded.
And in 1860 [Louis] Pasteur extended the proof to the
bacteria which he had shown were the cause of putrefac-
tion. It seemed fairly clear that all the living beings known
to us originate from other living beings. At the same time
[Charles] Darwin gave a new emotional interest to the prob-
lem. It had appeared unimportant that a few worms should
originate from mud. But if man was descended from worms
such spontaneous generation acquired a new significance.
The origin of life on the earth would have been as casual
an affair as the evolution of monkeys into man. Even if the
latter stages of man’s history were due to natural causes,

* The reference to insects is on account of their propensity to lay tiny eggs

in organic matter, which then hatch and may be interpreted as ‘proof ’ of
spontaneous generation.

xxx
 pride clung to a supernatural, or at least surprising, mode
of origin for his ultimate ancestors. So it was with a sigh of
relief that a good many men, whom Darwin’s arguments
had convinced, accepted the conclusion of Pasteur that life
can originate only from life. It was possible either to sup-
pose that life had been supernaturally created on earth some
millions of years ago, or that it had been brought to earth
by a meteorite or by micro-organisms floating through
interstellar space. But a large number, perhaps the majority,
of biologists, believed, in spite of Pasteur, that at some time
in the remote past life had originated on earth from dead
matter as the result of natural processes. — J.B.S. Haldane
(Haldane 1929)

Contemporary explanations regarding how inert matter be-

comes animated, is framed by the discovery of deoxyribose nu-
cleic acid (DNA), which provides organisational ‘information’.
Situated within the nucleus of all cells, the processes of life gov-
erned by this polymer are equated with computing algorithms,
which instruct the operations of machines. The rise of modern
computers coincided with the rise of molecular biology, which
consolidated a fundamentally mechanistic approach to the na-
ture of life, and even shared many terms of reference such as
virus, code and program. This is situated in a deterministic uni-
verse, thrives on the existence of stable things, and only gener-
ates change through random errors occurring spontaneously in
cellular information.

4 In the beginning was simplicity … Darwin’s ‘survival of

the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law
of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by
stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is
permanent enough, or common enough to deserve a name
… — Richard Dawkins (Dawkins 2006, 15)

While mechanisms require self-similarity to perform their func-

tions, molecular imaging techniques such as crystallography

xxxi
demonstrated that the precision of the code of life was not per-
fect — or omnipotent — and naturally produced variety within
the limits of the system, effectively establishing life’s operations
were probabilistic, rather than deterministic.

5 All the work of the crystallographers serves only to

demonstrate that there is only variety everywhere where
they suppose uniformity … that in nature there is noth-
ing absolute, nothing perfectly regular. — Georges-Louis
Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (de Buffon 1783–1788, 433)

Increasingly, scientific investigation links living things to their

environment that contextualises them in ways that exceed
mechanistic explanation.

6 Living systems are units of interactions, they exist in an

ambience. From a purely biological point of view they
cannot be understood independently of that part of the
ambience with which they interact: the niche; nor can the
niche be defined independently of the living system that
specifies it. — Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
(Maturana and Varela 1928, 9)

Studies of gene expression reveal that the cell milieu does not
slavishly carry out its programs but is actively enabled and mod-
ulated by a range of systems that include epigenetic processes
and environmental contexts.

7 … life is defined as a material system that can acquire,

store, process, and use information to organize its ac-
tivities. In this broad view, the essence of life is informa-
tion, but information is not synonymous with life. To be
alive, a system must not only hold information but process
and use it. It is the active use of information, and not the
passive storage, that constitutes life. — Freeman Dyson
(Dyson 2001)

xxxii
Explanations for such fluid relationships are attributed to the
properties of gelatinous matrixes such as protoplasm, nucleo-
plasm, cytoplasm and ectoplasm, which house ‘metabolic’ cellu-
lar systems capable of translating between internal imperatives
and external circumstances.

8 Life is the mode of existence of albuminous bodies, and

this mode of existence essentially consists in the con-
stant self-renewal of the chemical constituents of these
bodies. — Friedrich Engels (Engels 1947)

Expressions of living matter are thought to emerge from liquid

environments, where a sophisticated and increasingly complex
understanding of chemistry renders the synthesis of biological
systems possible through a practice of synthetic biology.

9 The elementary phenomenon of life is the contact be-

tween an alimentary liquid and a cell. For the essential
phenomenon of life is nutrition, and in order to be
assimilated all the elements of an organism must be brought
into a state of solution. Hence the study of life may be best
begun by the study of those physico-chemical phenomena
which result from the contact of two different liquids. Biol-
ogy is thus but a branch of the physico-chemistry of liquids;
it includes the study of electrolytic and colloidal solutions,
and of the molecular forces brought into play by solution,
osmosis, diffusion, cohesion and crystallisation. — Stéphane
Leduc (Leduc 1911)

Accounts for the liveliness of matter, still cannot be completely

resolved as a function of the individual properties and atoms
and molecules by looking downward for answers. The continued
pursuit of such an approach challenges the usefulness of the
idea of ‘life’ at all.

xxxiii
 10 Evolutionary biologists will sometimes suggest that
origins is a subject different than the evolutionary
history of life, but in so doing they reveal them-
selves as closet vitalists who assume that life is different than
nonlife … origins is merely one stage of the grand history
of replicators, which have elaborated themselves over time
from simple strings of nucleic acids to complex strings
of nucleic acids surrounded by the diversity of biological
bags that we see today… as with all science, such questions
should be bounded by naturalism, to avoid the temptation
to slide into the supernatural just because the natural is
often frustrating. — Andrew Ellington (Ellington 2012)

In reaching the limits of classical science, ensuing nihilism re-

turns investigations into living systems back to a pre-Enlight-
enment context, where it seems pointless to even consider their
nature.

11 Life has always been there; it has always propa-

gated itself in the shape of living organisms, from
cells and from individuals composed of cells. Man
used to speculate on the origin of matter, but gave that up
when experience taught him that matter is indestructible
and can only be transformed. For similar reasons, we never
inquire into the origin of the energy of motion. And we
may become accustomed to the idea that life is eternal, and
hence that it is useless to inquire into its origin. — Svante
August Arrhenius (Arrenhius 1908, 218)

While the character of life cannot be explained through the col-

lective action of individual molecules alone, an appreciation of
the dynamic ecology of matter/energy relationships, generates
new questions and modes of investigation that produce recog-
nisably lifelike phenomena.

xxxiv
 12 … we are literally inhabited by highly motile rem-
nants of an ancient bacterial type that have become,
in every sense, a part of ourselves. These thriving
partial beings represent the physical basis of anima: soul,
life, locomotion; an advocation of materialism in the crass-
est sense of the word. Put it this way: a purified chemical is
prepared from brain and added to another purified chemi-
cal. These two chemicals — two different kinds of motile
proteins — together crawl away, they locomote. They move
all by themselves. Biochemists and cell biologists can show
us the minimal common denominator of movement, loco-
motion. Anima. Soul. These moving proteins I interpret as
the remains of the swimming bacteria incorporated by be-
ings who became our ancestors as they became us. — Lynn
Margulis (quoted in Brockman 2011)

Our capacity to manipulate and synthesise living agents from

first principles and recruit them in a technological capacity in-
creasingly relies on a better understanding of the flux of matter
and context in which ‘beings’ exist. The Central Dogma whereby
genetic codes alone, establish the fate of an organism, is giving
way to alternative theories about how biological outcomes are
shaped, specifically through the process of metabolism.

13 … by looking at the genes we should know every-

thing in biology, and by just modifying them one
could re‐program the behaviour of living systems
at our ease. It is like bacteria were computers making
computers, and just by replacing the program one could
make them do things that they normally do not do. The
interpretative frame that places all emphasis on genes has
dominated much of the biological research agenda of recent
decades and has been recently boosted by the ease of cheap
DNA sequencing. But is such a focus on genes and DNA the
ultimate way to go? After many years of trying to genetically
re‐program environmental bacteria for release as agents
of in situ bioremediation of toxic pollutants, my candid

xxxv
 answer is: no. And the one reason is that one cannot just
play with DNA while ignoring chemistry and metabolism, let
alone some principles of chemical engineering … This calls
for a novel view (and possibly a fresh research agenda) in
which metabolism has the leading role in the chain of bio-
logical command, opposite to the standard direction of the
information flow in the canonical Central Dogma. — Victor
de Lorenzo (de Lorenzo 2015)

Despite all that has been deduced and established through

many advances in molecular science, and even with an in-depth
knowledge of its ingredients, life still has not been built from
scratch. Even the most sophisticated machines today are not
autonomously self-producing agents, but workhorses for other
agencies. The inability to recapitulate this aspect of life suggests
that either assembling an organism from its components is un-
feasibly hard, or that the ideas used to frame this process are
fundamentally wrong.

14 … life on the Earth may be a miracle, or a freak, or

an alien infection … in the fifties [it was anticipated
that] … the answer to the origins of life would ap-
pear in some footnote to the answer to the question of how
organisms work. Something much more will be needed.
Something odd. — Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith
(Cairns-Smith 1985, 8)

xxxvi
All but Blind

What I cannot create, I do not understand. — Richard Feyn-

man (Caltech Archives 1988)

Our inability to assemble an organism from its basic ingredi-

ents, implies that our understanding of ecosystems and the liv-
ing world is also incomplete. As tipping points in the order of the
living world are reached, a better, more inclusive, understanding
of life’s nature is critical to the ongoing survival of our species
and, indeed, the biosphere. These forces do not just involve the
natural realm but also extend to the laboratory environment
and technosphere, where synthetic life and man-made environ-
mental networks are already part of the living world. Creating
life from scratch would mark an incredible advance in human
knowledge, which would be accompanied by a form of power
that is comparable with the invention of the atomic bomb. More
than a scientific endeavour, this colossal ethical and moral pro-
posal could change everything we know about this planet — and
the worlds beyond it.

It’s organism(s) that die, not life. — Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze

1995, 143)

Our current way of addressing the greatest challenges we face

this century are based on universal and deterministic ideals.
While this approach may have suited the challenges that typified
the Industrial Revolution (new materials and energy sources, ef-
ficient modes of production, effective transport etc.) they are
poorly suited to this ecological era. Alternative, multiple, inclu-
sive frameworks are needed, and the first step towards this pro-
cess is to establish an alternative to the bête machine.

xxxvii
 Part I

CONTEMPLATION
 01

PAUSE
Highlighting how the living world is poorly
served by mechanistic metaphors that deal
with inert substances, this chapter outlines
liquid life’s key concepts, terminology, and
principles that inform the characterisations
depicted in sections 01.12, 01.13 and 01.14,
which re-problematise the potency of the
material realm.

41
 01.1
Air

The air is a single, moving fluid that stretches from the

heavens to the earth. The higher you go in the air, the less
there is of it, but it never actually ends. About halfway from
the earth to the moon — say, a hundred thousand miles
aloft — one molecule of the air may meet another only
every week or so, and the solar wind is as likely to send that
molecule into interplanetary space as back down toward the
earth. Still, there is just a touch of the air even way up there.
(Logan 2012, 7)

The ground is our interface with the core of the world, which
exerts a gravitational pull on gaseous molecules that constantly
tug upwards into the vacuum of space. In this rareified realm,
our bodies appear to be made up of hierarchies of solid parts,
while the air that surrounds us seems as nothingness. If we shut
our eyes and enter the realm of the senses, the sun warms our
faces and the mischievous air pulls our clothing, as if to raise us
aloft. The ancient desire of flight succumbs to this world of flow,
which does not wish us bound to the ground but compels us to
be free, like wraiths, and rise with the air currents.

43
01.2
Water

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

(Eiseley 1973, 15)

Residing at the boundary between water and other media, our

construction of reality is shaped by encounters between our
naked senses and the impacts of physics and chemistry on wa-
ter. Our bodies have learned to carry and contain inner seas.
Although this oxide of hydrogen is a versatile and common
molecule on Earth, it is also abundant in space accounting for
around 10% of interstellar matter, or space ‘dust’, which takes
the form of ice. Arising from the primordial clouds of gas that
produced the Sun and other stars, it forms in warm, dense re-
gions of space where complex, ionic chemical reactions between
hydrogen and oxygen occur. Although the liquid phase of water
is relatively rare in the cosmos, it is relatively abundant on our
planet, occupying 70% of its surface and its origin is enigmatic.
Our already ‘wet’, water-containing planet acquired even more
of the stuff during the cometary collisions that characterised the
Hadean epoch to form our first seas around 4.6 million years
ago. In liquid form, it is a universal solvent with paradoxical
properties that are associated with the emergence of ‘life’, which
is characterised by constant flux and leaky bodies.

I could see a turbulent stream flowing down between the

hills. I could see trees set deep into the ground like huge,
one-legged creatures. The stillness of what I could see was
only the surface to what lay underneath. Under the bark of
the trees I could see rivulets of water, streams of sap flowing
up and down the trunk. Under the roof of the house I could
see the bodies of people asleep, and their stillness, too, was
only superficial — their hearts were beating gently, their
blood was rippling in their veins. (Tokarczuk 2003, 1)

44
 01.3
Earth

The body of a soil is a sky where seeds and worms and ions
fly. (Logan 2007, 171)

Around 3 percent of the Earth’s surface is made up of a thin

layer of organic matter, which ranges from a few centimetres
to several metres deep, and is folded into much more durable
inorganic substances such as sand and clay. These soil amal-
gams are ‘living hypermaterials’, with complex metabolisms that
actively process and organise their substrates, as a continuous,
self-producing system. They also host many diverse communi-
ties of soil-dwelling creatures. Our own human bodies resonate
with the character of this ‘humus’, which references the ancient
belief that we sprang from the earth.

People born where the soil is light and sandy are small, with
fair, dry, skin. At first glance they seem rather weak and
lacking in energy, but they’re like the sand — dogged and
able to hold on to life just as pine trees hold on to the sand
in which they grow. (Tokarczuk 2003, 190)

The varied composition of our soils betrays our ‘geostory’, a non-

human narrative fabric, which is woven through tectonic plates,
meteorite impacts, and ice ages (Latour 2013). Permeated by liq-
uid life, these giant bodies orchestrate many acts of ‘biochemical
burning’, or metabolism, without need for a central organising
system such as DNA, or even a brain. Collectively, soil’s myriad
processes orchestrate an unbroken cycle of continuous exchang-
es that link the living and the dead. Through its expanded and
active relationship with death, the metabolic decoherence of a
discrete body is neither a passive process, nor a final destina-
tion. Soils provide a place for this ‘energetic pause’ of living mat-
ter, where constituent molecular systems are released from the
constraints of one set of metabolic relationships and, through
an active process, are reincorporated into others. Soils may even

45
be thought of as regenerative ‘hyperorganisms’, whose continual
flow and assimilation of resources maintains the cycles of life on
this planet, and have done so for the last 3.5 billion years.

46
 01.4
Invisible Realms

… at first the muon was thought to be the Youkawa meson

mediating nuclear forces. When it was proved, that the
muon is insensitive to the strong force, it was not concluded
that ‘muons do not exist’ but ‘muons are not mesons’.
This reminds us of the imaginary case treated by [Saul]
Kripke where cats are found to be demons. One should
not conclude ‘that there turned out to be no cats, but that
cats have turned out not to be animals’. (Corsi, Chiara and
Ghirardi 1993, 270)

Animism holds that all things, living and non-living, have a

spirit and soul. Before the Enlightenment, these occult forces
were thought to govern the natural world, under the guidance
of an ‘invisible hand’ that was arbitrated by angelic and demonic
activities (Vivenza 2005). These concepts are so deep-rooted in
our cultural imagination that even during the scientific revolu-
tion, the demon as trickster concept was used widely to char-
acterise the unreliable nature of reality. During the seventeenth
century, the effects of nature’s mysterious agents started to be
named, explained, and actualised, as a tangle of invisible rays.
Most of these intangible forces could only be inferred, rather
than evidenced, until the nineteenth century when advanced
imaging techniques such as photography were developed, which
could convert them into readable, physical traces. Ephemeral
phenomena that could not be recorded in this manner contin-
ued to be attributed to unreliable senses and weakened minds.
By the twentieth century, the mysterious effects of angels and
demons were replaced by metaphors that generated vivid con-
ceptual models of how material processes work. While many of
these models could account for the nature of matter through
mathematical formulae and simple causes and effects, others
could not decipher the peculiar nature of certain (quantum) ef-
fects. Cats are still a favourite metaphor, which have taken the

47
place of demons, since as contradictory creatures,1 they embody
the uncertain realms beyond the laws of classical science.

1 Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment involves considering the

effects of a sample of radioactive material on a cat locked inside a window-
less box, which is at the same time, alive and dead.

48
 01.5
Monsters

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly

dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the
functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking
questions. (Levi 1986)

To explore the potential of liquid life is to make monsters. At the

heart of evolution, without monsters, there is no change. Only
stasis.

I have beheld the birth of life. I have seen the beginning

of motion. My pulses throb even to the point of bursting.
I long to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl. Would
that I had wings, a carapace, a shell — that I could breathe
out smoke, wield a trunk — make my body writhe, divide
myself everywhere — be in everything — emanate with all
the odours — develop myself like the plants — flow like
water — vibrate like sound — shine like light — assume all
forms — penetrate each atom — descend to the very bottom
of matter — be matter itself! (Flaubert 2005, 190)

Monsters are only monstrous when an ethics is absented.

49
01.6
Angels and Demons

… we can’t see other people’s Angels, only our own.

(Rimbaud 2004a, 161)

Angels, and their demonic counterpoints, are transitional be-

ings whose substance is relative, since they are incorporeal and
immaterial when encountered by mortals, but embodied and
substantial when compared with God (St. John of Damascus
2017). Thomas Aquinas considered angels to be a range of in-
termediate beings that governed natural law and helped divine
forces regulate the universe. In Jewish, Christian and Islamic
folklore they play a symbolic role, relaying messages between
Heaven and Earth (Stiles 1996, 9), where their wings represent
freedom from the material world through flight. They are advi-
sors, conveyers of partial knowledge from enlightened realms
and revealers of visions (Stiles 1996, 9) that communicate
through many levels of meaning with indeterminate, and even
dubious status.

Genesis [the] ‘origin book’ … is the first book and it tells

the origin of everything (but it does not tell of the creation
of angels). The apparent omission raise[s] troubling
implications: it either call[s] into question the completeness
of the biblical text, or allow[s] for the possibility that there
exist certain creatures which ha[ve] not been made by God.
(Sowerby 1983, 19)

While cats stand in for paradoxes and thought experiments in

physics — angels and demons are used throughout this book as
ethical vehicles for liquid life, which highlight the role of moral
agency and decision-making, within the uncertain terrains that
characterise the living world. Although modern science has
provided many insights into our knowledge of the planet, its
account of ‘life’ is incomplete. While we can name the elemen-
tal building blocks of the organic realm — carbon, hydrogen,

50
nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorous — this information still cannot
be used to build life from scratch. In search of a better under-
standing of life’s processes, liquid life draws upon those realms
that exist beyond the established portfolio of scientific methods
that comprise the Modern Synthesis (see section 04.2). Its aim
is to develop an ecological engagement with the natural realm,
so that its animating forces can be better characterised and en-
gaged through experiment. Both angel and monster, this book
conveys ethical questions between knowledge disciplines about
our understanding of ‘life’, and juxtaposes science with uncer-
tainty, so that alternative realms and bodies may be called into
being.2

It seems ironic that human experiences known by artists

and saints and yogis in different cultures over the millennia,
and repeated over and over again in quite different
situations, are dismissed as superstition and illusion, but an
elementary particle that only exists as a nanosecond impulse
on a screen seen only by a handful of high priests at CERN
at a cost greater than the construction bill for the Great
Pyramids is considered to be ‘scientifically real’. Elementary
particles are no more real than angels or garden dwarves;
they are … ‘brought forth’. Elementary particles are
brought forth by linear or ring accelerators, just as angels or
bodhisattvas are brought forth by meditation. Physics … is a
language. (Thompson 1991, 20)

2 In a (hyper)complex reality, we can coherently be many simultaneous

things without contradiction: a woman, employee, daughter, mother, citi-
zen, angel, and monster.

51
01.7
Language of Angels

A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once

again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the
angel in the word — and angel means originally ‘emissary,’
‘message bearer’ — how can we utter anything but personal
opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? … We
need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing
words as independent carriers of soul between people. We
need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn
them in school, or ever have them fully under control.
Words, like angels, are powers that have invisible power
over us. They are personal presences, which have whole
mythologies: genders, genealogies (etymologies concerning
origins and creations), histories, and vogues; and their own
guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects.
For words are persons. This aspect of the word transcends
their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evoked in
our souls a universal resonance. (Hillman 1991, 28–29)

John Dee and Edward Kelley claimed to have spoken with angels
during scrying sessions in 1581, where they acquired knowledge
of a language, which bore similarities to calculation tables, with
its own alphabet, grammar, and syntax that was documented in
manuscripts and workbooks. They asserted this Enochian3 code,
or keys, could reveal the language of angels and so, communi-
cate with other dimensions of reality (Harkness 2008, 5).
Metaphorically allied with angels and transitional beings that
enchant our habitats and render our world more liveable, liquid
life invokes its own angelology to better describe and engage
with the many varied aspects of the living world.

3 John Dee asserted that the Biblical Patriarch Enoch was the last human to
speak in the language of angels and so coined the term ‘Enochian’ (Hark-
ness 2008, 147).

52
 … you have to look at everything that changes and
moves, that doesn’t fit into a shape, that fluctuates and
disappears: the surface of the sea, the dances of the sun’s
corona, earthquakes, the continental drift, snows melting,
and glaciers moving, rivers flowing to the sea, seeds
germinating, the wind that sculpts mountains, a foetus
developing in its mother’s belly, wrinkles near the eyes, a
body decaying in the grave, wines maturing, or mushrooms
growing after a rain. (Tokarczuk 2010, 110)

Although existing lifeforms may already be read as liquid bod-

ies such as venous and arterial circulations, or cerebrospinal
system, they are inevitably framed within the conventions of
the bête machine. This Enlightenment metaphor frames the
characteristics of life as being appropriate for discourses of ef-
ficiency, geometric perfection, hierarchies, and determinism.
To circumvent these biases, an apparatus for producing direct
encounters of liquid bodies is needed. The Bütschli system (see
section 09.1) is introduced in this context, as an apparatus that
provides a counterpoint to established mechanistic narratives.
Operating through the activities of dynamic droplets, it gener-
ates direct encounters with a polysemic ‘language of angels’ (see
chapter 09). Arising from the intersecting fields of olive oil and
strong (3M)4 alkali, it generates a semiotic system that conjures
dynamic material expressions from liquid states through the ac-
tions of matter at far-from-equilibrium states (Armstrong 2015).
These computations5 acquire specific value in conversation with
observers and how they are read, is established through juxta-

4 M refers to the ‘molar’ strength of a solution where one ‘mole’ of matter

(M), equates to the atomic mass of a compound in grams, which is dissolved
in one litre of solvent (usually water). In this specific case, the atomic mass
of sodium hydroxide is 40, so one mole is 40g and for a 3M solution, 120g of
the compound is dissolved in a litre of water.
5 Computation in this sense is not a symbolic operation but an actual, mate-
rial event made up of iterations of events. It alludes to the kind of platform
that Alan Turing was concerned with, in understanding how nature com-
putes.

53
positions of diverse hermeneutic conventions — such as science,
poetry, and design. Revealing a generative ‘angelology’ of ma-
terial expressions and associated terms, these Bütschli ‘angels’
provide an apparatus, or lens, through which the creativity of
liquid life can be examined, experimentally engaged, and re-
viewed without recourse to the framework of the bête machine.

54
 01.8
Angels and Ethics

Every reference to angels is incidental to some other topic.

They are not treated in themselves. God’s revelation never
aims at informing us regarding the nature of angels. When
they are mentioned, it is always in order to inform us
further about God, what he does, and how he does it. Since
details about angels are not significant for that purpose, they
tend to be omitted. (Erickson 1983, 434)

The indeterminate status of angels means they are difficult to

characterise and so embody an ethical dimension that asks us
to embrace their protean identities and multiple forms, so that
we may begin to apprehend the alternative forms of knowledge
they convey. Such beings are compatible with Donna Haraway’s
notion of Chthulucene, and in this book angels personify the
‘ongoing generative and destructive forces that characterise the
natural worlding and reworlding of the planet’ (Haraway 2016).
Many kinds of angels have been described throughout the mil-
lennia. The Sumerian bee goddess, flourished in the Mesopota-
mian civilisation of Sumer between 5300 and 3500 BCE, along-
side the first known (bird-)winged figures such as lions and
humans, which are thought to be the inspiration and archetype
for biblical angels. Bees in particular, have been regarded as pur-
veyors of order since ancient times. Their hives have inspired
the organisation of many Mediterranean temples attended by
the oracular melissae, who induced ecstatic trances by drinking
fermented honey, or mead. The pillars of faith in Islam state that
an angel, created from light, accompanies each raindrop, while
in Estonian folklore,6 birds move as angels from the Earth to
the heavens taking the souls of the deceased with them. Such a
diversity of beliefs is framed by a range of spiritual perspectives
that describe various relationships with the natural realm that

6 The cosmos turns around a central world tree in Estonian folklore, of which
the Milky Way (linnutee or birds’ way in Estonian) is a branch.

55
differently incorporate the presence of angels into their com-
munities. As new understanding arises, the messages that angels
convey also change along with their nature.

… angels [are a] prism through which to study broader

changes in contemporary society. (Sowerby 2016, 4)

During the European Middle Ages, the relationships between

angels and demons were formalised into Christian doctrines
and their cultural significance significantly increased between
the eighth and twelfth centuries. Angels in particular, provided
the vehicle through which the ethical principles upon which so-
cieties came together could be discussed. As most people did
not travel (Sowerby 2016, 2), the concepts associated with angels
were shaped by local customs, superstitions, obsessions, and fa-
bles where ‘the wealth of disparate narratives involving angels
led men and women of all sorts to expect their own interactions
with these spirits’ (Keck 1998, 209). Such angelology helped make
sense of people’s actions, their outlook, and provided narratives
about how societies were organised. Angelology was more than
a set of doctrines and practices, it also inspired ways of living
and inhabiting the world, and in the eighth and ninth centu-
ries the church began to mount resistance to the direct worship
of angels as a form of resistance to paganism by reducing the
diversity of angels. While the calling upon angels with names
other than Raphael, Gabriel and Michael was condemned (Keck
1998, 174), it was not possible to eradicate the public appetite for
them. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, their absence
from the book of Genesis stimulated scholastic debate, rational
argument, philosophy, logic, and reason. These new pedagogical
systems benefited the wider social and economic communities
of medieval Europe in their rapid transition towards an urban-
ising, profit economy (Keck 1998, 81). In the transition towards
the industrial revolution cultural utilitarianism through secu-
larism, ‘brute’ materialism and rationalisation of material events
banished ethical and moral debate. Instead, the principle of ‘sur-
vival of the fittest’ stood in for notions of fairness within society

56
(Irons 1901). With competition and inequality at the heart of
modern ‘progress’, a truth-bearing language to counter the anti-
vitalist concepts of the bête machine is still needed to restore a
sense of human ‘purpose’ in the world.

All of these stories are a lure to proposing the Chthulucene

as a needed third story, a third netbag for collecting up
what is crucial for ongoing, for staying with the trouble.
The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They
are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human
beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus,
not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman.
(Haraway 2016)

By embracing the concept of angels, liquid life upholds an ethi-

cal view of the organising principles of the living world and
the way it is, or should be inhabited, as a counterpoint to the
Anthropocene. In our transitioning towards an ecological era,
liquid life upholds the diversity in our approaches towards an
understanding of the innate strangeness of the natural realm, its
complex epistemologies of ‘being’ (Latour 1993), and our rela-
tionship with them through its discourses with angels.

57
01.9
Angels and Ecocide

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing
from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm
irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is
turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1969, 257–58)

Despite our best efforts to resist the atrocious environmental

legacy of intensive global industrialisation, we are losing our
connection with those agents that mediate exchanges between
the living and non-living realms. The Anthropocene, which em-
bodies this worldview through the logic and practices of ma-
chines, is driving angels from the complexity of living realm, re-
sulting in catastrophic losses in biodiversity, which carries clear
messages of impending disaster in the Sixth Great Extinction.
To mitigate what we can of the present ecocide and establish
alternative approaches that may secure our ongoingness, con-
ceptual frameworks, and metaphors that embrace vitality are
urgently needed. Most pressingly, if we are to break away from
the enduring habits that have scarred the surface of our planet,
it is imperative that the stranglehold of the machine metaphor
upon all aspects of ‘life’ must be broken.
Seeking to renew our relationship with the natural world,
liquid life draws on the irreducibility and strangeness of fluids,
which conjure forth the vital forces that flow through the world’s
metabolic networks. Within our guts, cells and environments,
hubs of vitality nurture its presence. Like the wind, we cannot
see it, but we know it is here by the effects it exerts on other
things and how it makes us feel. Through the countless, irreduc-
ible acts of ‘being’, liquid life (re)introduces the ‘soul substance’
into the contemporary discourse of ‘life’.

58
 01.10
Bête Machine

[T]he appeal to mechanism on behalf of biology was in its

origin an appeal of the well-attested self-consistent physical
concepts as expressing the basis of all natural phenomena.
But at present there is no such system of concepts.
(Whitehead 1925, 128)

René Descartes replaced the ancient, spiritual view of the living

world (Dickinson 1911, 2–8) with an extreme model of human-
ity, where the rational soul (mind) and body were made up of
qualitatively different substances. While people were capable of
rational thought and therefore, had souls (which departed when
the body machinery no longer worked), non-human life did not
and was regarded as a mere bête machine governed by the laws
of mechanics. Observed sensibilities were not considered to ex-
tend to anything more sophisticated than reflexes and instinct
(Newman 2001). This view enabled science to begin invasive
studies, where the living bodies of animals and human cadav-
ers could be dissected without concern for religious, or ethical
dilemmas, since the ‘appearance’ of pain was thought to be no
more than an unconscious reflex (Admin 2013). The machine
metaphor proved such a successful approach to understanding
the living world that Julian Offray de la Mettrie took this to its
logical extreme, referring to the human creature as as soulless,
self-winding automaton — ‘L’homme machine’.
Brilliantly, the concept of machine not only describes atom-
ism’s worldview; it embodies its ideas. Its principles and opera-
tions can be tested and reinforced by mechanical technologies.
The demonstrable and (potentially) perfectible success of ma-
chines is not only inspiring; its self-reinforcing procedural sim-
plicity is peerless.
Like atomism, machines are built from fundamental parts
and are structurally assembled according to mechanical prin-
ciples, which are derived from classical physics. Its components
are inert, lifeless, and unchanging, so it has to be powered by ex-

59
ternal forces (fossil fuels, electricity, computer programs, etc.),
which tip it away from equilibrium and command it into action.
Lumbering from molecule to molecule, and joint to joint, the
bête machine (the material apparatus of life) has no innate agen-
cy and is blind to its environmental context. Organised within
a hierarchy of inert geometric objects, it embodies a ‘brute’
mechanical view of reality. Through our quest to incorporate
their benefits into our lives, machines have become so sophis-
ticated they are more than workhorses for industrial processes.
Through personalised gadgets and robots, they have become our
companions, acquiring this status through our projections of
their worth on to them. Validated through our ability to incor-
porate its logic into our daily lives, the machine worldview with
its automata (alluding to self-movement), robots (workhorses)
and cyborgs (hybrids of human/animal/machine), pervades
everything we do. Indeed, we have reached the point where we
believe that we are little more than ‘survival machines’ guided by
‘informatic’ selfish replicators (Dawkins 2006, 24–25).

… a human society based simply on the gene’s law of

universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society
in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may
deplore something, it does not stop it being true … if you
wish … to build a society in which individuals cooperate
generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you
can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try
to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born
selfish. Let us understand what our selfish genes are up to,
because we may then at least have the chance to upset their
designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.
(Dawkins 2006, 3)

Reaching to the status conferred on ancient gods, their ubiquity

and potency is deployed at the scale and power of natural forces,
like the atomic bombs that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
August 1945 during the final stages of World War II. Mechani-
cal systems also provide substitutes for natural phenomena, like

60
the Moonlight Towers of Austin, Texas (Oppenheimer 2014),
which floodlit the city with artificial night light, not only replac-
ing the moon, but also ‘improving’ upon its performance, or the
Norwegian Rjukan sun, which consists of three giant mirrors
that extend daylight for the town. The influence of machines on
our existence is so profound that they even epitomise the hu-
man project — specifically, the anthropos, which is built upon
a particular kind of power and forms of privilege that elevate
humanity over other life forms (Braidotti 2013, 65–66). In this
way, the machine embodies and articulates the Enlightenment
project of objectivity and progress, extending its reach and im-
pacts through colonisation and the global marketplace.
While the mechanistic principles of the bête machine have
contributed significantly to the modern understanding of the
natural world, they do not speak perfectly for the extraordinary
phenomenon of the living realm. In many ways, ‘life’ is a coun-
terpoint to machines: while it obeys the laws of physics, it cannot
be predicted by them; it is probabilistic, while machines are de-
terministic systems; life expresses its far-from-equilibrium states
through its (hyper)complex materiality, while through their
rigid embodiment, machines transform the external inputs of
energy that tip them away from relative equilibrium into simple,
predictable, unchanging chains of causes and effects; the living
realm is deeply correlated with its surroundings, yet machines
are not sensitive to their environmental contexts. These funda-
mental incompatibilities present a situation where characteristic
and important phenomena associated with living things, cannot
be discussed or explored through the logic of the bête machine
and are therefore excluded from relevant (ethical) debates.
Even when non-human matter is imagined through its bio-
molecular components, the observed behaviour of the whole is
‘other’ than the sum of these parts. Whatever it is that emerges
through the ‘brute’ body of the bête machine, its irreducible, sen-
sible, and irrepressible presence allies much more closely with
Descartes notion of the soul than with an unthinking, unfeeling
assemblage that awaits instruction by an external agency. More
than a mechanism, the agency of living matter squeezes through

61
the gaps of our capacity to ‘reduce’ its nature into a set of simple
causes and effects — declaring itself ‘liquid’.

62
 01.11
Entropy

… the whole organic world constitutes a single great

individual, vague and badly co-ordinated it is true, but none
the less a continuing whole with inter-dependent parts: if
some accident were to remove all the green plants, or all
the bacteria, the rest of life would be unable to exist. This
individuality, however, is an extremely imperfect one — the
internal harmony and the subordination of the parts to
the whole is almost infinitely less than in the body of a
metazoan, and is thus very wasteful; instead of one part
distributing its surplus among the other parts and living
peaceably itself on what is left, the transference of food from
one unit to another is usually attended with the total or
partial destruction of one of its units. (Huxley 1912, 125)

Our planet formed around 4.6 billion years ago from collisions
between colossal gas and dust clouds that clumped together to
form our solar system. Since its inception, it has been perme-
ated with instability and change. As our world cooled, convec-
tion cells in its molten iron core formed and cast magnetic fields
around the planet, which established the dynamic material
conditions in which life could emerge. Today, the boundaries
between these bodies continue to move and subduct as tectonic
crusts, while the planet’s magnetosphere dances in the Sun’s
strange ionised winds. In this sheltered yet turbulent realm, a
transition from inert matter to life became possible. Arising
from such a vivacious place, it is little wonder, then, that since
ancient times, the dynamic character of the planet has been con-
sidered a ‘living’ being, whose nature varies according to differ-
ing perspectives.
Plato’s organicist view proposed the planet possessed both
soul and intelligence, while the hylozoism of pre-Socratics re-
garded all matter to some degree was ‘alive’ and Plotinus under-
stood that all beings were interconnected. Such concepts can be
traced through to the modern era in various schools of thought

63
such as, Thomas Aquinas’s natural theology, Ralph Waldo Em-
erson and Henry David Thoreau’s nature writing, Rachel Car-
son’s Silent Spring and the eco-activism of the late 20th century
(Ruse 2013).
While starkly contrasting with the mechanistic approach of
the scientific revolution that operated according to predictable
laws, notions of a ‘living world’ became incorporated into the
perspectives of ‘systems’ sciences.

The experiment is not traditional, reductionist, discipline-

oriented science, but a new, more holistic level of ecosystem
science that has been called ‘biospherics.’ (Odum 1993, 878)

Specifically, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis championed the

Gaia hypothesis, which regards Earth as a self-regulating ‘organ-
ism’, and imagined these principles could be applied through
climatological, biogeochemical, and bacterial mechanisms to
produce Earth-like environments in off-world settlements and
spaceships (Anker 2014). While cybernetics and systems science
generated a framework that provided more fluidity in the re-
lationships between ‘components’ (or ‘living’ beings) than the
mechanistic model of the living world, from a material perspec-
tive, life itself also did not seem to comply with the classical laws
of physics. According to Erwin Schrödinger, it characteristically
avoided the inevitable decay towards thermodynamic equilib-
rium — or inertia:

An organism’s astonishing gift of concentrating a ‘stream

of order’ on itself and thus escaping the decay into
atomic chaos — of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable
environment — seems to be connected with the presence
of ‘aperiodic solids’, the chromosome molecules, which
doubtless represent the highest degree of well-ordered
atomic association we know — much higher than the
ordinary periodic crystal — in virtue of the individual
role every atom and every radical is playing here. To put it
briefly, we witness the event that existing order displays the

64
 power of maintaining itself and of producing orderly events.
(Schrödinger 2012, 77)

Ernst Mayr observed that biology is unique among the sciences,

as certain principles of physics cannot be applied to biology,
nor do biological principles apply to the inanimate world (Mayr
2004, 21).

A chemical compound once formed would persist for ever,

if no alteration took place in surrounding conditions. But
to the student of Life the aspect of nature is reversed. Here,
incessant, and, so far as we know, spontaneous change is the
rule, rest the exception — the anomaly to be accounted for.
Living things have no inertia and tend to no equilibrium.
(Huxley 1870, 75)

Despite their protean nature, living systems remain stable within

chaotic environments by shedding heat, which actually results
in a minuscule increase in overall cosmic entropy and so, com-
ply with the second law. From a highly localised perspective,
however life appears to contravene this principle, as its it oper-
ates through highly local, specific molecular, and quantum ef-
fects, which maintain their relevance to particular microniches.

… there are places where matter creates itself, coming into

being on its own out of nothing. They are always just small
chunks of reality, not essential to the whole, and as a result
they are no threat to the balance of the world. (Tokarczuk
2010, 203)

Ilya Prigogine described the material systems that possess these

characteristics as ‘dissipative structures’ (Prigogine 1997, 27),
which are paradoxical objects/assemblages that arise from the
persistent flow of matter through a space (see section 08.9).
Dissipative structures remain stable by dispersing energy into
their surroundings, becoming increasingly structured during
the process of ‘dissipative adaptation’ (England 2015; Wang 2014)

65
(see section 08.10). Such dissipation-driven adaptation of mat-
ter is not unique to life but applies to all forms of dissipative
structures in the physical world, from the formation of volca-
noes to the crystallisation of snowflakes. The most primordial
forms do not self-replicate, but spontaneously arise from colli-
sions at energetically charged interfaces between lively matter/
energy fields. While these fields persist, dissipative structures
continue to be produced. Physical constraints on the system
keep the performance of these bodies in check. Should these
limits be loosened, they can reconfigure and adapt rapidly to
altering circumstances. While not all dissipative structures are
alive, all living things are dissipative systems, where organisa-
tional stability is produced by continual activity and flow, with
all constituent substances (not just genes) actively participating
in life’s flux. Some of these agents persist by using all possible
diversionary material strategies within their reach and, there-
fore, evade the direct pathway towards thermodynamic equilib-
rium — a form of material inertia, or death. Dissipative systems
are also compatible with notions of niche construction, where
agents exhibit a reciprocal relationship with their surround-
ings through energy-shedding activities that include, but are
not limited to, metabolic exchanges. In turn, these events have a
feedback effect in the system, producing anisotropy and there-
fore enabling the production of increasingly complex (or hyper-
complex) structures, which further resist the energetic descent
towards thermodynamic equilibrium. While such physical prin-
ciples alone do not inevitably result in biology, their countering
of entropic forces through dissipative adaptation constitutes the
very process of living, and is the start of a transition from lively
matter towards life (Ball 2017b).

A thousand incidents arise, which seem to be cut off

from those which precede them, and to be disconnected
from those which follow. Discontinuous though they
appear, however, in point of fact they stand out against the
continuity of a background on which they are designed, and
to which indeed they owe the intervals that separate them;

66
 they are the beats of the drum which break forth here and
there in the symphony. Our attention fixes on them because
they interest it more, but each of them is borne by the fluid
mass of our whole physical existence. Each is only the best
illuminated point of a moving zone which comprises all
that we feel or think or will — all, in short, that we are at any
given moment. It is this entire zone which in reality makes
up our state. Now, states thus defined cannot be regarded as
distinct elements. They continue each other in an endless
flow. (Bergson 1922, 3)

The driving forces of these operations may be envisaged as dy-

namic fields of activity and quantum phenomena that are capa-
ble of odd material behaviours. These are largely factored out
of classical scientific narratives, which are based on the average
behaviours of large numbers of atoms whereas life’s processes
produce their effects at the (sub)microscopic scale, with many
fewer atoms in play.

… physics doesn’t make a distinction between life and not-

life. But biology does. (Eck 2016)

Alfred North Whitehead proposed a fluid view of the living

realm where ‘actual occasions’ are the ‘final real things of which
the world is made up … drops of experience, complex and in-
terdependent’ (Whitehead 1979, 18) and ‘the flux of things is one
ultimate generalisation around which we must weave our phil-
osophical system’ (Whitehead 1979, 208). Such plastic models
of the material realm draw attention to protean and fluid phe-
nomena, which is not a solution to uncertainty, but an attitude
of iterative engagement with events that are context-sensitive
and framed by chemical laws. The operational framework for
these processes must therefore be updated continually, so that
the conditions for the next iterations of decisions may be ap-
propriately shaped.

67
 As systems dissipate energy, they drift in an irreversible
direction and by doing so become ‘exceptional,’ … not
perfect or ideal. ‘A bird is not a global optimum for flying
… It’s just much better at flying than rocks or worms.’ (Eck
2016)

How matter at far-from-equilibrium shapes life’s complex modes

of embodiment may be experimentally observed, explored, and
tested by applying the principles of liquid life through identify-
ing a portfolio of native materials, apparatuses, and prototypes,
some of which will be explored in this book (see chapters 08
and 09).

68
 01.12
Liquid Bodies

The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it

renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling
does it speak the truth. (Grass 2008, 4)

Liquids are non-bodies, as they are constantly changing and

therefore possess no formal boundaries. Possessing their own
logic these protean structures assert their identity through their
environmental context. They are pluripotent, not amorphous,
being forged by oscillations and iterations of material expres-
sions. Arising from interfaces, they persist through local con-
nections and networks, which have the capacity to internalise
other bodies as manifolds within their substance. Such multi-
ple entanglements invoke marginal relations between multiple
agencies that exceed the classical logic of objects, being capa-
ble of many acts of transformation. Although their behaviour
may be approximated by classical laws, like the liquid parcels
described by Lagrangian hydrodynamics, they resist complete
reduction into this framework.
Giving rise to the very acts of life, such as the capacity to
heal, adapt, self-repair and empathise, the diversionary tactics
of liquid bodies de-simplify the process of embodiment through
their visceral entanglements. While they are strange, they are
not the invention of fanciful imaginations but exist outside of
the current frames of reference in which our global industrial
culture is steeped. Aspects of their existence stray into the un-
conventional and liminal realms of auras, quantum physics, and
ectoplasms, which invite poetic engagement.

… every creature is contained within certain limits of its

own nature, and inasmuch as those invisible operations,
which cannot be circumscribed by place and bounds, yet
are closed in by the property of their own substance …
(Ambrose 2009)

69
Liquid bodies also challenge the idea that embodiment is ‘just’
a question of anatomy and physiology. Intersecting with each
other across multiple interfaces, they generate a bounded spec-
trum of events, structures, and inter/intra-relationships. Insepa-
rable from their context. Offering alternative ways of thinking
and experimenting with the conventions of making and being
embodied, they possess the capacity to surprise us.
Liquid bodies are political agents, which redefine boundaries
and conditions for existence in the context of dynamic, unruly
environments. Radically transformed, monstrous, coherent,
raw — and selectively permeated by their nurturing media, they
embody alternative ways of ‘being’. While the choreographies
that shape their iterations invite us to articulate the fuzziness,
paradoxes, and uncertainties of the living realm, they remain
instantly recognisable like — tornado, cirrus, soil, embryo, bio-
film. Challenging the structure of our grammar beyond the cau-
sality implied in the links between nouns (objects) and verbs
(process), they invite us to invent monsters that defy all exist-
ing forms of categorisation taking us beyond the conventions of
grouping and relational thinking. Making possible a new kind
of corporeality by relating one body to another, liquid bodies
produce contradictions of morphology and existence, which
invite alternative readings of how the world is sorted, ordered,
agentised, and valued.

70
 01.13
Liquid Consciousness

If animals were soulless, they were just machines. Therefore

they didn’t feel pain—they only acted as if they did. (Admin
2013)

With the senses deemed untrustworthy, the bête machine de-

nies non-humans the capacity to perceive, or interpret reality,
and are deemed to behave like blind automata awaiting cogent
instruction. Since rational thought is entangled with Descartes’
conception of the soul, liquid life’s innate agency raises ques-
tions about the quality of decision-making and capacity for self-
awareness of liquid bodies, providing a model for non-human
thought (see section 05.9).
Provoking an expanded notion of consciousness that is
situated at interfaces, ‘liquid consciousness’ is sensitive to the
environment, responding to the flows between lively fields of
matter/energy, which comprise a primitive mode of self-obser-
vation. Since action and matter are intrinsically coupled in a
liquid body, there no need for an internal model of the world to
instruct it, so it does not anticipate the nature of reality a priori.

The main problem with #emergence as a metaphysical

idea is that it’s too atomist at the outset. It denies that
consciousness is the very process of self-individuation, as
one awakes from dormancy. (Fuller 2018)

Always discovering its context, liquid consciousness constantly

reveals a world that is tinged with mystery. With persistence,
it begins to differentiate between the mundane — where mo-
lecular species hurtle towards stability — and the extraordinary
diversions of molecular assemblages at far-from-equilibrium
states, which enable it to persist awhile. Becoming increasingly
sophisticated, pervasive liquid bodies develop an indulgent pal-
ette of natural resources, food sources, waste materials, energy
fields, and act on opportunistic events. Neither fully defined by

71
any specific locale nor set of material resources, they are perme-
able to their particular circumstances and constantly capable of
change.

… there’s certainly intelligence there, of a kind … they

know what they’re doing. Look at it this way. Granted that
they do have intelligence; then that would leave us with
only one important superiority — sight. We can see, and
they can’t. Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone.
Worse than that — our position becomes inferior to theirs
because they are adapted to a sightless existence, and we are
not. (Wyndham 2000)

Without a predetermined, idealised form towards which to as-

pire, ‘liquid consciousness’ becomes optimised to its surround-
ings. Depending on the complexity of bodies, the richness of
their environments, specific events, and sustained experiences,
the character of thought is contingently shaped by its contexts.
Some liquid bodies lose the capacity to respond to light because
they live in darkness, others are primarily informed by ambient
vibrations by which they navigate the world, while a few, like
web-building spiders, extrude their mind maps into structural
forms that penetrate their world (see section 07.14).

So the octopus thinks: ‘All right. I’m going to make an

intelligence test for humans, because they show a little bit
of promise, in a very few ways.’ And the first question the
octopus comes up with is this: How many color patterns can
your severed arm produce in one second? (Williams 2011)

While theirs is not a human version of existence, their respon-

sive apparatuses of liquid bodies forge appropriate agency with-
in their habitats, which empowers them to act independently
of humans, or other observers, and become co-authors in the
unfolding narratives of their ‘living’ world.

72
 01.14
Liquid Life

Liquid life is a paradoxical, planetary-scale material condition,

with no fixed shape, but a characteristic readiness to flow and
therefore takes on the shape of any container. Forged by the per-
sistent instabilities of an uncertain realm, it is unevenly distrib-
uted but spatially continuous and is what remains when logical
explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we
recognise as ‘being alive’.
Liquid life is not a homogeneous life force, but a kind of ‘met-
abolic weather’ — a dynamic substrate, or hyperbody, that per-
meates the atmosphere, liquid environments, soils, and Earth’s
crust. ‘Metabolic weather’ refers to complex physical, chemical,
and even biological outcomes that are provoked when fields of
matter at far-from-equilibrium states collide. It is a vector of in-
fection, an expression of recalcitrant materiality and a principle
of ecopoiesis, which underpins the process of ‘living’ events.
These arise from energy gradients, density currents, katabatic
flows, vortices, dust clouds, pollution, and the myriad expres-
sions of matter that detail our (earthy, liquid, gaseous) terrains
(see section 05.23). Since our unique planetary conditions are
the generative source of this unique material phenomenon, as
long as they remain, life is ‘effectively’ immortal.
Liquid life is also a worldview — a phantasmagoria of effects,
disobedient substances, evasive strategies, dalliances, skirmishes,
flirtations, addictions, quantum phenomena, unexpected twists,
sudden turns, furtive exchanges, sly manoeuvres, blind alleys,
and exuberant digressions. It discusses a mode of existence that
is constantly changing, not as the cumulative outcomes of ‘er-
ror’, but as a highly choreographed and continuous spectrum of
events that arise from the physical interactions of matter at far-
from-equilibrium and their associated cascades of events.

Few men are gifted with the capacity of seeing; there are
fewer still who possess the power of expression … the
external world is reborn … natural and more than natural,

73
 beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed
with an impulsive life like the soul of its creator. The
phantasmagoria has been distilled from nature. (Baudelaire
1995, 12)

Steeped in the fluid conditions of hypercomplexity and hyper-

object-ness, liquid life exceeds our ability to observe, or compre-
hend it in its totality, owing to its massively distributed nature.
Typically, we recognise its epiphenomena as discrete beings,
which draw sustenance from the immense continuum of un-
evenly distributed, planetary scale, metabolic events that un-
derpin its myriad forms of expression. At far-from-equilibrium
states it ambles through transitional molecular states and enter-
tains rebellious quantum phenomena, which evade permanent
commitments to form or function. Seeking strategies of diso-
bedience through meandering pathways, it moves in directions
that evade thermodynamic efficiency and equilibrium’s death
drive. Neither purposeless, nor goal oriented, it contemplates
the spectacle of ‘living’, revelling in its indulgences and resisting
the efficiencies of material transaction that coerce it towards in-
ertia. Culturally speaking, this resistance shares resonances with
Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, who resists the path towards con-
sumer transaction within the ‘arcades’ of experience (Benjamin
1997, 79–80). Such diversions forge the very processes of life.

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water
of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become
one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the
passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house
in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of
movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To
be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at
home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and
yet to remain hidden from the world — impartial natures
which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator
is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The
lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like

74
 the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all
the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or
are not — to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives
in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus
the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though
it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we
might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or
to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to
each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity
of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.
(Baudelaire 1995, 9)

Liquid life creates a platform for thinking with and through

fluids, where the defining characteristic of our planet is ac-
knowledged within the concept of life itself. Such expanded
perspectives also engage with alternative power and identity
relationships that move towards inclusive, horizontal interrela-
tions, which are consistent with an ecological era. Proposing to
distribute agency more equally within an expanded notion of
immanent spaces, liquid life dilutes, decentres, and reduces the
environmental impact of the anthropos in the construction of
industrial processes (Steinberg and Peters 2015). It also raises
critical questions about notions of society that embrace all hu-
mans and even includes species that have become so intrinsic to
our biology they are integral to our being. For example, bacte-
rial commensals (bacterial microbiome), symbionts (pets) and
even ‘living’ fossils (mitochondrial bodies, viral, and bacterial
gene sequences in ‘junk’ DNA) are fundamental to our exist-
ence, their diffusion within our flesh conferring us with unique
character. As members of our ‘fluid’ communities, their rights
and (potential) responsibilities are emphasised, as are notions of
agency and modes of conversation. Such considerations invite
alternative notions of personhood, currently potentially extend-
ed to chimpanzees, dolphins (Revkin 2013), machines (Prod-
han 2016), land, rivers (Rousseau 2016) and planet (Vidal 2011).
These recognitions may also extend to building coalitions (Bas-
tian 2006) for (environmental) peace and include plants (an-

75
cient trees) (Martin 2000), insects (bees and other pollinators),
soil organisms (mycorrhiza) and other creatures upon which
our immediate existence depends. Although such notions could
potentially extend indefinitely to embrace every being on the
planet, from a ‘lived’ perspective, the appropriate limits and rel-
evance are bestowed by community members through shared
ethical concerns and values, which are at the heart of ecological
change.
While liquid life is effectively immortal, its epiphenomena
are not. At some point, beings reach thermodynamic equilibri-
um, where their deceased matter lies quiescently, patiently wait-
ing for its reanimation through compost where it is assimilated
back into the cycles of life and death.
This book does not set out to resolve the questions it pro-
vokes, but to stimulate conversation and debate about funda-
mental issues that enable the development and interrogation of
an alternative technological platform than the machine, with an
associated ethics that is appropriate for issues that characterise
the third millennium.

76
 Part II

DETERMINISM
UNBOUND
 02

THE WORLD OF MACHINES

This chapter sets the concept of liquid life
as an alternative to mechanistic thinking
and its principles of certainty, which frame
the discourses implicit in René Descartes’
concept of the bête machine. In this way, it
problematises the modern story of life and
how we work with, relate to, and give an
account of it.

79
 02.1
Introduction

Einstein wrote, ‘If the moon would be asked why it follows

its eternal path around the earth, he may answer that he
is gifted with self-consciousness and that his decision was
made once and for all.’ We smile, because we know that
his path abides by Newton’s Laws. Einstein asks that we
should also smile when you believe that you act on your
own initiative. Our initiative is simply an illusion, because
there is no reason that determinism — which is found in
nature — would stop in front of the human brain. In other
words, man is an automaton. He may believe that he’s free,
but he is not free. It would be like we’re in a movie. We
don’t know who was killed, we don’t know who’s the killer,
but somebody knows it — the person who made the movie.
In some sense, every action, every part of our life, of the
life of the universe, is already determined by the initial
conditions as they were present in the big bang. Therefore,
the pleasure of being invited to this beautiful ceremony,
and my friendship with Professor Ruffini, would have been
included in the information at the big bang. But that seems
very strange, and I could never accept this view. (Prigogine,
not dated)

The modern story of life is recounted as a set of linear material

causalities. They are related to each other through lines of verti-
cal descent and ancestral lineages from a hypothetical common
progenitor being — the last universal common ancestor (LUCA)
(LePage 2016). Life’s hypothetical prototype appeared around
3.8 billion years ago to produce the major divisions on the phy-
logenetic tree of life: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes.1 From

1 Viruses are debatably part of the phylogenetic tree of life. While they have
been traditionally considered ‘degenerate’ cells without the full apparatus
for self-replication, recent discoveries of ‘giant viruses’ challenge this theory
(Ludmir and Enquist 2009).

81
these primitive origins, a biodiverse range of creatures began to
blossom and wither, like branches on trees, from an initial set of
around 355 genes.2
Liquid life is not a reversible phenomenon and is inextricably
coupled with the vector of time (Prigogine 1997). Life does not
only unfold through vertical pathways in a forward direction, it
also unfurls sideways through space-time, continually permeat-
ing slippery spaces. This is not merely via the transmission of
life’s forces through the structuring of bodies, but also by the
propagation of its reactive fields — its potent intersections pro-
voke the events that form beings, memories, relationships, trau-
mas, conversations, dreams, and hopes for the future.
Liquid life arises from the process of living that deals in mul-
tiples, paradoxes, and occupies the fuzzy edges of existence. It
does not stand fast as an object, but dissolves into a spectrum
of unfolding phenomena such as eating, breathing, sleeping,
thinking, loving, metabolising, being, moving, growing, heal-
ing, hurting, dreaming, denying, aspiring, and observing. It per-
petually evades those conditions in which it may fossilise into a
permanent form, without hope of reprieve.
Life’s 3.5 billion years of unbroken legacy is currently under
threat, as its vital global infrastructures are in a state of decline.
We are witnessing dramatic losses in biodiversity — more than
ten times the accepted background rate. Of course, this is not
the first time the planet has faced a viability crisis. At the time of
biogenesis, life on earth is likely to have been extinguished many
times during an epoch of relentless asteroid bombardment that
characterised the Hadean era. Geological records also indicate
that, since its inception, life has been almost wiped out five times

2 Recent phylogenetic analyses of ubiquitous and presumed-to-be vertically

inherited ‘core’ genes, suggest that there might in fact be only two primary
domains of life, Bacteria and Archaea, with the eukaryotes having emerged
from within the latter (Williams and Embley 2014). This lends greater
weight to the deep origins of the ‘partial digestions’ of creatures at the early
stages of evolution, which are raised by Lynn Margulis (Margulis and Sagan
1995) and emphasised by Donna Haraway (Haraway 2015), as counter nar-
ratives to genetic hierarchies and forms of biological organisation.

82
in the last half a billion years (Ceballos et al. 2015). While these
previous catastrophes have been wrought by natural disaster,
uniquely, we are currently facing catastrophic human-initiated
environmental damage that is precipitated by global industrial
development. The tragedy of the Anthropocene is that the en-
suing Sixth Great Extinction is not just wrought upon existing
creatures, but also upon the elemental systems that expedite
planetary viability.
Although every civilisation exploits its environment in some
way, the intensity and scale of the wounds inflicted by the In-
dustrial Era are preventing the capacity of ecosystems to repair
themselves. The ‘great stone book of nature’ (Anstead 1863) is
etched with indelible fossils, as our seas are turn into plastic
soups, and concrete rocks lie as prehistoric bones under our
urban skylines. The kinds of reducing gases that once choked
the skies of the Hadean period now clog our atmosphere, while
intensive farming practices are turning our soils to dust. Threat-
ening the viability of our planet, these changes herald a cultural
‘Ecocene’, or Ecological Era, which seeks a new relationship with
nature capable of countering the ongoing massive destruction of
our natural environment.

83
02.2
Laplace’s Demon: On Determinism

We ought then to regard the present state of the universe

as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one
which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence
which comprehends all the forces by which nature is
animated and the respective positions of the beings which
compose it — an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these
data to analysis — it would embrace in the same formula
both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe
and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be
uncertain and the futures, as the past, would be present to
its eyes. (Laplace 1902, 4).

Although the Enlightenment addressed life’s paradoxes through

the lens of rational thought, this did not render them entirely
knowable through a detailed understanding their components.
In 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace used a thought experiment to as-
sert this fundamental concept, which was originally conceived
by Gottfried Leibniz. Imagining a scientist who could see all
the events of all times present to the mind of God, who became
known as ‘Laplace’s Demon’, he proposed that all the past and
future possible states of the universe could be calculated by such
a superintelligent being. With such knowledge, no place for law-
lessness or arbitrary events would remain, providing the present
state of the universe and the positions, velocities, and forces
on all particles acting on it at one time, were already known
(Laplace 1902, 4).
Laplace’s Demon was endorsed by Roger Joseph Boscov-
ich’s Theoria philosophiae naturalis, which documented practi-
cal findings on the principles of causality and continuity (Van
Strien 2014, 27; Koznjak 2015, 51) but today, the provocation is
disregarded. Not only does it assume the classical laws of phys-
ics apply at all times, which flies in the face of quantum physics,
but the amount of information needed to make these calcula-
tions is also impossibly vast. No matter how much data is gath-

84
ered for the demon, the stochastic processes that give rise to
events which shape ‘open’, or ‘probable’ futures — like the evolu-
tionary processes that take place in the natural world — simply
cannot be predicted from their initial conditions. Today’s un-
derstanding of reality is fundamentally probabilistic, while its
(real and imagined) paradoxes are framed by the pre-modern
notion of demons.

85
02.3
Of What Are Machines Made?

Machines embody the atomic world, which is without a

rational soul or innate capacity for reason and intellect.
The objects that make up mechanical systems stand in
for atoms, which are composed of different combinations
of fundamental particles. These organisational principles
can be embodied and recapitulated through the machine
metaphor, namely, ‘… material things with fixed sets of
properties … which exist independently of the activities
they engage in …’ (Nicholson 2018, 3)

Machines are stable systems that exist within the ancient

framework of atomism, which was championed by Leucippus,
Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius that shapes the modern
worldview, where reality is made up of infinite combinations
of fundamental ‘uncuttable’ parts known as ‘atoms’ (Berryman
2016). While atoms are constantly moving, and colliding into
each other, machines begin at a ground state of relative thermo-
dynamic equilibrium. Machines like a clock or an orrery, are ap-
paratuses that perform a discrete choreography of objects which
reveal the nature of the world, but before they can perform this
useful work, they first need to be first tipped off balance by an
external energy source. Championed by Galileo, who proposed
that the book of nature was waiting to be decoded through the
language of mathematics, this shift in representation began to
specify reality in terms of geometrically described object rela-
tions, which took the form of patterns and trajectories.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth,

but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that
of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker
nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or
music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection
such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of
delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than a

86
 man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is
to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is
best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a
task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and
brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed
encouragement. (Russell 1920, 73–74)

Verifiable through observation, experiment, and measurement,

the new empirical reality could be described by equations, which
were instrumental in determining how events would unfold. In
this way, objects too could be sorted, ordered, and ultimately
controlled as microcosms of the universe.

… mathematics [is] a language and scientific modelling

[a] process of writing a story … that should have meaning,
not just rules. In considering complexity it is not only
impossible to expunge the natural referent, but their natural
semantic qualities must be retained in order to cross the
bridge back into mathematical formalism in a valid way.
(Edson, Henning, and Sankaran 2017, 82)

Eugene Wigner discusses the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of

mathematics to describe reality (Wigner 1960), which is taken
to an extreme by Mark Tegmark, who proposes that mathemat-
ics itself is reality and the whole of our universe is a giant math-
ematical object (Tegmark 2014). However, mathematics remains
an abstraction of reality and evolves as concepts change, ques-
tions seek new territories and number theory evolves. Even the
cultural biases and prejudices of mathematics are embodied in
its algorithmic expressions, giving lie to Descartes’ assumption
that it is uncontaminated by our unreliable senses.

It is not possible for algorithms to remain immune from the

human values of their creators. If a non-diverse workforce
is creating them, they are more prone to be implanted with
unexamined, undiscussed, often unconscious assumptions
and biases about things such as race, gender and class.

87
 What if the workforce designing those algorithms is
male-dominated? This is the first major problem: the
lack of female scientists and, even worse, the lack of true
intersectional thinking behind the creation of algorithms.
(Bartoletti 2017)

Slippages between actuality and modes of representation are

particularly noticeable when mathematical rules are used to
denote subjective encounters. For example, in ‘affective’ com-
puting, feelings such as grief, love, and hate are signified, rather
than experienced. While mathematical formulae and their de-
rivative computer algorithms have provided incredible insights
into the material realm, the associated discourses, tools, appa-
ratuses, and languages value a particular kind of ‘reality’ that
poorly deals with subjectivity, or ephemeral experiences. While
the resultant notion of reality is verifiable, it has difficulty ap-
preciating quality of experience, since not everything of value
can be meaningfully delineated, or measured.

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. (Rukeyser

1968, 111)

To circumvent this difficulty, algorithms, and data, which are re-

garded as the virtual equivalent of atoms (Negroponte 1996) are
used to generate elicit complex experiences (Hoel 2017), howev-
er, outcomes are inevitably inexact. Rather than relating content
to a specific context and appropriately transforming it, which is
typical of (living) agents of ‘thought’, the descriptors of higher
forms of order such as emotions (love, intelligence, etc.) are
built upon ‘neutral’ channels that relay information impartially
(Shannon and Weaver 1949). Nicholas Negroponte (1996) ob-
served, ‘while today’s computers can exhibit an uncanny grasp
of airline reservations (a subject almost beyond logic), they ab-
solutely cannot display the common sense exhibited by a three-
or four-year-old child. They cannot tell the difference between
a dog and a cat’ (Negroponte 1996, 156). Moreover, while people
change over time, machine learning unfortunately doesn’t work

88
that way (Wachter 2018) and the slippages between artificial and
human thinking can produce odd effects. When ‘bits and bytes’
(Negroponte 1996) are equated and substituted for one another,
a form of cognitive dissonance occurs which is known as the
‘uncanny valley’ (Kuwamura et al. 2015; MacDorman and Chat-
topadhyay 2016). Currently these conjunctions are largely lim-
ited to simulacra of specific bodies — e.g., companion robots,
humanoids. While conversations between human and artificial
intelligences continue to remain relatively simple, it is becoming
difficult to discern chatbots from real human subjects (Univer-
sity of Reading 2014). Ongoing research into the linking of the
digital and material realms through bio-digital interfaces raises
questions about new conjunctions and dissonances are possible.

The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become ‘smarter’ as

more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to
parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that
human Twitter users fed the program, forcing Microsoft
Corp to [apologise and] shut it down … (“Microsoft ‘Deeply
Sorry’ for Racist and Sexist Tweets by AI Chatbot” 2016)

Such limitations are being addressed by major breakthroughs

in machine learning using various forms of convolutional neu-
ral networks that have enabled computers to accurately classify
images based on their object representations. These principles
are being applied in self-driving vehicles, with the potential to
transform the whole transportation sector (Tollefsen 2017).

Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to

what can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding
particles from being organized in ways that perform even
more advanced computations than the arrangements of
particles in human brains … (Hawking et al. 2014)

As thought is folded into the bête machine, we are obliged to

observe the way the world works through a mechanistic lens,

89
which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; irrefutably, we are ma-
chines (Fuller 2011).

… [machines that think] … [complete] a naturalistic

understanding of the universe, exorcising occult souls,
spirits, and ghosts in the machine. Just as Darwin made it
possible for a thoughtful observer of the natural world to do
without creationism, Turing and others made it possible for
a thoughtful observer of the cognitive world to do without
spiritualism. (Pinker 2015)

90
 02.4

Detailing the Bête Machine

The process of improvement was cumulative. Ways of

increasing stability and of decreasing rivals’ stability became
more elaborate and more efficient. Some of them may even
have ‘discovered’ to break up molecules of rival varieties
chemically and to use the building blocks so released
for making their own copies. These proto-carnivores
simultaneously obtained food and removed competing
rivals. Other replicators perhaps discovered hot to protect
themselves, either chemically, or by building a physical wall
of protein around themselves. This may have been how the
first living cells appeared. Replicators began not merely to
exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles
for their continued existence. The replicators that survived
were the ones that built survival machines for themselves
to live in. The first survival machines probably consisted of
nothing more than a protective coat. But making a living
got steadily harder as new rivals arose with matter and more
effective survival machines. Survival machines got bigger
and more elaborate, and the process was cumulative and
progressive. (Dawkins 2006, 24–25)

Cells are the fundamental units of the bête machine, which are
governed by ‘selfish genes’ (Dawkins 2006). These units are
hierarchically ordered into increasingly sophisticated arrange-
ments of tissues, organs, bodies, populations, and ecosystems
through an evolutionary process that is most compatible with
an incremental, gradualist view of change. Combinations of
‘selfish’ molecules, however, are so abstracted from our everyday
experiences of living things that — to better relate to them — our
discourses about the bête machine are vitalised by essences
(metaphysics) and functions (teleology), which are ascribed
anatomical and physiological narratives.

91
 … when the sapid and slippery morsel — which is and is
gone like a flash of gustatory summer lightning — glides
along the palate, few people imagine that they are
swallowing a piece of machinery (and going machinery too)
greatly more complicated than a watch. (Huxley 1884, 47)

These modern approaches are founded on the ancient idea of

Aristotle’s hylomorphism, which proposes that ‘being’ is the
condensation of matter and form (Conti 2001). Even then, this
is not sufficient to account for the unique capacity for life to pro-
duce more of itself. The transfer of form and character between
generations through ‘genes’ bears striking resemblance to the
pangenesis theory. Championed by Hippocrates and Democri-
tus, the homunculus, the ‘little man’ inside a sperm, mysteri-
ously develops once it is in a fertile soil, or egg — to produce
a mature (self-similar) being. However, modern genetic theo-
ries replace the homunculus with encoded DNA. Georges-Louis
Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who pioneered the idea of biological
change taking place over long timescales, and Charles Darwin,
who coined the idea of descent with modification, supported
this homuncular notion of vertical inheritance, where every
parental organism carries tiny heritable particles within them.
Darwin proposed that specific characteristics could be acquired
through atomic-sized ‘gemmules’ formed by cells that were con-
centrated in the reproductive system (Zirkle 1935). However,
this mechanism alone could not account for increasing diver-
sity, but tended towards homogenisation, where differences
between creatures would be diluted and ‘averaged’ out. This
disparity between theory and observation was finally resolved
by introducing the theory of Mendelian inheritance, which in-
volved a very structured shuffling of traits during cell division to
produce asymmetric phenotypes.
In the late twentieth century, molecular science established
that the DNA responsible for cellular identity did not self-gov-
ern, but was regulated and even modified by other systems.
The implications of these findings meant that the operational
codes of living things could not be entirely predetermined, but

92
were customisable and even (re)programmable using advanced
biotechnological toolsets. While the powerful tool for editing
genomes Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Re-
peats (CRISPR; pronounced ‘crisper’), allowed the cell’s genome
to be cut and edited at highly specific locations (Ledford 2015),
life’s processes remained vulnerable to influences beyond the
genetic code.
No single definition, or list of characteristics encoded by
genes, exists that universally defines life. While classical de-
scriptions describe a list of characteristic functions, namely:
homeostasis, the internal (physiological) regulation of the or-
ganism; respiration, the production of energy for cellular sys-
tems; reproduction, the copying of the biological system with
differing fidelity that results in heritable change and ultimately
the open-ended development of life; sensitivity, the response
to changes in the external environment; growth, a higher rate
of anabolic than catabolic activity that results in an increase in
structural organisation over time; movement, locomotive activ-
ity such as bending towards a light source or running; excretion,
the removal of metabolic waste; and nutrition, fuelling meta-
bolic activity — some creatures do not fulfil all these criteria but
are clearly alive, like the sterile mule, which is a cross between
a male donkey (jack) and a female horse (mare). While wide-
spread variations in opinion exist, a commonly used definition
in scientific literature is Jack Szostak’s notion of a ‘self-sustained
chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution’
(Szostak 2012). In practice, working definitions of life are used
as evaluative toolsets to experimentally ‘convert abstract con-
cepts into entities’ (Gould 1981, 56). Many of these are molecular
models where DNA stands in for ‘life’. One study that was based
on more than 100 tabulated definitions revealed nine groups of
terms that indicated (self-)reproduction and evolution (varia-
tion) were the minimal set of characteristics needed for an en-
tity to be considered ‘alive’. The phrase, ‘self-reproduction with
variations’ (Trifonov 2011) was therefore recognised as the pre-
ferred terminology for a concise, inclusive definition, and ‘use-
ful’ working definition of life.

93
 When taking an experimental approach to the nature of ‘life’,
an appropriate evaluation toolset is also needed, some of which
have been inspired by Alan Turing’s ‘imitation game’, as a ‘Tu-
ring test’ for living things (Cronin et al. 2006). Turing’s origi-
nal approach addressed the conundrum of intelligence, which
evaded a clear definition or empirical solution (Turing 1950) by
incorporating the experience of human participants as part of
the decision-making system. Similarly, life is not an absolute,
but something that is constructed and evaluated through an ex-
isting value system. While Turing’s technique does not guaran-
tee reproducible views, it is a valuable way of approaching un-
fathomably complex systems and enables researchers to shape
better questions about the performance of the system under
interrogation, which may ultimately, lead to insights that were
not available at the start of the experiment (Armstrong 2015, 29).
Since life cannot be defined descriptively in absolute terms,
some investigators prefer to refute the utility of definitions, re-
garding them as beyond the remit of scientific investigation.
Viewing life as a physiochemical world, which could be ap-
proached through the logic of (bio)chemistry Claude Bernard
claimed that

there is no need to define life in physiology … [such

attempts are] … stamped with sterility … It is enough
to agree on the word life to employ it: but above all it is
necessary for us to know that it is illusory and chimerical
and contrary to the very spirit of science to seek an absolute
definition of it. We ought to concern ourselves only with
establishing its characteristics and arranging them in their
natural order of rank. (Bernard 1974, 19)

A similar approach is currently adopted by molecular biologists

such as Andrew Ellington.

If we haven’t figured out what life is by now, there is little

hope that we will figure out a definitive definition in the
near term, and there is no research program that I can

94
 imagine, at any price, that will provide such a definition.
(Kaufman 2012, 38)

While classical science needs to precisely establish the terms

of its investigations, it is nonetheless possible to meaningfully
work with life’s processes without having a universally accepted
definition of what is being observed. Even while the molecular
science of genetics is still being deciphered, synthetic biology
deploys life’s processes in ways that are addressing some of the
world’s most challenging problems, such as offering ecologically
beneficial alternatives to fossil fuels and returning ‘excess’ car-
bon dioxide to the metabolically active realm (Gill 2010).

The change for biology came in the 1970s, when

biotechnology began to deliver synthetic tools. At first,
biologists cut and pasted single genes, rearranging what
was naturally available. Then, in the early 1980s, synthetic
biologists moved away from nature, synthesizing entire
genes, artificial genetic systems with extra nucleotides and
proteins with more than 20 kinds of amino acid. To do
more than tinker with natural biological parts, however,
a synthetic grand challenge must be at the frontier of the
possible. If it is, it forces scientists to solve new problems.
Should their design strategies be flawed, they will fail
in ways that cannot be ignored. Thus, synthesis drives
discovery and technological innovation in ways that
observation and analysis cannot. (Benner 2010)

Today’s mechanistic view of synthetic biology employs the ge-

nome to stand in for the synthesis of objects-to-be. In this man-
ufacturing system, cell function can be changed by writing the
programs of life using nucleotide bases and modular units called
‘biobricks’ (Knight 2003). CRISPR enables this editing function to
be carried out with precision, so that life’s processes are not only
‘programmable’, but can also be artificially assembled. These rig-
orous systems are also being used to establish what constitutes
‘life’ by experimentally establishing the minimal requirements

95
for a functional cell. Present approaches involve stripping away
from what already exists, like an anatomy dissection rather than
assembling a living thing from a toolkit of fundamental building
blocks. Examining systems at the threshold of life, such Mini-
mal Life experiments were actualised through the extraordinary
‘biohack’ of the Mycoplasma mycoides bacterium by J. Craig
Venter’s research group. The synthetic organism, which is the
first species to have computers as parents, was dubbed ‘Synthia’
by the press in 2010. Marking a significant technical step in arti-
ficially ‘cranking out’ genomes like a factory system for the code
of life, it rebooted these synthetic codes into ‘ghost cell’ chasses
(the organic equivalent to the homuncular soils, or egg matrix)
(Gibson et al. 2010). Synthia now has a life of its own and has
replicated over a billion times.
Biotechnological breakthroughs continue to produce new
tools and methods to interrogate the nature of life and test the
outcomes. J. Craig Venter’s group have already improved upon
their landmark development by producing Syn 3.0, a minimal
cell that is simpler than any natural one. Much faster growing
than Synthia, it possesses an even smaller number of genes (only
473 genes in Syn 3.0 compared with 516 genes in Syn 2.0 and 525
in M. genitalium). While a third of these vital genes remain un-
known, the progression of this minimal cell approach promises
new insights into fundamental biological principles. The ulti-
mate goal of these research projects is to develop a cell so simple
that every gene can be completely understood according to its
molecular and biological function (Service 2016). Such inten-
tions rest upon long-standing controversial assumptions, such
as the relationship between genotype (code) and phenotype
(what aspects of the cell’s capabilities are expressed in the liv-
ing organism). Venter’s continued successes clearly demonstrate
that the nature of life can be equated with advanced, program-
mable machines — but are based on certain preconditions. The
synthesised cell is not autonomous but requires a donor life sup-
port system that is provided by cytoplasm from the bacterium
M. capricolum, which has had its DNA removed. Moreover, the
purpose of the 149 unknown genes in Syn 3.0 remains mysteri-

96
ous. Some products appear to produce molecules that stick out
from the surface of the cell, while others are transport systems
that shuttle substances in and out of the cell. This introduces
a degree of uncertainty within the manufacture of unspecified
synthetic cell products and which poses an investment risk for
funding bodies interested in commercial applications of these
genetic codes, even when the whole system is highly controlled
(Yong 2016).
While Venter’s quest centres on biological coding as the
source for deterministic instruction for cell-machines, other
experimenters are searching for even more minimal definitions
that may invoke other kinds of less tightly determined modes of
control, while introducing far fewer mysteries into the experi-
mental method. Tibor Gánti’s ‘principles of life’ for building an
artificial cell are applied in the Chemoton experimental criteria
(Gánti 2003) which defines the fundamental components of life
as — metabolism, compartment, and information. Used as the
investigatory framework for contemporary origins of life exper-
iments this model enables the lifelike behaviours of chemical
systems to be investigated in many ways by, for example, lacing
their matrices with biomolecules (Armstrong 2015, 36).

We start with things that are not alive. So, protein by itself
is not alive, DNA by itself is not alive — but somehow, when
you put these things together, under the right conditions,
you get life. Nobody knows how that is, and so that’s what
we’re trying to figure out. I guess you’d say we are exploring
the boundary between living and non-living … building
an artificial cell with biological parts and studying the
origins of life are two separate fields … [we are] trying to
build a cellular Turing test. All living things communicate
chemically, so we’re trying to build an artificial cell that can
speak the same chemical language as a natural cell, and then
we want to ask whether natural cells understand that ours
are artificial, or do they think that they are talking to other
natural friends, a natural neighbor? So can we trick E. coli,
for example, into thinking it’s talking to another E. coli? If

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 we keep getting better and better at this, then perhaps they
will become indistinguishable, not only to a bacterium, but
to us. (Eng 2013)

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 02.5

Homeostasis

The living body, though it has need of the surrounding

environment, is nevertheless relatively independent
of it. This independence which the organism has of its
external environment, derives from the fact that in the
living being, the tissues are in fact withdrawn from direct
external influences and are protected by a veritable internal
environment which is constituted, in particular, by the
fluids circulating in the body. (Schultz 2003, 4)

The mechanical model of life requires environmental stability in

order to coordinate the multitudinous functions that organisms
typically perform and therefore resists change. Claude Bernard
established the concept of a stable milieu intérieur, as a precon-
dition for dealing with external change, which was later called
‘homeostasis’ by Walter Bradford Cannon, as ‘the condition for
free life’.

The highly developed living being is an open system having

many relations to its surroundings … The coordinated
physiological reactions which maintain most of the steady
states in the body are so complex, and so peculiar to the
living organism, that it has been suggested … that a specific
designation for these states be employed — homeostasis.
(Cannon 1929, 400)

Internal constancy enables the bête machine to resist fluctua-

tions in the environment and therefore avoids the potentially
destructive effects of change in the living system. Organic bod-
ies however, do not demand absolute stability, but can operate
within variable limits of performance. Channelling the flow of
matter/energy through its internal systems, ‘[t]he organs and
tissues which regulate the internal environment … are con-
stantly taking up and giving off material of many sorts, and their

99
‘structure’ is nothing by the appearance taken by this flow of
material through them’ (Haldane 1917, 90).
Microvariations exist within all organisms. For example, core
body temperature is higher than at the periphery, yet oxygen-
carrying cells still need to function effectively within these lim-
its. In other words, homeostasis establishes the range of condi-
tions within which living systems can be constantly tipped off
balance and constantly move away from a physiological condi-
tion of stasis (or equilibrium). They are able to continually per-
form the processes of life, by constantly re-equilibrating their
surroundings for example, to alter nutrient concentrations and
waste products.
The concept of homeostasis therefore depends on whether
a deterministic machine, or a probabilistic organic body is in-
voked. While the bête machine seeks environmental independ-
ence and internal stability, the processes of organic homeostasis
are open, highly changeable dynamic conditions that are bound-
ed by chemicophysical limits. However, when life and machines
become ontologically interchangeable, the expectations of the
different kinds of systems are confused. For example, the notion
of a ‘closed loop’ ecological system as a homeostatic system that
can indefinitely recycle resources simply does not work in prac-
tice as an organic system. With time, a ‘closed’ organic system
will grind to a thermodynamic halt owing to inevitable (dissipa-
tive) matter/energy losses.

The essence of mechanical explanation, in fact, is to

regard the future and the past as calculable functions of
the present, and thus to claim that all is given. On this
hypothesis, past, present and future would be open at a
glance to a superhuman intellect capable of making the
calculation … But duration is something very different from
this … We perceive duration as a stream against which we
cannot go. It is the foundation of our being, and, as we feel,
the very substance of the world in which we live. It is of
no use to hold up before our eyes the dazzling prospect of
a universal mathematic; we cannot sacrifice experience to

100
the requirements of a system. That is why we reject radical
mechanism. (Bergson 1922, 29)

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02.6

Ship of Theseus

We cannot speak of a machine ‘theory’ of the organism, but

at most of a machine fiction. (von Bertalanffy 1933, 38)

Life’s continual ability to enter into material negotiation with

multiple systems and update itself accordingly, is a defining
quality that cannot be easily articulated by mechanistic models.
Mechanical operations can be framed so that machines appear
to be capable of adapting and evolving according to the para-
dox posed by the Ship of Theseus. During an annual journey
from Athens to Delos, the vessel underwent constant repairs, so
that its original parts were completely replaced. Although the
outward appearance of the ship is preserved, its materials are
entirely different, which raises questions about the authenticity
of the returning vessel. Depending on the perspective of the ob-
server, this may be decided according to preferred value systems
that may for example exalt preserved function over the origin of
the components (Nicholson 2018, 21).
As a counterpoint to this conundrum, it is worth considering
whether the Aegean Sea, upon which Theseus’ vessel sails, is the
same or different during the voyage. Liquid bodies are expected
to constantly reconfigure themselves while maintaining a co-
herent character. The paradox of the Thesian ship is therefore
imposed on a system by a mechanistic framework, rather than
arising as the conundrum of an evolving materiality.

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 02.7

Cats and Computers

Cats travel between worlds. Prowling the edge of the visible

realm, they walk a shadowy line between darkness and light.
They exude the kind of strangeness that only unearthly wisdom
might possess. Infamous for their fluid bodies, cats can squeeze
through small gaps, and land like snow.
Cats and computers are often found together. Computer hard
drives are cat-magnets with added benefits that are capable of
reaching temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius, while also prom-
ising endless amusement. Their depressible keyboards activate
alluring images that lurk behind warm screens. While relation-
ships in a cat-and-computer-containing household are deeply
entangled, most people would not confuse one with the other.
Cats and computers are easily distinguishable through their dis-
crete characteristics using classical taxonomic systems such as
Aristotle’s systema naturae,3 which identify claws, tail, eyes, ears,
and fur — or screen, keyboard, and power supply.
Through the lens of the bête machine, the warm furry cat
shares the mechanical ontology of the cold, hard laptop, and
there are strikingly few differences between them. Each is made
up of fundamental components (atoms/cells), consumes en-
ergy, each has a ‘mouse’, produces waste (heat/organic matter),
moves, and ultimately breaks down or ‘dies’. The most striking
difference between them is that following death, the creature
cannot be resurrected by reorganising their non-functioning
parts, while the machine can. From a mechanical viewpoint, the
organic world possesses a theoretically preventable deficiency
and therefore, is an inferior mode of existence.

3 Aristotle’s approach influenced Carolus Linnaeus in the construction of his

Latin-based classification system, which grouped natural phenomena into
the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms. This taxonomic system, which
is characterised by universal naming conventions and the consistent use of
binomial nomenclature to sort things into taxa according to their type, has
become the foundation for modern scientific classification.

103
 While metaphors are neither true nor false, they may be ap-
propriate to greater or lesser extents. Conflating ontologically
distinct entities through their use has real consequences, as
they start to ‘become’ each other. In this way, the bête machine
becomes an existential trap that prevents us from using alter-
native perspectives than industrialisation to address the press-
ing issues of planetary-scale ecocide. By using its mechanisms
more efficiently, through reducing, reusing, and recycling its
resources, we are convinced that somehow, our living world will
be spontaneously restored.

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 03

THE HARD QUESTION OF MATTER

This chapter establishes a contemporary
portrait of the material realm. Moving
from a classical worldview through to
quantum and nonlinear accounts, it inves-
tigates the unknowns and seeds of material
rebellion that inform the physical princi-
ples of liquid life.

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 03.1
Origin of Atoms

What makes the atom more real [than a ghost] is that it has
more allies, and these allies stretch well beyond humans.
Experiments testify to the atom’s existence; instruments
stabilize it and make it indirectly visible; generations of
children learn of it and pass the word along: Brownian
motion shows that particles of water are moved by it. The
ghost, by contrast, has only a paltry number of allies bearing
witness to its reality. But the atom’s allies may one day desert
it too. (Harman 2004, 16)

Atoms were formed during an extremely rapid expansion of the

universe during the Big Bang, when it went from ‘nothing’ to
‘relative’ infinity around 13.8 billion years ago. In the first three
minutes, when temperatures cooled from 100 nonillion Kelvin
to one billion Kelvin, the lightest elements were born as pro-
tons and neutrons formed deuterium, a stable isotope of hydro-
gen. Clouds of this primitive matter condensed and collapsed
to form the first cosmic bodies in the non-luminous early uni-
verse, which swallowed up the high-energy ultraviolet light pro-
duced by the earliest galaxies and stars.

Physicists have brilliantly reverse-engineered the

algorithms — or the source code — of the universe, but left
out their concrete implementation. (Mørch 2017)

Around 150 million to one billion years after the Big Bang, su-
permassive black holes had sufficiently expanded to take over
the reionisation process. As they interacted with other forms
of matter and radiation the universe became luminous (Yeager
2017). Around five billion years after cosmogenesis the current
expansion of the universe was initiated, and matter started to
condense under the space-time warping influence of gravity
(Creighton 2015b), which were countered by dark energy’s in-
flationary influences (Choi 2017). 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun

107
was formed from a giant, spinning cloud of gas and dust, and at
4.5 billion years, it was encircled by a cloud of hot debris, which
cooled and combined into clumps. Congealing into increas-
ingly larger clots, this moulten matter formed planetesimals and
planets that frequently collided and vaporised each other.
Out of this primordial fluidity, atoms congealed to produce
the dissipative systems that shape our dynamic planet.

108
 03.2
Structure of Atoms

… it was thought that atoms were rather like the planets

orbiting the sun, with electrons (particles of negative
electricity) orbiting around a central nucleus, which carried
positive electricity. The attraction between the positive and
negative electricity was supposed to keep the electrons in
their orbits in the same way that the gravitational attraction
between the sun and planets keeps the planets in their
orbits. The trouble with this was that the laws of mechanics
and electricity, before quantum mechanics, predicated that
the electrons would lose energy and so spiral inward until
they collided with the nucleus. (Hawking 1995, 65–66)

The quest to characterise atoms at the start of the twentieth

century, set the scene for new ways of thinking about the ma-
terial realm. Through this inquiry, experimental evidence that
supported non-classical concepts amassed and matter became
stranger.
In 1900, Max Planck set out to establish how to create maxi-
mum light from light bulbs with minimal energy, but won-
dered why his black body experiment did not appear to obey
his predictions, which were based on the idea of ‘continuous
matter’ that behaves like waves. Looking to Boltzmann’s statisti-
cal interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, which
suggested that electromagnetic energy could only be emitted
in quantised form — i.e., emitted as discrete particles, as an
act of despair, he established the foundations for the theory of
quantum physics (Kragh 2000). Other theoretical models also
emerged during this period such as Niels Bohr’s atomic model,
where atoms are made of electrons that circumscribe quantised
orbits around a nucleus.
To observe the fundamental particles from which atoms are
composed, giant instruments as big as cathedrals were built to
accelerate the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to the speed of light in
giant underground tunnels. Torn apart at the moment of colli-

109
sion with lead (or other hydrogen) nuclei fragments, the curved
trajectories and tight spirals they leave behind can be used by
physicists to calculate the momentum of a particle, and so de-
duce its identity. This new science of ‘quantum’ physics began to
reveal the strange characteristics of infinitesimally small realms,
which suggest that matter is not made of solid blocks, but are
mostly empty space (De Jesus 2016). Requiring its own ‘quan-
tum mathematics’, e.g., ‘mirror symmetry’ (Dijkgraaf 2017), the
realm is divided in into two kingdoms which includes bosons,
which tend to behave collectively, and fermions, which are indi-
vidualists that enable reactive chemistry by refusing to occupy
the same quantum states (Wilczek 2017). Quantum effects reach
beyond the nanoscale and are capable of ‘spooky’ remote en-
tanglements (Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen 1935) and improb-
able forms of ‘tunnelling’ that shortcut through previously in-
surmountable energetic barriers (Razavy 2003, 462). In fact, the
strange laws of quantum physics, now appear to apply to things
of all sizes such as, birds, plants, black holes, and maybe even
people (Vedral 2015).

110
 03.3
Darkness

… our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We’re all

made of the same thing — the blown-out pieces of matter
formed in the fires of dead stars. (Crouch 2016, 245)

Albert Einstein’s special relativity theory changed the classi-

cal physical law that stated matter could not be created or de-
stroyed. His simple and elegant equation described the relation-
ship between matter and energy as (E = mc2),1 where mass was
reversibly considered as a super-concentrated form of energy
that could be released from atoms. Although his equation was
not used directly to set off the nuclear fission chain reactions of
the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs — it came to
epitomise the pinnacle of all Enlightenment knowledge, where
humanity could command the fundamental forces of nature in
the most absolute manner.
With the rise of quantum science, humanity’s attention to
the nature of the world turned from inwards and downwards
(Kauffman 2008, 17) to outwards and upwards into the cosmos.
Through the new gaze of radio telescopes and particle detectors,
it is apparent that our cosmos is mostly a vacuum that compris-
es 95% dark matter and energy, which does not obey our uni-
versal laws. Our understanding of the whole of reality is based
solely on our knowledge of the ‘luminous’ matter that makes
up only 5% of its substance. This ‘darkness’ is made up of dark
energy and dark matter, which have little in common — other
than their nature is elusive.

According to the Planck mission team, and based on the

standard model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of
the known universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 68.3%
dark energy and 26.8% dark matter. This is a non-luminous

1 Where E = the total energy in the system, m = the atomic mass of an atom
and, c = the speed of light.

111
 hypothetical substance, first proposed by Jan Oort in 1932,
as a way of accounting for missing mass in the universe. Its
characteristics are inferred from the gravitational effects
on visible matter, radiation, and the large-scale structure
of the universe. It cannot be seen directly with telescopes,
as it does not respond to the presence of light, although it
may emit its own unique kind of gamma ray. This may be
a fundamental property of an as yet uncharacterized type
of subatomic particle, whose discovery is one of the major
efforts in particle physics today. So, while there is more
dark matter than normal matter in the universe, the most
abundant substance is actually dark energy, which may be
an innate property of space. (Armstrong 2016, 36)

Dark stars were first proposed by William Thomson (who would

become Lord Kelvin), as a way of accounting for dark regions in
the sky, where a theoretical form of matter could account for the
uneven distribution of cosmic bodies. Henri Poincaré indicated
that, theoretically, much more of this ‘dark matter’ than Kelvin
supposed should be expected (Bucklin 2017). By studying the
Coma galaxy cluster, Fritz Zwicky produced the first evidence
for dark matter by deducing that it did not contain enough vis-
ible matter to hold it together. Vera Rubin and Kent Ford also
calculated that about ten times as much dark matter than lu-
minous matter was needed to account for the characteristics of
spiral galaxies (Scoles 2016). Today, the nature of the dark mat-
ter particle remains elusive and it is not even clear that there is
just one kind of agent at work.
The most widely accepted theory about dark matter is that it
largely works to hold the matter in space together. It accounts
for galaxies clumping together despite appearing to lack suffi-
cient visible matter to do so. It is made of weakly interacting
particles that move about slowly under the influence of gravity
but cannot account for all associated phenomena. Justin Khoury
and Lasha Berezhani suggest this may be due to a phase change,
where most of the time dark matter behaves like conventional
cold dark matter, but under other circumstances becomes a su-

112
perfluid, with zero viscosity. Then again, Erik Verlinde suggests
that dark matter may not exist at all, its apparent effects being
caused by interactions between dark energy and matter, which
generate curved space-time (Wolchover 2016).
Dark energy is even more elusive than dark matter, having
been deduced by comparing theoretical and actual cosmological
observations. Unchanged by time it acts in some way to counter
gravity. While there are also no convincing theories about what
it might actually be, its existence accounts for why the expan-
sion of the universe appears to be accelerating.
A more recent theory by James Farnes at Oxford University’s
e-Research Centre proposes that dark matter and energy can
be unified into a fluid that comprises a sea of negative masses,
which repels all adjacent matter. All positive mass surf upon this
dark substance, which does not thin out over time, as it is con-
tinually produced and therefore, does not become diluted as the
universe expands (Farnes 2018).
Our understanding of the cosmos is framed by our knowl-
edge of the small amount of luminous matter with which we
are familiar, which means our understanding of the cosmos is
likely to be incomplete. It is possible that, as our understand-
ing of dark and quantum realms advances, we will discover that
matter is even more extraordinary than we have assumed.

113
03.4
Not-matter

One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we

then perceived on all sides the feeble luminous silhouettes
of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was
really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing
tubes looked like faint, fairy lights. (Curie and Curie 1923,
187)

The peculiar realm of radiation was discovered by accident. In

1896, Antoine Henri Becquerel, who was intrigued by the ca-
pacity of some materials to glow when exposed to sunlight, was
hoping to demonstrate a link between these minerals and a new
type of electromagnetic radiation discovered by Wilhelm Rönt-
gen, called X-rays. Although he set up an experiment overcast
conditions prevented him from studying the fluorescing mate-
rial (uranyl sulphate) and he placed it in a drawer, so he could
observe its behaviour on a sunny day. On returning to the unex-
posed plate, he discovered strong, clear images, which indicated
that the uranium had emitted radiation without recourse to an
external source. Later, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered that
both radium and polonium could also emit such rays. This in-
visible radiation, or ‘radioactivity’, was further characterised as a
complex phenomenon by Ernest Rutherford, who split its beams
into alpha, beta, and gamma particles, which could be classified
according to their ability to penetrate matter. Niels Bohr theo-
retically demonstrated these rays originated from the emission
of charged particles, which jumped between the orbits of atomic
nuclei, when they were excited by collisions with other agents.
The further characterisation of radiation has not lessened its
strangeness, which enjoys an odd relationship to matter, since it
interacts with matter, is created by matter, can create matter and
is emitted by matter, but it is just too ephemeral to ‘be’ matter
(Armstrong 2016, 36).
With the discovery of a stranger invisible, massless, almost
volumeless material world, the once indivisible atom became

114
the backdrop against which these subatomic agents could be ob-
served. With further developments in radiation science, charge-
carrying explanations were sought for the properties of matter,
which identified other kinds of phenomena. Some of which were
surprising, like neutrinos, which do not play a major role in the
structure of atoms (Lincoln 2017) and not only provided new
accounts of atomic identity, but also firmly established quantum
physics as a new field of science.

115
03.5
Spooky Reality

The hard problem of matter is distinct from other problems

of interpretation in physics. Current physics presents
puzzles, such as: How can matter be both particle-like and
wave-like? What is quantum wavefunction collapse? Are
continuous fields or discrete individuals more fundamental?
But these are all questions of how to properly conceive of
the structure of reality. The hard problem of matter would
arise even if we had answers to all such questions about
structure. No matter what structure we are talking about,
from the most bizarre and unusual to the perfectly intuitive,
there will be a question of how it is non-structurally
implemented. (Mørch 2017)

The first steps towards the standard model that is currently

used to understand the anatomy of atoms were established by
Sheldon Gashow in the 1960s, when he grouped discoveries in
quantum field theory into quarks (up, down, charm, strange,
top, bottom); leptons (electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon
neutrino, tau, tau neutrino), gauge bosons (gluon, photon, Z-
boson, W-boson) and the Higgs boson (Glashow 1961). Like
Mendeleev’s periodic table, which further advanced the under-
standing of the combinatorial properties of the atomic realm
by formulating the ‘periodic law’ according to eight base types,
Gashow’s system is a deductive and predictive instrument, not
only establishing the characteristics of known particles, but also
predicting the existence of as yet undiscovered ones. For ex-
ample, since gravity exists, it is counterintuitive that subatomic
particles are massless. The light Higgs boson, or other interac-
tions between particles may confer this missing mass and there-
fore renders the standard model complete. Further concepts like
string theory and supersymmetry also aim to fill in these gaps
between knowledge and experiment. String theory proposes
that fundamental particles are different manifestations of one
basic object: a ‘string’. These are one-dimensional point struc-

116
tures with no internal organisation that become different parti-
cles through the way they oscillate in space-time. So, in one di-
rection, we see an electron, and in another, a photon or a quark.
String theory predicts that a type of connection, called super-
symmetry, exists between particle types despite their almost op-
positional character — for example, fermions and bosons and is
almost magical in its oddness. Notably, it anticipates the lightest
supersymmetric particle that is stable and electrically neutral,
which interacts weakly with the particles of the standard model,
has exactly the characteristics of dark matter.
It is still not known how these massless specks establish a
connection with gravity. While the nature of matter is still be-
ing pieced together, the quantum realm is fundamentally coun-
terintuitive and produces strange phenomena. For example,
time crystals have been demonstrated, which spontaneously
break time translation symmetry and create the possibility of
regularly repeating motion without the need for extra energy
from external sources (Yao et al. 2017). Other odd nanoparti-
cles called ‘magnetic skyrmions’ behave in ways similar to the
atomic ‘knots’ proposed by Lord Kelvin in his model of atomic
structure. This followed on from the work of Hermann Helm-
holtz in the late nineteenth century, who observed that vortices
exert forces on each other and their cores act as a line-like fila-
ment that can become knotted with others in ways that could
not be undone. Inspired by the coupling potential of these fun-
damental structures, Lord Kelvin proposed an atomic model
where atoms were structured like liquids as knots of swirling
vortices in the aether (Zyga 2017). Imagine a bath half filled with
water, with not one, but lots of plugholes. Now envision how
the surface of the water looks as those plugs are pulled. This is
how Lord Kelvin imagined the structure of atoms. Unusually,
‘magnetic skyrmions’ can be observed experimentally (Hou et.
al. 2017), which means they may at some point be manipulated
to test new theories such as ‘knotting’ them into various types
of stable configurations by twisting a magnetic field (Zyga 2017).
While initial studies of quantum phenomena were assumed
to be confined to imperceptibly small and cold realms, by the

117
late twentieth century these assumptions were challenged
through the identification of exotic materials at the macroscale.
For example, semi-metals can produce a current when heat and
a magnetic field are applied simultaneously (Gooth et al. 2017);
their properties cannot be accounted for by classical physics.
Perhaps even more striking are findings in the developing field
of quantum biology, where physics meets the life sciences and
‘biology emerges from chemistry, which in turn emerges from
how atoms and molecules interact in the microscopic realms
ruled by quantum probabilities’ (Byrne 2013). While classical
quantum experiments take place in the laboratory at tempera-
tures close to absolute zero, biology can process quantum in-
formation at room temperature and stabilise coherent quantum
states in extremely complex systems for extended periods.

It turns out that organic systems with tailor-made molecules

are highly tunable. The trick is to not lose the input data.
(Byrne 2013)

For the observed events to take place, they must disobey a fun-
damental concept known as decoherence, where quantum ef-
fects are averaged out at the macroscale. By demonstrating that
quantum phenomena can be effective in these unlikely situa-
tions, this means that even at relatively hot temperatures typical
of living systems (Al-Khalili and McFadden 2014), the individu-
al properties of matter may be — at least in part — contributing
to the ‘weird’ nature of matter and life. Schrödinger drew his
inferences on the nature of life,2 from the experimental research
conducted by Max Delbrück during the 1930s, where organic
molecules overcame energy barriers to enable the chemistry of
life, which was established by quantum interactions between the
subatomic and atomic interactions of organisms (Byrne 2013).
Yet, it is still not known what prevents biological systems from

2 Specifically, Schrödinger observed that discrete systems are capable of

‘negative entropy’ that enables system reordering and resistance to entropic
decay (Schrödinger 2012, 70).

118
becoming what Schrödinger called ‘quantum jellyfish’, which re-
fers to the anticipated blurriness and featurelessness when many
overlapping boundaries exist, which are characteristic of quan-
tum fields.

… nearly every result produce[d] is about the probability

of this or that … happening — with usually a great many
alternatives. The idea that they be not alternatives but
all really happen simultaneously seems lunatic … just
impossible … if the laws of nature took this form for …
a quarter of an hour, we should find our surroundings
rapidly turning into a quagmire, or sort of a featureless jelly,
or plasma, all contours becoming blurred, we ourselves
probably becoming jelly fish. (Schrödinger 1995, 19)

Nevertheless, the biological domain does not demonstrate the

typical paradoxes associated with information processing in
quantum physics (Byrne 2013). The practical implications of
these findings are far from reaching a consensus view. This is
hardly surprising, as the more that is discovered about the quan-
tum realm, the stranger it seems. To establish a relationship with
this realm means that decisions about the kind of information
that is useful to us have to be made that can challenge our as-
sumptions. Françoise Chatelin cautions that the mathematical
philosophical framework underpinning quantum science is
also capable of distorting interpretations of experimental find-
ings because the effects of other forces and agencies involved
get smaller as objects get larger. Also, unlike classical physics,
the sample sizes are also very small and therefore deal with ex-
ceptional behaviour, rather than the averaging effects of huge
numbers of molecules (Chatelin 2012).

After the experimental discovery of Quantum Mechanics,

the strange wave/particle behaviour at the subatomic
level was taken by Bohr (1927) as a fiat from Nature. Bohr
posited the ‘complementarity’ principle which states that
quantum-mechanical results can only be described in

119
 classical but contradictory terms. Therefore a description
in space-time precludes any classically causal description,
and if classical causality is maintained then the uncertainty
principles (Heisenberg) emerges. In other words, sub-
atomic randomness is only the result of looking at things
through the lenses of classical causality. The radically
dualistic perspective of Bohr accepts as a gift the two
contradictory messages sent by Nature. This paradoxical
picture fits perfectly in the organic logic … which stems
from hyper computation. But it was a constant source of
discomfort for the majority of his peers. Therefore Bohr’s
view was abandoned for the most easy-to grasp theory of
entanglements, which puts randomness at its foundation.
(Chatelin 2012, 558–59)

Nevertheless, researchers are beginning to develop experimen-

tal approaches that enable us to test our understanding of our
idiosyncratic universe in a constant state of flux.

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 03.6
Maxwell’s Demon

… atoms do not swerve a little and initiate the kind of

motion which in turn shatters the laws of fate, but leave
effect to follow cause inexorably forever, where does that
freewill come from that exists in every creature the world
over? (Lucretius 2007, 43)

Lucretius introduced the concept of the ‘clinamen’ to discuss the

disobedience of the material realm to the laws of physics. He
believed that this unpredictable swerve of atoms accounted for
the free will of all living things.
James Clerk Maxwell proposed a thought experiment that
aimed to contravene the second law of physics, which states that
the entropy in a closed system (a box) cannot decrease (Maxwell
1872). Imagining gas at a particular temperature (or pressure) in
a sealed environment, he proposed that within this space some
molecules were hotter (moving faster) and some cooler (mov-
ing slower) than others. Guarding a membrane-like partition
with a small trapdoor (a pore-like system) inside the box, was
an imaginary intelligent being (later called a ‘demon’ by Lord
Kelvin) that could perform ‘work’ without expending energy, by
deciding which side of the membrane the gas molecules ended
up on. By sorting the mixed gas molecules into an ordered state
with lower entropy the demon could contravene the second law
of physics (Kelvin 1879).

The word ‘demon,’ which originally in Greek meant a

supernatural being, has never been properly used as
signifying a real or ideal personification of malignity.
Clerk Maxwell’s ‘demon’ is a creature of imagination
having certain perfectly well-defined powers of action,
purely mechanical in their character, invented to help us
to understand the ‘Dissipation of Energy’ in nature. He is a
being with no preternatural qualities, and differs from real
living animals only in extreme smallness and agility. He can

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 at pleasure stop, or strike, or push, or pull any single atom
of matter, and so moderate its natural course of motion.
Endowed ideally with arms and hands and fingers — two
hands and ten fingers suffice — he can do as much for
atoms as a pianoforte player can do for the keys of the
piano — just a little more, he can push or pull each atom in
any direction. He cannot create or annul energy; but just as
a living animal does, he can store up limited quantities of
energy, and reproduce them at will. By operating selectively
on individual atoms he can reverse the natural dissipation of
energy … (Kelvin 1879, 144)

Both Maxwell and Kelvin concluded that the presence of an

intelligent agent in a disordered system could encapsulate life’s
thermodynamic disobedience, but in 1929, Hungarian physicist
Leo Szilard demonstrated that the demon had to exert energy
to sort the molecules into hot or cold groupings, which would
not actually violate the second law (Edwards 2010). Maxwell’s
demon therefore gives the appearance of violating the second
law, without actually contravening it, which is exactly what life
manages to do.

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 03.7
Time’s Arrow

An organism does not have a temporal trajectory; it is itself

a temporal trajectory. (Nicholson 2018, 22)

In classical physics, time is a reversible phenomenon. It deals

with space and the statistical analyses of large numbers outlined
by Ludwig Boltzmann, where random events cancel out any be-
haviours that may appear to contradict the second law of ther-
modynamics. This banishes time to the realm of phenomenol-
ogy (Boltzmann 1964).
In the natural realm, time is a material process that operates
at small scales in highly localised situations and produces its ef-
fects on a paucity of molecules, where statistical analyses cannot
iron out any irregularities. In this contrary space, lively matter
has the capacity to retain or increase its order. Tim Maudlin ob-
serves that standard geometry, which is algebraic and designed
for making directionless spaces, considers time to be an arte-
fact of space. In this case, either nothing alters, or events can
be reversed (Musser 2017). Drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept
of ‘pure duration’, Ilya Prigogine developed a concept of ‘third
time’ in physics, where qualitative local changes melt into and
permeate one another, without precise outlines. This provided
a new model for examining space-time, where time was ‘pure
heterogeneity’ (Bergson 2010, 104), rather than a series of suc-
cessive (linear) occurrences. Third time is therefore character-
ised by irreversibility, which provides a source of creativity for
the living realm and exists in space-time rather than standard
geometric space.

Irreversibility can no longer be identified with a mere

appearance that would disappear if we had perfect
knowledge. Instead, it leads to coherence, to effects that
encompass billions and billions of particles. Figuratively
speaking, matter at equilibrium, with no arrow of time

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 is ‘blind,’ but with the arrow of time, it begins to ‘see’.
(Prigogine 1997, 3)

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 03.8
Symmetry Breaking

According to Archemanes the world was created as a

result of the synergy of two primal forces. He understood
these powerful forces to be eternal and universal. Their
synergy would best be described as never-ending
consumption — one devours the other, ceaselessly — and
the existence of the world is dependent on this. (Tokarczuk
2003, 99)

All natural forces and elementary particles are assumed to

have been identical just before the Big Bang. For the universe to
have any character, this fundamental symmetry had to be bro-
ken, which is an active phenomenon caused by countless small
matter/energy fluctuations acting on a system that tip it into an
irreversible cascade of events and is at the heart of all meaning-
ful dynamic events.
First, the colour force between quarks broke away from the
electroweak interaction. Then, hadrons developed very differ-
ent masses from leptons. Next, electroweak forces split into
two — electromagnetism and the weak force (or weak nuclear
force). Out of these moments of asymmetry, an ocean of particle
types blossomed, which gave rise to our present reality.
Liquid life is an asymmetric phenomenon (Coleman 1975),
where like no longer breeds like, but moves towards a condition
of heterogenesis — where, under the influence of time’s irrevers-
ible arrow, nothing can be exactly self-similar, so variation in
living systems is the norm, not the exception.

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03.9
Invisible Realms

Aethers were invented for the planets to swim in, to

constitute electric atmospheres and magnetic effluvia, to
convey sensations from one part of our bodies to another,
and so on, until all space had been filled three or four times
over with aethers. … The only aether which has survived
is that which was invented by Huygens to explain the
propagation of light. (Maxwell 1878)

Perhaps the hardest of all questions for science to answer is not

the nature of matter, but of space. If atomism is correct, then it
is possible to measure and detect ‘something’, but it is paradoxi-
cal to characterise nothing. Nothing must be filled with some-
thing, which can then be negated and considered ‘nothing’. Such
existential conundrums produce material and conceptual blind
spots, which they ask us to imagine concepts beyond our knowl-
edge, experience, or ability to verify them and open up a realm
of unnamed mysteries, forces, and unexplained phenomena,
which cannot be verified directly through our senses, or even by
scientific instruments.
While we cannot directly perceive the invisible realm, its
effects can sometimes be indirectly encountered like feeling
a breeze upon your face, or watching a dust devil dancing. At
other times, invisible realms must be deduced where there is
no other available explanation, such as dark energy and matter,
which seem to be simultaneously holding the universe together
and pushing it apart. The invisible realm remains problematic, as
to be accounted for, it must be correctly theorised and conjured
into existence. Failure to do this means that our knowledge of
reality is incomplete, and what we do not know is banished to
the realms of speculation, mythology, or wishful thinking.
From the time of Aristotle, nature was said to ‘abhor’ a vacu-
um, while Parmenides opposed the concept of ‘creatio ex nihilo’,
since the idea of nothingness by definition did not exist. Up un-
til the fourteenth century, the narratives of ‘nothing’ were at-

126
tributed to supernatural forces, which sprang from demonic, di-
vine, and unknown influences, that were thought to hold reality
together (Barrow 2002, 71–72). These mysterious invisible forces
also shaped our world and even extended beyond the reach of
the cosmos. From an experimental perspective, scholars such
as Al-Farabi began to make vacuums using pumps and closed
containers, which provoked a range of theories accounting for
the contradictory nature of these spaces and how they could ‘ac-
tually’ hold the universe together. For example, Walter Burley
proposed that voids could exist momentarily but were prevent-
ed from collapse by celestial forces. Enlightenment perspectives
took a mathematical view of the paradox of matter and space,
where Descartes proposed that the single essential property of
matter was its ‘extension’ of volumetric space (Descartes 1985).
This separated bodies at a distance and implied the existence
of a continuous medium between them. The idea of invisible
rays and uncharacterised forces inevitably led to disagreements
about their nature. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leib-
niz differed in their views about the way gravity influenced bod-
ies, Leibniz regarding Newton’s view of remote interactions as
akin to ‘occultism’ (Clarke and Leibniz 1998).
Soon, the idea of force fields and geometric frameworks began
to fill up these invisible realms and everything moved through
a universe filled with an ocean of ubiquitous (uncharacterised)
ethereal fluid. Collectively, these forces were discussed as trans-
mission media or aethers. These space-filling substances and
fields were necessary for the action of bodies, forces, and light to
act upon. However, most of these ideas could not be empirically
validated. For example, the ‘odic’ force, which was proposed by
Baron Carl von Reichenbach as a vital substance that permeated
crystals, magnets, and living things, could be detected through
the senses. Reichenbach believed that some people were more
predisposed to these forces than others and could be seen as a
field gliding spectacularly along magnets and crystals in total
darkness by sensitive individuals.
While many ‘invisible forces’ were debunked, numerous
paradoxes of the invisible realms remain. Isaac Newton’s laws of

127
gravity — a cornerstone of physics — remain mysterious, since
the hypothetical fundamental gravity-carrying particle, or grav-
iton, has not been identified. Others, such as the luminiferous
aether proposed by Christiaan Huygens that could be traversed
by light, steadily gained credibility and led to the discovery of
electromagnetic phenomena.
It is possible that the fundamental assumptions of atomism
leave blind spots in our conception of reality, and may even
prevent our complete characterisation of the cosmos. For ex-
ample, the influence and relevance of dark energy and matter
currently exceeds the capacity of our philosophical and experi-
mental apparatuses to ascertain. While this should not preclude
investigation of the phenomena, our discoveries are anticipating
a particular set of observations that place them within an exist-
ing understanding of reality. Alternative ways of conceiving the
world are vital for exploring the spandrels of opportunity that
exist beyond the limits of a geometrically organised universe,
and may help us gain a more complete understanding of the
nature of the cosmos.

Physical knowledge has advanced much since 1905,

notably by the arrival of quantum mechanics, and the
situation [about the scientific plausibility of aether] has
again changed. If one examines the question in the light
of present-day knowledge, one finds that the aether is no
longer ruled out by relativity, and good reasons can now
be advanced for postulating an aether … We can now see
that we may very well have an aether, subject to quantum
mechanics and conformable to relativity, provided we are
willing to consider a perfect vacuum as an idealized state,
not attainable in practice. From the experimental point of
view there does not seem to be any objection to this. We
must make some profound alterations to the theoretical
idea of the vacuum … Thus, with the new theory of
electrodynamics we are rather forced to have an aether.
(Dirac 1951)

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In an age of quantum theory, the notion of ‘aether’ has become
outdated and replaced by more theoretical models and termi-
nology to invoke the character of the void. Even stranger forms
of aether than classical physics proposed are explored through
the idea of ‘quanta’, or packets of matter. The quantum realm,
however, does not assume that space is empty, but already ‘oc-
cupied’ by a quantum vacuum. While the term may superficially
imply another kind of nothingness, its nature is, unsurprisingly,
contradictory. For starters, a quantum vacuum is a very different
kind of ‘absence’ than the classical void, as it is not truly empty,
but filled with space-time, which has curvature, structure, and
is teeming with potential particles, pairs of virtual matter and
antimatter units, which are being simultaneously created and
destroyed in massive numbers on a quantum scale. This pecu-
liar vacuum also contains ‘quantum foam’, which is made up
of many types of electromagnetic fields that permeate space-
time, where each domain gives rise to specific subatomic parti-
cles — for example, electron fields produce electrons. Quantum
foam is imagined as a ubiquitous medium that underpins the
propagation of electromagnetic waves by incorporating the
transitioning of photons into electrons and positrons3 — even
within the space between galaxies. Since these characterising
events are so incredibly small they do not significantly interact
with us at the macroscale, so in everyday terms, they can effec-
tively be ignored.

… ‘empty space’ is not what we think it is — it is a soup of a

lot of things that average out to zero. Like thermodynamic
equilibrium, i.e. ‘no net flow’ is nowhere near the same as
‘no flow’ at all! (De Jesus 2016)

Other theories that characterise the nature of ‘space’ manage to

evade the tricky subject of matter altogether. For example, Albert
Einstein’s approach to gravity proposes that it is a smooth force

3 This is an example of radiation (photons) becoming matter (electrons and

positrons)

129
and curvature of space-time that is induced by mass and energy.
Therefore, an object’s mass/energy warps space-time — similar
to how a rubber sheet is deformed by a heavy body (Creighton
2015b). In this way, Einstein evades the need to discuss the ‘hard
question’ of the nature of the material realm.

130
 03.10
Theory of Everything

It would be very difficult to construct a complete unified

theory of everything all at one go. So instead we have
made progress by finding partial theories. These describe
a limited range of happenings and neglect other effects, or
approximate them by certain numbers. In chemistry, for
example, we can calculate the interactions of atoms without
knowing the internal structure of the nucleus of an atom.
Ultimately, however, one would hope to find a complete,
consistent, unified theory that would include all these
particle theories as approximation. The quest for such a
theory is known as ‘the unification of physics’. (Hawking
2007, 111)

Quantum theory and general relativity are different world-

views, so there is a schism in theoretical physics, which could be
healed by a unifying Theory of Everything (TOE). In approach-
ing this quest Paul Dirac developed an equation that decipher
the behaviour of an atom moving at relativistic speed, which
combined quantum theory and special relativity. However, the
outcome posed a significant problem, in that the equation had a
positive and a negative solution, which anticipated the existence
of antimatter.

From our theoretical picture, we should expect an ordinary

electron, with positive energy, to be able to drop into a hole
and fill up this hole, the energy being liberated in the form
of electromagnetic radiation. This would mean a process in
which an electron and a positron annihilate one another.
The converse process, namely the creation of an electron
and a positron from electromagnetic radiation, should also
be able to take place. Such processes appear to have been
found experimentally, and are at present being more closely
investigated by experimenters. (Dirac 1933)

131
Such investigations raise profound implications about the con-
ventions we use to understand the universe. For example, at-
tempts to produce a quantum theory of time that brings to-
gether the theory of relativity with the quantum realm, suggest
that space-time might arise as a side effect of entangled ‘quan-
tum bits’ (qubits) that are situated on the temporal boundaries
of the universe (Cowen 2015). Other theories, like ‘bootstrap-
ping’, which was pioneered by Alexander Polyakov in the 1970s,
search for geometric frameworks that can accommodate uni-
versal principles within quantum field theory by searching for
identical behaviours in diverse materials, where ‘correlation
functions’ can be computed. These correlations happen at phase
transitions (such as heating iron to the point where it loses its
magnetism), where molecules suddenly all exhibit the same be-
haviours. Such ‘conformal symmetries’ constrain the variables
within matter, so that all possible quantum field theories can po-
tentially be unified to generate a quantum TOE. This framework
has implications not only for dark matter, but also for space-
time and the quantum origin of gravity (Wolchover 2017a).

There’s no telling what insights such a theory would yield.

Physicists struggling to marry Einstein with quantum
mechanics have already made one startling discovery. In
1971, Russian physicist Yakov Zel’dovich guessed that black
holes aren’t truly black, but instead combine with quantum-
mechanical fluctuations to emit photons and other particles.
Stephen Hawking proved the idea three years later, and
these emissions are now called Hawking radiation. All
fledgling theories of quantum gravity also make a more
general and even weirder prediction: the structure of space
and time is very different from the gentle curves predicted
by general relativity. The American physicist John Wheeler
realized in the 1950s that if you look at things on a scale of
about 10−35 metres, quantum fluctuations become powerful
enough to play tricks with the geometry of the Universe.
Space and time break down into ‘fuzziness’ or ‘foaminess’. A
spaceship that size could find itself negotiating virtual black

132
 holes, or getting sucked into one wormhole after another
and tossed back and forth in time and space. (Brooks 1999,
28)

With such determination to combine the best of both worlds,

physicists could be creating a contrary model of reality like the
‘Tycho Brahe solution’, which attempted to reconcile the ancient
Ptolemaic system and Copernican cosmology by imagining the
Earth at the centre of the universe while all the other planets
orbited the sun (Ouellette 2017). It is possible that the range
of contradictory findings that characterise the observations of
quantum science may simply mean that our current models of
the universe are profoundly mistaken.

… if you believe that the universe is not arbitrary, but is

governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to combine
the partial theories into a complete unified theory that
will describe everything in the universe. But there is a
fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete
unified theory. The ideas about scientific theories outlined
… assume we are rational beings who are free to observe the
universe, as we want and to draw logical deductions from
what we see. In such a scheme it is reasonable to suppose
that we might progress ever closer toward the laws that
govern our universe. Yet if there really is a complete unified
theory, it would also presumably determine our actions.
And so the theory itself would determine the outcome for
our search for it! And why should it determine that we come
to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not
equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion?
Or no conclusion at all? (Hawking 1995, 14)

Provided they are not slammed into competition, the accumu-

lation of differing perspectives on the nature of reality enriches
our understanding of it. Since our understanding of matter is
incomplete, the pursuit of unifying theories may not be sensible,
let alone possible. However, the contradictions that arise from

133
such a pursuit can offer more complex and nuanced modes of
understanding than any one theory alone. Perhaps, as we dwell
among the uncertainties, mysteries, and incompleteness of the
universe, closer attention to its contradictions to observe what
emerges from these uncertain terrains. For example, what does
it mean that we best understand the imperceptibly small aspects
of reality through the gargantuan scale such as the Large Had-
ron Collider and how does this relate to human experience?
Does quantum entanglement play any role within dissipative
structures and, if so, how might this change our understanding
of life? To address such questions, our concepts, language, and
narratives need to be sufficiently rich to deal with our constantly
emerging understanding of reality.

134
 03.11
’Pataphysics

To understand ’pataphysics is to fail to understand

’pataphysics. To define it is merely to indicate a possible
meaning, which will always be the opposite of another
equally possible meaning, which, when diurnally
interpolated with the first meaning, will point towards a
third meaning which will in turn elude definition because
of the fourth element that is missing. What we see of
’pataphysics in the so-called real world is what has been
created to provide the evidence of ’pataphysics. It seems to
connect with the paradoxes and uncertainties of quantum
mechanics, yet it does so through a very different kind of
mathematics, a purely imaginary science. (Hugill 2012, 2)

Alfred Jarry’s imaginary science of exceptions resists defini-

tions. ’Pataphysics is intent upon seeking imaginary solutions to
real or non-real phenomena, and is remarkable for its purpose-
lessness and unfathomability. Nevertheless, it is a coherent set of
ideas and experiments that embrace the specific and irreducible
aspects of reality to establish where contradictory and excep-
tional solutions may be found, such as sailing in a sieve, building
a time machine and mathematically calculating the surface area
of God (Jarry 1997).

It will already be apparent that definitions of ’pataphysics

are to be treated with caution. This is because the very
notion of a ‘definition,’ which is a cluster of words that
gives the specific sense of a terms that holds true in all
(or as nearly all as makes no different) situations, is itself
unpataphysical. (Hugill 2012, 3)

’Pataphysics opens up a space for liquid life by enabling the

impossible, invisible, imaginary, and contradictory qualities
of the living realm to be acknowledged — not as truths but as

135
paradoxes — and to hold spaces open for experiment that would
otherwise be closed by logic and empiricism.

136
 03.12
Speck

A vigorous speck. An imperceptible ort of life.

Against the odds.
The chances of life forming by random processes alone
based on the possibility of the random synthesis of a small
protein are said to be less than one in ten to the power
of forty thousand. In other words, the odds against life
happening by accident are greater than it occurring once in
thirteen billion years — the age of the universe.
Life should not exist.
And yet, a dot of life.
Here (.) (Armstrong, forthcoming 2020)

Against all probability life exists and when it is encountered,

it springs from an appropriately lively material condition. The
questions missing from the classical worldview of ‘life’ pertain
to its native vital materiality, which is a material condition that
permeates matter at far-from-equilibrium states and is capable
of being incorporated into existing and new assemblages of par-
ticipatory matter. ‘Vital materialist’ Jane Bennett proposes that
the ‘life-principle that animates matter, exists only when in a re-
lationship with matter, but is not itself of a material nature’ (Ben-
nett 2010b, 47–48). In providing examples of vital materiality
from the inanimate world — where ‘glove, pollen, (unblemished
dead) rat, cap, stick … comman[d] attention in their own right,
as existents in excess of their association with human meaning,
habits or projects …’ (Bennett 2010b, 4) — she responds to the
oddness of a ‘lively’ material composition. Bennett’s desire to
reunify inert matter with a vital essence, (re)transposes this live-
liness into an ephemeral realm, which beyond its compelling
description is nonetheless complicit with the logic of the bête
machine.
Appreciating that matter itself is a fundamentally strange ac-
tor that appears disobedient to classical laws (see sections 09.9
and 08.10), does not mean that anything goes. Rather, a non-

137
classical set of principles also govern ‘actual’ material agency.
Observations made throughout the twentieth century indicate
that innate vitality is bestowed upon the material realm without
invoking spiritual infusions through the laws of quantum phys-
ics, the passage of ‘third time’ and ‘dissipative adaptation’. Since
energy flows freely through agentised matter in unidirectional
time, it can also dynamically alter its program, which raises
questions about the origins of ‘mind’. These operations are not
self-contained, but are fundamentally open and directly coupled
to the environment. Moreover, the molecular interactions that
comprise these material expressions, such as dissipative struc-
tures, are shaped by the transformations encoded by their spa-
tial configuration, elemental character, laws of physics, chemis-
try, and, also, by their context. Furthermore, these behaviours
and transformations have also been independently shown to be-
come even more complex — whether they are directly observed,
or not (Prigogine 1997).

We now know that irreversibility leads to a host of novel

phenomena, such as vortex formation, chemical oscillations,
and laser light, all illustrating the essential constructive
role of the arrow of time … The claim that the arrow of
time is ‘only phenomenological,’ or subjective, is therefore
absurd. We are actually the children of the arrow of time, of
evolutions, not its progenitors. (Prigogine 1997, 3)

To engage with such lively entities is not to subdue, but to en-

gage and provoke them. Given that the material realm is stran-
ger than our classical laws attest, and the ‘emergent’ properties
arise from agents that cannot be meaningfully reduced into their
components, then it is possible that, as yet uncharacterised,
forces or events may also be in play. Such perspectives do not
negate the soul substance that is necessary for ‘life’ but through
its irreducibility and inseparability from matter, as a unique and
fundamental material property of the (luminous) cosmos.

138
The role of the observer was a necessary concept in the
introduction of irreversibility, or the flow of time, into
quantum theory. But once it is shown that instability
breaks time symmetry, the observer is no longer essential.
In solving the time paradox, we also solve the quantum
paradox and obtain a new, realistic formulation of
quantum theory. This does not mean a return to classical
deterministic orthodoxy; on the contrary, we go beyond the
certitudes associated with the traditional laws of quantum
theory and emphasize the fundamental role of probabilities.
(Prigogine 1997, 5)

139
 04

COMPLEXITIES
This chapter highlights the fluidic, mutable
nature of living systems by outlining the
challenges faced by the bête machine when
explaining, or imitating, the irreducibly
complex processes of life.

141
 04.1
Making Life

Complexity gives the lie to the motto which was so

often used in order to claim that everything is clear, at
least in principle. ‘This is the same thing that we already
understand, just more complicated.’ This was precisely
Jacques Monod’s claim: the study of bacteria had produced
the secrets of life; the royal road, the only scientifically
relevant one, had been opened. For the mouse or the
elephant, or man, it would be the same questions, the same
road. (Stengers and Lissack 2004, 92)

Mechanistic models of the living realm suppose that life can be

built once all the fundamental parts of an organism are identi-
fied and fully connected together. In other words, the only dif-
ference between life and non-life, is the bête machine’s organisa-
tional complexity.
For more than 150 years, scientific experiments aimed to-
wards producing sufficient complexity within systems of or-
ganic, as well as mechanical and artificial parts, has failed to
work (Hanczyc 2008; Hanczyc 2011), as the living and mechani-
cal realms are not materially equivalent. The machine’s ‘brute’,
unagentised ontology, belongs to a deterministic world at rela-
tive equilibrium (brute matter), while organic life occupies far-
from-equilibrium states (agentised matter) that are situated in
a world of flux (Mayr 2004). The theorised challenges in life’s
artificial construction, exceed those of reaching sufficiently ad-
vanced levels of higher-order complexity to generate life. Living
systems arise from persistent hubs of activity, which perform
multitudinous operations that are structured by patterns and
repetitions, yet descriptions of this process do not comprise a
buildable strategy for compiling ‘life’.

Can the emergence of real new properties in complex

systems really be explained? If the sciences of complexity
offer important new insights, theories, and methodologies

143
 for dealing with complex, higher-order phenomena (as we
think they do), and if the traditional view of explanation
cannot account for the explanatory strategies we find
here, we should look for other accounts of scientific
explanation. Perhaps the very idea of scientific explanation
as a strictly deductive argument should be reinterpreted
and explanations seen in a more dynamic and context-
dependent setting, eventually themselves being emergent
structures, ‘emergent explanations’. (Baas and Emmeche
1997)

‘Living’ matter is innately agentised, sensitive to environmen-

tal conditions and capable of behaving unpredictably. Although
various approaches, such as Gantí’s Chemoton model and the
Maturana–Varela notion of autopoietic systems, are used to ex-
plore its characteristic phenomena, a mature portfolio of acces-
sible apparatuses capable of working with matter at far-from-
equilibrium states, is still far from mature.

… in silico and in vitro investigations are paving the way

to a novel research arena that appears to be both very
rich (thanks to its intrinsic interdisciplinary character)
and promising (because only via synthetic/constructive
approaches is it possible to enquire about the features of
simple, early cells). This approach also stimulates more
theoretical considerations with respect to intriguing
questions, such as ‘What is life?’ and further supports
abiogenesis as the theoretical framework for understanding
the emergence of living systems on Earth. (Stano and
Mavelli 2015)

As an experimental discipline, building life from its fundamen-

tal ingredients remains as challenging as nailing jellies to walls.

144
 04.2
Life as Fundamental Change

The process of inheritance is unaffected by the processes

that introduce an adaptive bias to form, and by the process
of development. Organisms do not inherit what would
be advantageous for them to inherit, instead, for better
or worse, they get the traits their parents donate to them
at conception. Novel evolutionary characteristics (i.e.,
mutations) are unbiased by the adaptive demands of the
organisms in which they first occur. They are said to occur
at random. Neither of the processes of inheritance or
development introduced evolutionary changes to biological
form. The structure of the inherited material is completely
unaffected by the downstream developmental processes
that turn programs into organisms. What arises anew in
development cannot be genuinely inherited. As neither
inheritance, nor development, nor mutation is adaptively
biased, there must be another, wholly independent process
that introduces adaptive change. Adaptive evolutionary
change is the sole province of natural selection. (Huneman
and Walsh 2017, 2–3)

Life’s persistence through its self-replication, or reproduction, is

at the crux of the modern story of life, which is characterised by
the Modern Synthesis that centres on genes. Originating in the
early twentieth century, it combines the Mendelian theory of in-
heritance with the neo-Darwinian theory of population change
in evolutionary dynamics (Huneman and Walsh 2017).
According to the Modern Synthesis, genes act on inert or-
ganic matter, which has no innate agency. Since genes, which are
also ‘just’ molecules,1 are bequest a special status in their ability
to act, they perform the role of the molecular ‘brain’ of the cell,

1 While crystals have historically been considered ‘primordial seeds’ of life,

molecular biology regularly confers chemical structures with agency and
even ‘personifies’ them with attributes such as selfishness (Dawkins 2006).

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or the soul in the bête machine. Their potency is particularly
persuasive, since our molecular evidencing systems are devel-
oped to further endorse their centrality. Every explanation of
the living world in the Modern Synthesis is reduced back to the
action of genes, or more recently, their networks. Deviance from
the assumed standard of self-similarity of genetic reproduction
are caused by genetic ‘errors’ — rather than other active organ-
ising systems working in parallel with them — that result in
‘modification by descent’. Regarding variation as a second-order
narrative, the Modern Synthesis views these unconventionali-
ties as carrying narratives of functional adaptation and identity,
which provide ‘Darwinian selection [with the] genetic variation
to work on’ (Dawkins 2006, 320). Remaining silent until a time
of evolutionary need, they are then expressed wherever differ-
ence — not sameness — is the key to survival.

… a transparent worm-like creature [is] moving

uncomfortabl[y] on the surface of an exploded rock. It
has recently ingested a woodlouse. Although the worm’s
meal is fully enveloped within its simple gut, the ingested
crustacean’s shell has protected it from digestion. The
worm is at risk of being split open by the woodlouse, which
kicks out against its soft, suffocating intestines. Perhaps
an unlikely truce can be struck between them. While
the louse continues to struggle in its transparent organic
bag, a gelatinous swarm of cells surrounds the coupled
bodies — anticipating that one of these battling systems will
fail. The amorphous mass pulses as tiny particles moving
through its very simple spaces, or veins. Its approach is
marked by a trail of translucent slime that exteriorises and
records its primitive thinking … In its own manner and at
its own speed, the formless blob attempts to swallow whole
the conjoined creatures. (Armstrong 2018a, 87)

Bacteria, which are among the most abundant organisms on

Earth (Nature Reviews Microbiology 2011) reproduce by differ-
ent means than ‘higher’ organisms. Asexually dividing by ‘bi-

146
nary fission’, a bacterial cell prepares for the synthesis of two
daughters by enlarging to twice its starting size before it divides.
In preparation for fission, a complex system of proteins, which
make up the cell division machinery, condenses at the division
site. Genetic material is then copied and partitioned to opposite
ends of the cell through a complex choreography of structures,
which avoids damaging the DNA during the process. The se-
quence of events starts at the site called the ‘origin’ and appears
to be tightly regulated by the cell apparatus, which orchestrates
DNA replication, segregation, division site location, cell envelope
invagination and new cell wall synthesis. As the cell divides, the
cytoplasm splits and a new cell wall is produced around the
daughter cells, which are (functionally) identical to the progeni-
tor and are clones of each other.

Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small,

weighing less than 10−12 grams, each is in effect a veritable
micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands
of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular
machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand
million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery
built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-
living world. (Denton 1986, 250)

Even for such a seemingly straightforward process, the chore-

ography of events is incredibly complex. If each cell is to remain
viable and competitive within the bacterial community, divi-
sion must occur at the right time, in the right place, and bestow
each offspring with a full set of essential organelles and genetic
material (a circular chromosome). In a dynamic environment,
successful organisms also need to respond quickly to altering
circumstances. The adaptive plasticity of cells poses problems
for the Modern Synthesis, which places genetic mutations at
the heart of adaptive change, that take place randomly through
‘error’. However, adaptive changes are not produced at random
but in response to specific change, and modifications can confer

147
advantages at their first appearance.2 Organisms can also pref-
erentially increase copies of genes in areas of the genome where
modifications could be beneficial — a hypothesis called ‘adap-
tive mutation’ (Cepelewicz 2017).
In bacteria, the whole cell3 (rather than just its genetic infor-
mation) can be regarded as the fundamental unit of propaga-
tion, particularly since its offspring are self-similar. The advent
of multicellularity complicates the biological notion of the ‘self ’
in replication, or reproduction, as it tends towards differential
specialisation. With only a few cells becoming gametes, genetic
codes become the unchanging masterplan whose differential
expressions leads to various cell types, which are functions of
their (invisible) interiority, rather than expressions of the whole
creature (phenotype).
Owing to cellular specialism, the lifecycles of multicellular
organisms become much more complex. Needing to generate
various tissues and organs, their developmental process is regu-
lated by a complex choreography of events in which genes play
an important part, but do not determine every event. The cho-
reography between the biological ‘self ’ (genes) and these ‘other’
factors (metabolism, environment, infection, epigenetics, cul-
ture) is highly complex. Of particular interest is how structural
complexity is generated in multicellular creatures, since many
different species show significant genetic homologies with oth-
ers — from bananas to fruit flies, mice, and humans — which
over evolutionary time, are highly conserved, and raise ques-
tions about exactly what causes them to be so very different (see
section 05.6). Within the various forms of embodiment that
make up the developing biological ‘self ’, differential states of ex-
istence capable of performing different functions are expressed,

2 According to the Modern Synthesis, adaptation is an etiological concept,

that is, it refers to a trait that has occurred in the past (Huneman and Walsh
2017, 9).
3 While the Modern Synthesis places genes as the central organising agents
in evolutionary narratives, the role of whole organisms must also be ac-
knowledged in the processes of change namely, development, adaptation,
and evolution itself (Huneman and Walsh 2017, 10).

148
whereby an egg does not directly reproduce another egg and a
chicken does not lay another chicken (see section 06.1). Or, as
Stephane Leduc notes, ‘the substance of the child is other than
that of the ovum, and the substance of the adult is not that of the
child’ (Leduc 1911, 3).
HeLa cells complicate the concept of multicellular agency
even further, since they are the progeny of an immortal cell line
of cervical cancer cells taken on February 8 1951 from Henrietta
Lacks, a patient who died of cancer on October 4 1951. Char-
acterised only by their genes, rather than the being as a whole,
these beings-in-themselves thrive independently from the ana-
tomical conventions that frame other human beings. Although
they have not been legally granted personhood, HeLa raises
critical questions about what it means to be ‘human’ and ‘alive’.
While the Modern Synthesis implies that genes are discrete
codes and rule-makers, advances in molecular biology reveal
there is no consensus on what a gene actually is. Nor do they act
entirely by their own agency, but are influenced by networks of
other molecular actors (Keller and Harel 2007).

“… This molecule can’t dance without a team of

choreographers’’, that [means] ‘‘it comes alive only when
numerous proteins pull its ‘strings’’’. (Pennisi 2003)

This alternative decision-making agency speaks to a dynamic,

amorphous realm of metabolism, which is located within the
cytoplasm and leaks out into the environment beyond the cell
boundary. The formlessness and fluidity of metabolic reactions
provides a permissive matrix in which genes, gene systems, and
gene networks, become connected to each other within dynam-
ic in a sea of ‘invisible’ exchanges.

The onset of synthetic biology opens a different perspective

by leaving aside the question about the evolutionary
origin of biological phenomena and focusing instead on
the relational logic and the material properties of the
corresponding components that make biological system

149
 work as they do. Once a functional challenge arises, the
solution space for the problem is not homogeneous but it
has attractors that can be accessed either through random
exploration (as evolution does) or rational design (as
engineers do). Although these two paths (i.e., evolution
and engineering) are essentially different, they can lead to
solutions to specific mechanistic bottlenecks that frequently
coincide or converge-and one can easily help to understand
and improve the other. Alas, productive discussions
on these matters are often contaminated by ideological
preconceptions that prevent adoption of the engineering
metaphor to understand and ultimately reshape living
systems-as ambitioned by synthetic biology. (de Lorenzo
2018)

The fundamental creativity, heterogeneity, and plasticity of bio-

logical systems challenges the central doctrine of Neo-Darwin-
ism, which states that every cell in a multicellular organism is
identical. Recent findings of a study into the genetic causes of
abdominal aortic aneurysms discovered that blood and tissue
samples were not genetically identical (Gottlieb et al. 2009).
This finding was anticipated by Kevin Kelly in 2006 in The Edge,
where he proposed that biological information is not stable, but
contextual.

… the DNA in your body (and in the bodies of all living

organisms) varies from part to part. I make this prediction
based on something we know about biology, which is that
nature abhors uniformity. Nowhere else in nature do we see
identity maintained to such exactness. Nowhere else is there
such fixity. I do not expect intra-soma variation to diverge
very much … if my belief is true, it would matter where in
your body a sample of your DNA is taken. And it would also
matter when your DNA is sampled, as this variation could
change over time. (Kelly 2006, 207–8)

150
Value systems come into play when translating dynamic cell
functions into mechanistic programs, as their established range
of concepts eliminate a spectrum of robust material processes,
such as development, which are necessary for resilient and
versatile forms of life. The terminologies used to indicate the
character of these phenomena portray them as flaws, errors,
modifications, mutations, adaptations, and variations — devi-
ancies from ‘the norm’, where interspecies hybridisations, such
as the breeding between polar and grizzly bears observed in the
Northwest Territories of Canada, are reported through (unin-
tentionally) value-loaded accounts.

‘Polar bears would most likely prefer to mate with other

polar bears and grizzlies with other grizzlies, rather than
with an odd-looking hybrid’ … (Roach 2006)

The breakdown of species barriers may start with atypical

mating preferences of select individuals; however, the story
we present can be traced to a single female polar bear who,
along with three of her known F1 offspring, has been killed.
(Pongracz et al. 2017, 151)

Such terminology not only spotlights human preferences for

biological ‘order’ within the natural realm but also obfuscates
the underlying principle of organic life: that material transfor-
mation is at the heart of the living realm, rather than being a
deviant side effect of pre-determined processes. This funda-
mental material creativity is expressed in all complex life forms,
which are likely to have evolved independently at least 25 times,
in groups as diverse as animals, fungi, plants, slime moulds, and
seaweeds (Sebé-Pedrós et al. 2013; McGowan 2014). Even with-
in a single lifespan, multicellular organisms may also undergo
multiple transitions in their development (like the instar stages
of development of insects) and even integrate other organisms
into their lifecycles. The intoxicating exchange between bee and
orchid during the pollination process captured Marcel Proust’s
imagination, where unorthodox modes of sexuality working

151
together through completely different (and extravagant) life
forms, could ensure the diverse and effusive propagation of life.

Like so many creatures of the animal and vegetable

kingdoms, like the plant that would produce vanilla, but
which, because, in it, the male organ is divided by a septum
from the female organ, remains sterile unless humming
birds or certain small bees transport the pollen from one
to the other, or unless man fertilizes them artificially …
their sexual needs depend on the coincidence of too many
conditions, too difficult to encounter. (Proust 2003, 30–31)

Reproductive tactics are not always consistent with ‘efficient’, or

conservative, reproductive solutions, but are frequently promis-
cuous, materially indulgent, and highly risky. In fact, the mate-
rial choreography of reproduction seems to be designed to be as
challenging as possible.
According to the doctrine of the selfish gene, life should be
stable and change very little over the course of evolution, but
this is clearly not the case. Donald Williamson suspects that the
variety of body forms that were produced in a geological period
of morphological variation, the Cambrian Era, were potentially
much more plastic and fluid in their ability to fuse with other
beings than modern biology is today willing to acknowledge
(Williamson 2006a). In other words, these primitive bodies
formed strategic ‘error-generating’ communities.

About 600 million years ago, shortly before the Cambrian,

animals with tissues (metazoans) made their first
appearance … All Cambrian animals were marine and, like
most modern marine animals, they shed their eggs and
sperm into the water where fertilization took place. Eggs
of one species frequently encountered sperm of another,
and there were only poorly developed mechanisms to
prevent hybridization. Early animals had small genomes,
leaving plenty of spare gene capacity. These factors led to
many fruitful hybridizations, which resulted in concurrent

152
 chimeras. Not only did the original metazoans hybridize but
the new animals resulting from these hybridizations also
hybridized, and this produced the explosion in animal form
… (Williamson 2006b, 188)

While genetic studies do not support Williamson’s specific idea

that modern larvae evolved by hybridogenesis (Oransky 2011),
his view is worth mentioning as a tool for considering the story
of life through deep time, when the developmental plasticity of
bodies may not have been the same as today.

… the great majority of novelties which define the taxa

are not led up to via the adaptive continuums that might
have endowed selection with causal directive agency.
Unfortunately, very few are prepared to follow the logical
implication of this absence: namely, that the origin of
the basic Types of nature must have been determined or
directed by causal factors other than gradual cumulative
selection. (Denton 2016, 42)

Those life forms that have very distinct modes of existence and
development, which depend on radical transitions and trans-
formations like embryos and larvae, continue to challenge the
Modern Synthesis by drawing attention to the possibility of
multiple loci of organisation within the biological ‘self ’’, which
organisationally adapt and evolves.

… though the oyster seems the type of dull animal

vegetation in its adult condition, it passes through a
vagabond, if not stormy youth, between the time in which
it is sheltered by the parental roof, and that in which it
‘ranges itself ’ as a grave and sedentary member of the oyster
community. (Huxley 1884, 47)

They also raise important questions about which aspects of their

being are conserved during these radical material reorganisa-
tions such as during birth and metamorphosis. Slippages in

153
these modes of existence are more than the sequential expres-
sion of individual genes, but highly orchestrated modes of re-
structuring that must simultaneously manage physical change
and existential continuity, which is characteristic of dissipative
systems (see section 08.10).

What is this egg? … First there is a speck which moves

about, a thread growing and taking colour, flesh being
formed, a beak, wing-tips, eyes, feet coming into view,
a yellowish substance which unwinds and turns into
intestines — and you have a living creature. This creature
stirs, moves about, makes a noise. I can hear it cheeping
through the shell — it takes on a downy covering, it can
see. The weight of its wagging head keeps on banging the
beak against the inert wall of its prison. Now the wall is
breached and the bird emerges, walks, flies, feels pain, runs
away, comes back again, suffers, loves, desires, enjoys, it
experiences all your affections and does all the things you
do. And will you maintain, with Descartes, that it is an
imitating machine pure and simple? (Diderot 1976, 158)

In the process of resisting entropy’s call, life’s effusive strategies,

exquisite choreographies, paradoxical relationships, and mate-
rial indulgences, present many challenges for the Modern Syn-
thesis, by indulgently exploring the many strategies for exist-
ence beyond the restrictions of the (genetic) bête machine.
Life — the ultimate flâneur.

154
 04.3
Complexity, Cybernetics and
Complicating Things

Entelechy is born in the negative spaces of the machine

model of nature, in the ‘gaps’ in the ‘chain of strictly
physico-chemical or mechanical events’. (Bennett 2010b, 50)

The nature of life’s dynamic character has been considered since

ancient times through a broad range of philosophical frame-
works, many of which are animistic and so, refuse the logic of
the bête machine. Heraclitus compared life to a flame, while Ar-
istotle proposed that ‘entelechy’, a vital substance that was nei-
ther truly material nor spiritual (Bennett 2010, 71), was respon-
sible for the operations of living things.
Within these discourses, the flow of matter and liquids are
pervasive themes, which are used to discuss the nature of life
and are potentially testable. While some of the properties of
liquids can be simulated using mechanisms, their full range of
non-linear characteristics cannot be exactly replicated even if
attempts to do so provide an enchanting spectacle.
Dating from the eighteenth century, the Silver Swan is an au-
tomaton that entranced Mark Twain. Driven by three separate
clockwork mechanisms, the ornate bird swims upon a stream of
twisted glass and moves gracefully to the sound of music. Period-
ically it catches a golden fish from out of the stream and has done
so for around 250 years (Kennedy 2017; Bowes Museum 2017).

I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about

his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes, watched
him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as
if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop.
(Kennedy 2017)

Advances in mechanics made possible the development of cy-

bernetic apparatuses, which differ from classical machines by

155
their methods of control, information exchange, and feedback
systems (von Bertalanffy 1950). By performing repeated cycles
of work, cybernetic apparatuses provide mechanical models for
life’s fundamental flows and processes that are iteratively updat-
ed by information flowing into the apparatus (von Bertalanaffy
1968, 18–19). Largely achieving their effects through the repeti-
tions of inert-bodied machines, which are recursively depend-
ent on each other, they transduce work back into the system to
maintain a ‘steady state’, or mechanical ‘homeostasis’. Applying
systems science to cybernetics, Ludwig von Bertalanffy cham-
pioned a new ‘natural philosophy’ through his General Systems
Theory (GST), which modernised Heraclitus’ view that life is in
constant flux, which could be tested through the flowing in-
teractions and connectedness of cybernetic apparatuses (von
Bertalanffy 1950). Such concepts prompted the search for self-
maintaining machines, such as Ross Ashby’s ‘homeostat’, which
was designed as an ‘artificial brain’.

I have been trying to develope [sic] further principles

for my machine to illustrate stability, + to develope [sic]
ultrastability. (quoted in British Library 2016)

While the fields of GST and cybernetics created a new scientific

language, in essence they upheld ‘a model of centralization, a
real acting-out of it’ (Ballantyne 2007, 26). Without an ontologi-
cal shift in the organisation of a physical system, i.e., an evolu-
tionary development, cybernetics actually strengthens the idea
that the difference between non-life and life is merely down to
its degree of material complexity. By possessing a richer lan-
guage than classical machines, however, GST and cybernetics
invoke testable notions of change and adaptation.
Since life is more than persistent iterations of recursive sys-
tems, which feedback on themselves but is also capable of spon-
taneous, material, and organisational transformation — before
an artificial system is capable of radical ‘developmental’ change,
it must first attain systemic and material non-linearity.

156
 04.4
Autopoiesis

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduced the con-

cept of autopoiesis into machines, as self-producing, self-main-
taining systems. Made up from a network of components and
processes of production, they could continuously regenerate
themselves through their interactions and transformations, to
maintain and produce the network of processes that sustained
them. This integrated ‘knot’ of exchanges constituted a ‘unified’
entity whose elements specified the topological domain of its
‘machine’ network.

Professor Humberto Maturana, with his colleague Francisco

Varela, have undertaken the construction of a systematic
theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems
not as they are objects of observation and description,
nor even as interacting systems, but as self-contained
unities whose only reference is to themselves … they are
autonomous, self-referring and self-constructing closed
systems — in short, autopoietic systems in their terms.
(Maturana and Varela 1928, v)

When open to their environment and able to receive external

energy and matter, autopoietic systems perform softer, semiper-
meable, more agile, and persistent notions of work, and agency
than are possible through classical mechanical systems.

Autopoietic structures have definite boundaries, such as a

semipermeable membrane, but the boundaries are open and
connect the system with almost unimaginable complexity to
the world around it. (Briggs and Peat 1989, 154)

‘Open’ exchanges between the interior and exterior spaces are

not exactly circular, but possess ‘circularity’. This is a cyclical
concept that is not sealed in an unending loop of precision but
allows the corkscrewing of energy and matter into and out of the

157
system through iterations of events. In this lifelike model of ex-
change, the idea of object permanence is decentred, as the whole
system is constantly remaking, or reasserting, itself through its
iterations.

It makes no sense to identify an organism over time with

the materials that compose it, given that these are constantly
being replenished by the whole. (Nicholson 2018, 23)

When a body is infiltrated by its surroundings, it must man-

age active change — from self-maintenance, to active growth
and (re)production. In classical mechanics, such alterations in
baseline conditions are disruptive events with the potential to
destabilise the established hierarchies of order that govern the
machine’s actions and may threaten catastrophic system failure.
In contrast, life’s agile iterations are heteropoietic and at times of
stability generate ‘self-similar’ iterations of work. Niles Eldredge
and Stephen Jay Gould observed that for most of evolutionary
history, these iterations expressed through the morphology of
species, is remarkably stable and reaches a condition of ‘stasis’.

‘Nothing will come of nothing.’ Cordelia’s dilemma arises in

science when an important (and often pre-dominant) signal
from nature isn’t seen or reported at all because scientists
read the pattern as ‘no data’, literally as nothing at all. This
odd status of ‘hidden in plain sight’ had been the fate of
stasis in fossil morphospecies until punctuated equilibrium
gave this primary signal some theoretical space for
existence. Apparent silence — the overt nothing that actually
records the strongest something — can embody the deepest
and most vital meaning of all. (Gould 2007, 38)

At times of stress however, living systems are capable of radical

shifts in order, which prevent system collapse, and may rapidly
confer organisms with the ability to adapt to new conditions.
Such abrupt transformations are evidenced in the fossil record
as ‘punctuated equilibrium’, where certain new characteristics

158
like shells, bones, and eyes, appear over relatively short evolu-
tionary time periods.

Evolution is a theory of organic change, but it does not

imply, as many people assume, that ceaseless flux is the
irreducible state of nature and that structure is but a
temporary incarnation of the moment. Change is more
often a rapid transition between stable states than a
continuous transformation at slow and steady rates. We live
in a world of structure and legitimate distinction. Species
are the units of nature’s morphology. (Gould 1979, 18)

In a truly open autopoietic system, it might be reasonable to

anticipate spontaneous and sudden advances in the configura-
tion of ‘autopoietic machines’, albeit over protracted periods of
apparent stability. With such an eventuality, the ontological dif-
ferences between mechanism and ‘life’ would disappear.

159
04.5
RepRap: Self-replicating Machines

The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not

a struggle for raw materials — these, for organisms, are air,
water and soil, all abundantly available — nor for energy
which exists in plenty in any body in the form of heat, but
a struggle for [negative] entropy, which becomes available
through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the
cold earth. (Boltzmann 1974, 24)

Attempts to produce self-replicating machines focus on the

specific (re)placement of components using external ‘intelli-
gence’ and agency, which has been impossible to complete to
date. Adrian Bowyer initiated the RepRap (Replicating Rapid-
protoyper) project in 2004, which is an open-source, 3D print-
ing apparatus that prototypes plastic objects and also explores
the possibility of self-replicating machines. It prints the plastic
components for a kit that can be assembled into a new machine,
which account for about 70% of the necessary parts — printing
the electronic circuity remains particularly problematic (Jones
et al. 2011; Giaimo 2019).
Current RepRap machine kits are not self-compiling. They
operate a recursive assembly process on pre-given materials,
which is hardly autonomous, and kits come with instructions so
that gaps in the ‘autopoietic’ process of ‘self ’-production, must
be completed by (external) human input. Even when it becomes
possible to self-print all the components of a 3D printer, RepRap
still relies on a maker community to evolve its design. Com-
pare this with a plant, for example, that is able to turn elemental
materials into complex, constantly changing, structural systems.
The present generation of self-replicating machines therefore do
not address the infrastructural conditions in which the entire
spectrum of their vital operations takes place and instead, rely
on existing human production systems for their completion.
Ontologically speaking, these machines not differ from factory-
made machines, other than through the degree of automation

160
used in the assembly process. While rapid prototyping changes
the distribution of economic and social power among people
using these tools, it has little effect on the degree of autonomy
within the machine itself.

161
04.6
Natural Selection

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances

for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting
different amounts of light, and for the correction of
spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed
by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest
degree … The difficulty of believing that a perfect and
complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though
insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered
subversive of the theory. (Darwin 2010, 82)

Charles Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’ proposed that the

‘fitness’ of an organism was reflected in its reproductive success
that was passed on through heritable traits. These in turn helped
certain types of organisms survive and become more common
in a specific population over time — ultimately to produce new
species (Paradis 2007, 113). While he gave the principles of his
theory, Darwin did not propose a physical process that explained
how the actual ‘means of modification by descent’ worked.
Without these details, early critics such as Samuel Butler,
accused him of advocating truisms — where ‘survivors sur-
vive’ — as a way of avoiding giving real causes and effects (Butler
2008, 351), while George Henry Lewes argued that by referring
to ‘chance’ in his explanations, Darwin demonstrated that could
not explain the effects he proposed.

Mr. Darwin seems to imply that the external conditions

which cause a variation are to be distinguished from the
conditions which accumulate and perfect such variation,
that is to say, he implies a radical difference between the
process of variation and the process of selection. This I have
already said does not seem to me acceptable; the selection
I conceive to be simply the variation which has survived.
(Lewes 1878, 109)

162
With the advent of the Modern Synthesis, DNA was identified
as the agent of heredity and evolutionary change, although not
all biologists agree on the principles that govern these processes
and natural selection has become a semantic stage upon which
technical paradigms related to biological theories continually
clash in a wider, and often undeclared, political arena.

In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics—the

tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition
of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature
as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of
reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—
the relation between organism and machine has been a
border war. The stakes in the border war have been the
territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.
(Haraway 1991)

Those that embrace a Neo-Darwinist, deterministic reality like

Richard Dawkins, regard natural selection as governed by ‘real’
interiorised genetic ‘means’, to produce specific outcomes, which
may be further modified through environmental and social
events (Dawkins 2006).

Neo-Darwinism is an attempt to reconcile Mendelian

genetics, which says that organisms do not change with
time, with Darwinism, which claims they do. (Brockman
1995, 133)

Others that take a more contingent and therefore probabilistic

view of natural selection, like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay
Gould, look to the myriad forces that shape evolution through
the processes of living (Gould and Lewontin 1979). These are
so varied and contingent that their effects have many more de-
grees of freedom and are produced by networks of distributed
processes, which enable organisms to dynamically respond to
change, even while overarching organisational principles (ge-
netics, laws of physics and chemistry) are at work.

163
 … organisms must be analyzed as integrated wholes, with
baupläne4 so constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of
development, and general architecture that the constraints
themselves become more interesting and more important in
delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that
may mediate change when it occurs. (Gould and Lewontin
1979)

The association of natural selection, with Herbert Spencer’s ad-

age ‘survival of the fittest’, bestows it with a politics, where the
most ruthless and uncaring organisms may be regarded as ‘fit-
test’, since through proactive aggression, they are more likely
to survive.

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world

is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute
that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of
animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for
their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being
devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of
all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must
be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will
automatically lead to an increase in the population until
the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a
universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces
and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt,
other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any
rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we
observe has precisely the properties we should expect if
there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good,
nothing but pitiless indifference. (Dawkins 2001, 155)

When used in a Neo-Darwinist context, natural selection also

negates the agency of organisms beyond the level of organisa-

4 Baupläne, or ground plans, is a biological term for a set of morphological

features that are common to many members of a phylum of animals.

164
tion of their molecular hierarchies, which do not directly ac-
count for the sophisticated aspects of behaviour (see section
04.7), such as empathy for other beings. While non-humans are
frequently treated as if they lack social order, or codes of con-
duct, certain creatures like capuchin monkeys (Markey 2003)
are demonstrably capable of making ethical decisions. Negating
the capacity for creatures to act altruistically against their own
interests George Price argues there is a ‘rational’ selfish genetic
theory underpinning such ‘irrational’ actions, since close fam-
ily members ‘benefit’ from the sacrifice made by a genetically
related individual (Reigner 2016). These accounts assert biologi-
cal ‘fate’ as a final cause through with a creature’s agency can be
denied as: they do not address morality, neither do they engage
with a whole spectrum of complex behaviours, nor can they
provide a framework that indicates what ought to be done, when
faced with a given set of circumstances.

Our culture has the genetics and the nature theory. You
come into the world loaded with genes and are influenced
by nature, or you come into the world, are influenced by
the environment, and are the result of parents, family,
social class and education. These theories don’t speak
to the individuality or uniqueness that you feel is you.
(NurrieStearns 2017)

With the politics of enablement at the core of its ethics, liquid life
seeks empowering narratives that return autonomy to all beings
through the innate agency of matter at far-from-equilibrium
states. By constantly negotiating its relationship with genetics,
which is part of its wider community of collaborating agents,
liquid beings resist the material programs and mechanisms of
power that strive to supress them (Foucault 1998).

165
04.7
Causal Emergence

Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no

obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a
line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between
them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against
its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings … Romeo
soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise,
of touching Juliet’s lips directly. (James 1890, 8)

At far-from-equilibrium states, bodies are not governed by the

simple interactions between individual atoms, nor through a
chain of command initiated by nucleotide programs but ally
with the operations emerging within intersecting agentised
fields, whose mutual attractions are expressed as ‘causal entropy’
(Wissner-Gross and Freer 2013). When these active fields link
together, massive exchanges between populations of molecules
take place, which are also dynamically interacting with their
local surroundings. Consequently, the resultant phenomena
frequently exceed causal explanations at higher levels. In these
instances, higher-scale events that arise from the constitutive
fields of interaction begin to shape real events observed at the
macro-scale. This ‘causal emergence’ challenges existing ideas
about the nature of laws, powers of scale and how they relate.
This is not only a more efficient way to model complex phenom-
ena, but also constitutes a real force. It is not a cipher for true
causes but embodies the actual agents responsible for high-level
system behaviours. While at first, it appears counterintuitive
that higher-level organisation is more predictable than even the
most detailed micro-scale description of systems (Hoel 2017), it
is likely to underpin the behaviour of many kinds of emergent
phenomena such as superconductivity, murmurations, crystals,
and waves, which establish the natural scales that correspond
with each other and generate real consequences such as tsuna-
mis, weather, complex behaviours, and the formation of planets
(Wolchover 2017b).

166
 04.8
Non-linearity

Where chaos begins, classical science stops. For as long

as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of
nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder
in the atmosphere, in the turbulent sea, in the fluctuations
of wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and
brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and
erratic side — these have been puzzles to science, or worse,
monstrosities. (Gleick 1997, 3)

A glimpse of dynamical chaos was first provided by Henri Poin-

caré when he entered a competition held in 1890 by Oscar II, the
King of Sweden. One of the challenges was to demonstrate that
Newton’s solar system equations were dynamically stable, but his
incomplete solution to the classical ‘three-body problem’ indi-
cated that a range of factors could alter the movement of the solar
system in ways that defied calculation. These first clues indicated
that astonishing chaotic behaviour was possible in the deter-
ministic solar system and enormous incalculable changes could
be produced by tiny variations, whose behaviour was shaped
by their initial conditions but still obeyed fundamental physi-
cal laws. Demonstrating that accurate long-term predictions of
chaotic systems were impossible (Peterson 1993), Poincaré later
suggested such phenomena were likely to be common in other
fields of study such as meteorology. Chaotic systems are also able
to produce recognisable patterns with striking characteristics
that include; responding to their context, producing persistently
repeating patterns, reaching equilibrium states, or undergoing
unpredictable changes that are not proportional to their inputs.
None of these systems can be decomposed into parts, then sub-
sequently reassembled back into their original state.

… the theory of nonlinear systems is like a theory of non-

elephants … It’s impossible to build a theory of nonlinear

167
 systems, because arbitrary things can satisfy that definition.
(Hardesty 2010)

With the advent of modern computers in the mid-twentieth

century, researchers such as Edward Lorenz began to experi-
ment with the equations of complex dynamic systems in ways
that were previously impossible. Lorenz’s ‘toy model’ of atmos-
pheric convection produced a solution with characteristic ‘but-
terfly wings’. Lorenz argued that this strange attractor suggested
why it is hard to predict the weather — as it was sensitive to
initial conditions. Characteristically, the patterns never settled
down to equilibrium, or entered a predictable, ‘periodic’ state
(Lorenz 1963). The wing-like trajectories of this model system
inspired the aphorism of the ‘butterfly effect’ — where tiny dis-
turbances produced by the flutter of the insect’s wings could be
chaotically amplified to ultimately cause a tornado.

Determinism was equated with predictability before Lorenz.

After Lorenz, we came to see that determinism might give
you short-term predictability, but in the long run, things
could be unpredictable. That’s what we associate with the
word ‘chaos’. (Dizikes 2011)

Working for IBM, Benoit Mandelbrot was one of the first to use
computer graphics to demonstrate how visual complexity could
be produced from simple mathematical rules. He codified and
popularised them as ‘fractal’ images, which could be taken up
into a variety of subjects such as the emerging field of math-
ematical biology.

Clouds are not spheres … Mountains are not cones.

Lightning does not travel in a straight line. The new
geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded,
scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked,
and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined. The
understanding of nature’s complexity awaited a suspicion
that the complexity was not just random, not just an

168
 accident. It required a faith that the interesting feature of
a lightning bolt’s path … was not its direction, but rather
the distribution of zigs and zags. Mandelbrot’s work made
a claim about the world, and the claim was that such
odd shapes carry meaning. The pits and tangles are more
than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidean
geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing.
(Gleick 1997, 94)

The theory and practice of non-linear systems provides entry

into paradoxical spaces and material states where qualitatively
new outcomes are possible. In the field of ‘mechanical meta-
materials’, non-linear degrees of freedom that arise in suitably
designed microstructures are programmed to perform specific
mechanical tasks. The aim is to create a new class of controllable,
dynamical, and active materials that combine unconventional
physical properties such as swelling and non-linear elasticity,
with substrates like metagels, which are structured hydrogels that
respond to osmotic shock (Florijn, Coulais and van Hecke 2014).
An appropriate conceptual and operation framework is there-
fore needed to anticipate and fully engage the potential of these
fields. Precedents already exist within the realm of fluids, such as
Rayleigh–Bénard cells and the Bütschli system, which behave ac-
cording to the laws of chaotic systems but, through their specific
materiality, also possess the seeds of technological disruption.

169
04.9
From Hard to Soft Machines

When Stephane Leduc first coined the term ‘synthetic biology’,

the difference between lively chemistry and biological systems
was regarded as ‘a gradual chemical elaboration, which culmi-
nates in those high compounds which, under surrounding in-
fluences, manifest those complex changes called vital’ (Leduc
1911, 116). Even today, the question of life is regarded as a chal-
lenge for combinatorial chemistry. However, ‘brute’ matter that
lacks innate agency is simply unable to account for material ‘de-
cisions’ about becoming. Concepts that engage with a (new) ma-
terialist discourse must encapsulate the capacity for the mate-
rial realm to act autonomously in making decisions about what
it might become, without recourse to the influence of external
agencies such as divine forces, or genetic ‘intelligence’.
One of the hypotheses Denis Diderot makes in in D’Alembert’s
Dream, is that not only can matter think, but that all of matter
is sensible:

Just as a drop of mercury fuses itself with another drop of

mercury, so a sensitive and living molecule fuses itself with
a sensible and living molecule … At first there were two
drops—after the contact there is only one … Before the
assimilation there were two molecules; after the assimilation
there is now only one … The sensibility becomes common
to the common mass … And, indeed, why not? … In
my thinking about the length of an animal fibre, I can
distinguish as many parts as I like, but the fibre will
remain a unity … yes … a unity. The contact between two
homogeneous molecules, perfectly homogeneous, creates
the continuity … and it’s an example of the greatest union,
cohesion, combination, and identity one could imagine
… Yes, philosopher, if these molecules are elementary
and simple … but what if they are aggregates, if they are
compounds? … The combining will still take place no less
than before and the resulting identity and continuity …

170
 and then the usual actions and reactions … It’s certain that
contact between two living molecules is something different
from the contiguity of two inert masses … (Diderot 1976,
167)

This possibility is examined in a thought experiment, where a

marble statue is ground into powder then mixed into the earth.
Plants spring from this soil which are eaten by animals and then,
by a woman, where this matter is organised in the womb to pro-
duce a human life. The inanimate statue therefore becomes a
person (Diderot 1976, 150–53) — a process that Diderot calls
‘animalisation’. This journey however, is not an isolated set of
transformations but invokes extended fields of potentiality that
are more extensive than an ort of matter, like metabolisms, and
so, animalisation does not simply work on discrete objects alone
but is an account that describes a much more extensive process.
For life to be constructed from fundamental units requires
more than material complexity but also the right context in
which transformation can take place. The specific context that
is required, is something that is not easily reducible, but odd
(Cairns-Smith 1985, 8).

… just adding complexity to the system in an unprincipled

way [is] likely to lead to ‘black tar’ rather than any
interesting higher-order behavior — the addition of
complexity must be done with care. This leads to an as yet
unanswered question: Are there principles to guide us in
adding complexity at the right places in the system, or are
we essentially left to experiment by trial and error? (Taylor
et al. 2016, 413)

Robert Rosen notes that there is no syntactic way across the

complexity bridge (Rosen 1991). This could mean that our cur-
rent knowledge of what we call ‘emergence’ is incomplete, or
that we cannot generate sufficient complexity for the construc-
tion of ‘life’ to succeed. While complexity, and even those recipes
that provoke it can be recognised, they cannot be ‘built’ into a

171
system through assembling their parts into specific configura-
tions alone and something ‘irreducible’ has to happen for the
system to become autonomously agentised. While massive in-
creases in ‘information’ flow through physical systems could po-
tentially ‘solve’ this issue, the nature of this information cannot
be general — such as applying a huge amount of heat — it must
be ordered and specific, so that it can develop particular rela-
tionships — material, energetic, temporospatial — with the host
at specific scales of operation. Alternatively, the fundamental
premise that life is an incredibly complex machine, which can be
assembled from molecular parts, may require radical rethinking.

In the history of science and philosophy there is hardly

a less happy expression than that of the bête machine of
Descartes. No concept leads to such a distorted view of
the problem underlying it, or so greatly falsifies its proper
meaning. It might even be said that, in spite of its heuristic
success, the notion of the machine has had a destructive
effect on the development of biological theory. It has
entangled the investigator even today with scholastic
artificial problems, and at the same time as prevented
the clear discernment of the essential problem of organic
nature. Only the displacement of the machine theory … will
put an end to the paralysis of biological thinking for which
this Cartesian expression has been responsible. (Bertalanffy
1933, 36–37).

A revival of material discourses is needed in view of the present

unfolding environmental catastrophe. To advance the theory
and practice of building, this must take place in conjunction
with alternative narratives, models, and prototypes, to living
systems, where ‘the difference between the living and the non-
living can become an object of practices instead of definitions
… It is no longer a question of a unitary logic, but rather of the
creation of new types of artefacts’ (Stengers 2000, 88).
The expanded language, associated metaphors, and concep-
tual toolsets offered by new materialism and the semiotics of

172
soft machines, reject notions of instrumentalised ‘brute’ matter
and instead, respond to a livelier, agentised non-human realm
in constant flux, which implies the devolution of human agency.
This is not to say that people are debased, but that ‘if matter
itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects
and objects minimized, but the status of the shared material-
ity of all things is elevated’ (Bennett 2010a, 12–13). Advances in
the life sciences are providing new apparatuses that challenge
traditional perspectives of materials, where ‘conversations’ with
lively matter can be shaped by altering genes (Caputo 2016), cul-
turing living tissues (Sandhana 2004) or changing the environ-
ments in which responsive (living) materials are placed (Anthill
Social 2009). This enlivened realm shifts invokes an age of ‘liv-
ing’ technology (Armstrong 2015, 31–33), and cyborgs (Haraway
1991), which resist the conventions applied to brute obedience
(Bennett 2010a, vii) and move towards a participatory realm
of ‘thingly power’ (Bennett 2010a, xiii). Here, the boundaries
that separate life from matter, organic from inorganic, human
from non-human, man from god, are ‘not necessarily the most
important ones to honor’ (Coole 2010, 47). Such ‘vital’ agency
invokes the poetics of ‘soft’ machines, whose components (or
agents) are loosely coupled and form horizontally organised
power structures through groupings (or assemblages) that de-
territorialise and re-territorialise within the logic of ‘desiring-
production’ (Ballantyne 2007, 18–38; Deleuze and Guattari
1979; Deleuze and Guattari 1983). Such ‘machines’ are not ac-
tual apparatuses, but philosophical instruments for (mostly)
thinking through how these concepts may be actualised. New
materialist perspectives also hybridise with the concepts of
speculative realism (Morton 2010), Actor–Network Theory
(Latour 1996), and feminist theory, to address a range of issues,
including hierarchies, the nature of relationality, and the rela-
tionships between nature, society, humans, and other agencies
that constitute the living planet. Collectively these perspectives
propose the existence of dynamic, emerging, and constantly
negotiated ecological relationships across and between unlike
bodies that evolve co-constitutive relationships, or anatomies,

173
such as wasp orchids5 and thynnine wasps (Deleuze and Guat-
tari 1983, 284); while ‘oceanic’ ontologies (Steinberg and Peters
2015) and hyperobjects (Morton 2013) also generate discursive
platforms for exploring massive material flows and irreducible
complexity. The orientation of soft machines however, remains
ontologically consistent with Descartes’ dualistic corpus and
soul substance — albeit with softer and fuzzier boundaries. Jane
Bennett, for example, summons Hans Driesch’s interpretation
of Aristotle’s entelechy (Driesch 1929, 1–113), and Henri Berg-
son’s ‘vital’ principle (Bergson 1922, 44) to place emphasis on
ephemeral essences as external operative agencies in new ma-
terialist discourses; while supreme consciousnesses are implied
in James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ invocation of Gaia — ‘a
tough bitch and is not at all threatened by humans’ (Brockman
2011) — as sources of agency and metaphor for planetary sys-
tems (Lovelock 1979). The challenge in adopting such terminol-
ogy is how to practically apply the proposed ideas without re-
articulating them within the context of the bête machine.
The most successful collaborations that emerge from these
alternative transdisciplinary practices are not simply theoreti-
cal, but also synthetic (bringing concepts together), which in-
volve ‘making’, or prototyping possibilities to functionality. Isa-
belle Stengers proposes a constructivist platform that promotes
experimental modes of collaboration that may apply to ongoing
developments in the characterisation of life, such as coupling
and causality in complex systems, which resist easy instrumen-
talisation (Stengers 2000, 87). These may be brought into prox-
imity with cultural developments. In this ‘ecology of practices’
(Stengers 2005), the aim is not to address the state of knowledge
and making right now, but to generate new kinds of methods
and discursive prototypes that may underpin alternative ap-
proaches to building life in the laboratory. By producing proto-
types of the collaborative work, they may be subject to iterative

5 Part of the wasp orchid has evolved to closely resemble female thynnine
wasps, so when males try to mate with these structures, they deposit pollen,
which pollinates the flowers (Ballantyne 2007, 23)

174
interrogation, and as they are developed, may be capable of re-
sponding to and incorporating new findings.

Each branch of science at its commencement employs only

the simpler methods of observation. It is purely descriptive.
The next step is to separate the different parts of the object
studied — to dissect and analyze. The science has now
become analytical. The final stage is to reproduce the
substances, the forms, and the phenomena, which have been
the subject of investigation. The science has at last become
synthetical. Up to the present time, biology has made
use only of the first two methods, the descriptive and the
analytical. The analytical method is at grave disadvantage in
all biological investigations, since it is impossible to separate
and analyze the elementary phenomena of life. The function
of an organ ceases when it is isolated from the organism of
which it forms a part. This is the chief cause of our lack of
progress in the analysis of life. (Leduc 1911, 5)

While the empirical aspects of lively agents can be framed by

the machine metaphor, their ‘invisible’ (irreducible) potencies
cannot. By changing the framework through which the com-
plex actions of living systems operate, liquid life raises the status
and influence of non-human actors — such as the bacteria that
Margulis indicated were Gaia’s agents of change (Margulis and
Sagan 1995), so that a broader recognition of Earth’s liveliness
can be acknowledged, engaged, and valued.

175
 Part III

HYPERCOMPLEXITY
 05

BEYOND DETERMINISM
This chapter examines the physical and
material properties of liquid at far-from-
equilibrium states and the strange phe-
nomena they emit. Developing these
qualities through their protean materiality,
the tangible yet extraordinary nature of the
living realm is characterised.

179
 05.1
Environment

Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with

the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty — but no
welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained
in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere
is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and
comedy. That’s where life is; that’s were all the good stuff is.
(Botkin 2001, 192)

‘Controls’ were invented during the Enlightenment so that

bodies could be understood as things-in-themselves without
interference by their surroundings — wild flowers, Ice Age
megafauna, mists, sunbeams, a scurrying beetle, gardens, cit-
ies, graffiti, spilt remains of a Friday evening takeaway on the
pavement, guano, layers of pollution on brickwork, the volatile
perfumes of summer flowers, clumsy wings flapping in branch-
es dripping with leaves, traffic jams, plane trails, the sigh of a
spider as it repairs threads on its web, thunder and lightning, or
a runaway balloon. These classical scientific experiments factor
out even the simplest substances like soil, air, and water, since
their embodied hypercomplexity and unpredictability can-
not be meaningfully engaged using mechanistic frameworks,
which are dedicated to elucidating simple causes and effects.
This has set the stage for the neglect of our vital surroundings,
which became regarded as little more than decorative settings
for their occupants. While prized as picturesque backdrops
for resource-efficient metropolitan environments, these two-
dimensional images are devoid of real value or presence be-
yond their bucolic aesthetic. While it may be simpler to em-
pirically and aesthetically understand abstracted bodies in this
way — rather than engaging with their true materiality — such
perspectives prevent us from discovering sophisticated ways of
inhabiting places whereby the environment flourishes along-
side human development.

181
 With the onset of increasingly turbulent environmental con-
ditions that characterise climate change, the language of disas-
ter is unleashed, as an ‘arms race’ between humans and nature
begins. Colossal barriers like the MOSE gates in Venice, create
defensive walls to keep out the high tides (Armstrong 2015), and
geoengineering technologies like fertilizing phytoplankton with
micronutrient iron on the ocean surface, seek to alter the flux of
carbon to the deep ocean and mitigate global warming (Bues-
seler et. al 2004). Even R. Buckminster Fuller’s Manhattan-scale
biosphere proposes to achieve full control of our environments,
so their resources can be exploited more efficiently through the
better design of machines in ‘The Good Anthropocene’ (Fuller
2016, 387).

People learned to create by the force of their own will,

and called themselves gods. Now the world was filled
with millions of gods. But their will was subordinate to
impulse, and so chaos returned to the Sixth World. There
was too much of everything, though something new was
always coming into being. Time started gathering speed,
and people started dying from the effort of trying to make
something that did not yet exist. (Tokarczuk 2010, 204–5)

Implicit in this ‘struggle’ for survival is that we cannot dissoci-

ate ourselves from our habitats. Giving shape and meaning to
the way we dwell in them, they generate value and a sense of
belonging, so we can ‘feel at home’ in certain places, fall in love
with a city, tend gardens, construct buildings, clean up beaches,
or make a whole range of lifestyle choices. These specific mate-
rial details are our interface with the world, which is so particu-
lar and peculiar to the places we encounter they possess unique
meaning. Environment is exactly why what happens today still
matters tomorrow and ways of working are urgently needed, so
that the generative forces that enable the processes of living can
continue their unbroken legacy.

182
 05.2
Watery Planet

Our planet may be blue from the inside out. Earth’s huge
store of water might have originated via chemical reactions
in the mantle, [as well as] arriving from space through
collisions with ice-rich comets. (Coghlan 2017b)

A very small amount of water, comprising less than 0.1% of the

Earth’s mass, confers our planet with a ‘pale blue’ appearance
from space. Even at the time of the ‘cool early earth’, 4.4 bil-
lion years ago, when there were no tectonic plates to buckle and
bow into landmasses and mountains, our world was covered
with water.

For perhaps half a billion years, the place was too hot for
life. Water remained as vapour in an atmosphere rich in
carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, neon and cyanide. Then,
as the Earth began to cool, it rained for perhaps twelve
thousand years without stopping, helping to create the first
seas. (Logan 2007, 10)

Miraculously, our water reserves have not evaporated into the

atmosphere and out into space, partly due to Earth’s gravitation-
al pull but also because most of it is not contained in its surface
bodies. Only around a third of our water is freely available in the
hydrosphere, which contains around 1.6 × 1021 kilograms of wa-
ter, while the rest of it is bound as hydrous minerals like clay and
mica within Earth’s crust. Another 0.1 to 1.5 additional surface
hydrospheres are anticipated to be bound to minerals within the
bigger, lower mantle. While it is challenging to estimate the wa-
ter content of the deeper layers, which may even be devoid of
water (Mottl et al. 2007), it is equally possible that up to 100 hy-
drosphere equivalents exist in Earth’s core. Although the origins
of Earth’s water are thought to have been acquired during the
Late Heavy Bombardment when ice-containing asteroids and
comets pulverised the world’s surface around 4.1 to 3.8 billion

183
years ago, it may also have been produced by a simple chemi-
cal reaction that takes place between silica and hydrogen in the
upper mantle, which is around 4–400 kilometres below the sur-
face. Here, the necessary extreme conditions at temperatures of
1400°C and at pressures greater than 20,000 atmospheres could
be met (Burnham and Berry 2017). Under great pressure, this
chemically produced reservoir may be responsible for trigger-
ing previously unexplained earthquakes (Futera et al. 2017), and
it seems that Earth is probably ‘wet’ (i.e., contains water), in
some sense, ‘all the way down to its core’ (Coghlan 2017b).
The actual mass of liquid water in Earth’s substance, however,
does not account for its uniqueness. This arises from its ongo-
ing, active circulation, and keen bioavailability through soils,
liquid, and gas, which plays a critical role in establishing the
conditions for liquid life.

People who are born where there’s a lot of water, in fertile

lakelands or on the banks of great rivers, are different. Their
bodies are soft, fragile and insensitive, their skin is darker,
with an olive tinge, cool and damp with blue veins beneath
it. (Tokarczuk 2003, 191)

184
 05.3
Ocean

… the class of ‘bodies without surfaces,’ as Leonardo da

Vinci was to put it, [are] bodies that have no precise form
of extremities and whose limits interpenetrate with those of
other[s]. (Damisch 2002, 124)

Oceans comprise 97% of Earth’s surface water environments

which exist between Earth’s breathable atmosphere and the
crust’s solid ground. Recurrently reconfiguring the near-shore
environment, the vastness and depth of oceans means they are
opaque to our gaze, while their complex and changing behav-
iour provides a metaphor and linguistic trope for a world in flux
(Steinberg and Peters 2015). Possessing recognisable configura-
tions that escape formal human encoding, they are understood
ambivalently as: voids with no persistent features, passive recep-
tacles, givers of life, bringers of destruction (Patton 2006), or
hypercomplex spaces that exceed our capacity to fully observe
and analyse them, which is even more profound when entan-
gled with globalisation’s toxic effluents (Gordillo 2014). While
oceans have facilitated human settlement and established power
relations, they are not reducible to their social uses or simple
categories. Indeed, oceans and synthetic platforms comprise ‘an
ideal spatial foundation … [that] is indisputably voluminous,
stubbornly material, and unmistakably undergoing continual
reformation’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015), which demands their
own language, so their vastness and strangeness can be appreci-
ated not only in their generalities, but also through their details.
Inspired by dynamic, contingent liquid relationships, oceanic
ontologies are expressive apparatuses and agents of causal emer-
gence, rather than descriptive tools. They can simultaneously
process events across multi-scalar domains without resource
to abstraction, reduction, or hierarchy. Matt Lee proposes these
systems can be imaginatively explored like actors that improvise
within a complex environment. A reading of the ‘plot’ can be
made through their exchanges, which ‘present us with … a way

185
of learning … that isn’t subject centred but created through the
movement of transformation’ (Lee 2011, 130), so their character
becomes more visible and familiar.

The Drowned Man was always discovering his potential

anew. At first he thought he was weak and defenceless, that
he was something like a flurry of wind, a light haze or a
puddle of water. Then he discovered that he could move
faster than anyone could imagine, just be thought alone…
He also discovered that the mist obeyed him, and that he
could control it as he wished. He could take strength from
it, or a shape, he could move entire clouds of it, block out
the sun with it, blur the horizon and extend the night.
(Tokarczuk 2010, 79)

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 05.4
Pluripotentiality: ‘The Hunting of the Snark’

Throughout the ages, water has been understood as funda-

mental to life. Thales of Miletus considered water as the ‘prime’
matter — one of the fundamental elements of existence, or ar-
chai — that governed the growth of plants and animals. Contin-
ually rising, undulating, and falling within watery landscapes,
liquid bodies are fundamentally lively. Simultaneously imbuing
and infiltrated by their surroundings, neither our natural sens-
es, nor concepts, fully convey their protean nature, which allies
them with the realm of monsters — entities from unseen realms
that evade categorisation by formal classification systems.
A classical approach to describing the motion of liquids is
possible using Lagrangian fluid dynamics, where an observer
follows a ‘fluid parcel’, which moves through space and time.
Typically, these are constrained by considering very small
amounts of liquids, which can be identified within a specific
field and trajectory of flow. While the mass of a fluid parcel re-
mains constant, its volume and shape may change due to dis-
tortion caused by its situatedness within the liquid field. Addi-
tionally, the properties of the fluid parcel may evolve during the
trajectory as the result of simple physical laws acting upon it,
like molecular diffusion.
In contrast, unconstrained fluid bodies are difficult to read
beyond their surface qualities and are commonly regarded as
bland, or featureless. Claude Lévi-Strauss regards the sea as
uninspiring (Lévi-Strauss 1973, 338–39), while Roland Barthes
views the ocean as a ‘non-signifying field [that] bears no mes-
sage’ (Barthes 1972, 112) and Michel Serres embraces the details
of liquid bodies specifically the subversive ‘nautical murmur’ of
the sea, which he regards as a symptom of its disturbing perva-
sive vitality (Serres 1996, 13).

It is at the boundaries of physics, and physics is bathed in

it, it lies under the cuttings of all phenomena, a proteus
taking on any shape, the matter and flesh of manifestations.

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 The noise — intermittence and turbulence — quarrel
and racket — this sea noise is the originating rumor and
murmuring, the original hate. (Serres 1996, 14)

Liquid bodies are anything but banal. Their subversive unpre-

dictability and unruly pluripotentiality resists control, com-
ponentisation — and, ultimately, mechanisation, so we are ill-
equipped to quell their monstrous transformations, or impose
order upon their undifferentiated expanses.
Lewis Carroll’s satirical poem, ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, en-
capsulates the absurdity of trying to rationalise the liquid realm
through the tale of ten intrepid adventurers1 that set out with
the aid of a blank map to find a creature, which will make them
invisible.

He had bought a large map representing the sea,

Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
‘They are merely conventional signs!
Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) that he’s bought us the best —
A perfect and absolute blank!2 (Carroll 1946, 6)

On entering the featureless terrain, each explorer conjures the

encounters their preconceptions of the space and during the
journey succumb to their individual neuroses. Just as the Baker
thinks he has found the Snark, he vanishes, since the creature is

1 The band of ten intrepid explorers in search of the Snark are: Bellman,
Boots, maker of Bonnets, Barrister, Broker, Billiard-maker, Banker, Butch-
er, Baker and Beaver.
2 From: Fit the second — the Bellman’s speech (Carroll 1946, 6, lines 5–16).

188
actually a Boojum — which is a highly dangerous version of the
species (Carroll 1946, 50).
The unfathomable complexity of liquid expanses opens up a
space for transgressions where the classical expectations of the
material realm are disrupted. In this protean space, encounters
between occupying bodies and their medium begin to develop
structural relationships with each other. This primes their recep-
tivity and capacity to respond to continually altering contexts,
so they undergo many transformations, which enrich the living
realm. Although the invisible forces shaping this dance are not
fully fathomable, they are of consequence, since in an uncertain
terrain it is possible to come across a Boojum when we are look-
ing for a Snark. Instead of becoming selectively blind to oceanic
ontologies with notions of ‘blandness’, we must instead become
familiar with the complexity of liquid bodies, as well as the per-
ils and delights of their enabling media (Armstrong et al. 2017).

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05.5
Ex Mare

The floating and the bottom-dwelling invertebrates of the

seas are memorials to the earliest strategies for achieving
[osmotic independence], but although they acquired a skin,
they did not acquire the ability to move under their own
power. In a sense, they were and have remained cells in
the vast organism of the ocean, which moves them at will.
(Logan 2012, 12)

The bodies of water that make up our deltas, rivers, and oceans
have been studied by seafarers since ancient times. Today, real-
time Global Positioning System (GPS) networks observe our liq-
uid world from space, offering generalisations about how these
immense expanses of fluids perform. Much less is known about
their particularities and peculiarities, which ‘learned to contain
the sea’ (Logan 2007, 11).
Contestably,3 life began in a liquid environment — freshwater
lake, river, or stream, rather than in an oxygen-starved ocean
(Byrne 2014). Darwin proposed that biogenesis occurred in the
uterine environment of a ‘warm little pond’ (Brouwers 2012),
while Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane give accounts of ‘pri-
mordial soups’ rich with organic materials (Shapiro 1987, 110).
Deep seafarers imagine the rich yet isolated marine ecologies
around the ‘black smokers’ of abyssal geothermal vents — natu-
rally occurring chemical ‘pressure cookers’ — as the original site
for life’s origins (Colín-García et al. 2016). Others propose Earth
was seeded with life by asteroids carrying alien molecules that
catalysed the initial reactions — a theory called panspermia (Ar-
renhius 1908).
Whatever the nature of the initiating event, and wherever
the location of its original context, the chemical principles of

3 While deep oceans are conventionally thought to hold life’s origins, recent
research suggests that active volcanic landscapes may have been the site for
biogenesis (van Kranendonk, Deamer and Djokic 2017).

190
its progression through biogenesis are outlined by two distinct
postulates.
The command-and-control style information first hypoth-
esis argues that biological codes arose before energy-producing
bodies. The most popular theory is RNA World (Neveu, Kim and
Benner 2013), which centres on the dual properties of a smart
molecule, ribose nucleic acid (RNA), which can catalyse reac-
tions and also replicate itself without the need of an existing cel-
lular apparatus. Early forms of life, therefore, evolved from con-
centrations of these molecules that enabled them to conserve
biological functions and catalyse chemical reactions, which gave
rise to the major domains of life.
The Virus World theory also centres on an information-first
event and is closely related to the RNA World theory, but differs
in the evolutionary sequence of events, where viral ancestors
evolved before cells (Arnold 2014). From an evolutionary per-
spective, viruses are far more diverse than cellular life, with many
more ways of replicating possible that viruses either predated or
coexisted alongside the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).
Supporting evidence for this theory is provided by the discovery
of giant viruses such as mimivirus, pithovirus, megavirus, and
pandoravirus that were characterised in 2013. Typically, viruses
are considered degenerate life forms and relative latecomers in
the story of life that lost the capacity to self-replicate, and so de-
veloped ways of hijacking more sophisticated cell systems. Giant
viruses challenge these assumptions since they are larger than
certain bacteria and possess huge genomes, which may contain
genes that are absent from the major domains of life that are suf-
ficiently complex to perform complex autonomous functions,
like protein synthesis and self-replication. Some viruses contain
the enzyme reverse transcriptase, which is not present in cells,
but allows the virus to write themselves into a cell’s genetic code
by translating viral RNA into DNA sequences. The ancestors of
giant viruses may have even provided the raw material for the
development of cellular life and catalysed its biodiversity (Moe-
lling 2013).

191
 The Metabolism First hypothesis suggests that self-sustaining
biochemical systems did not initially require centrally-coor-
dinated biological information to form its persistent, yet open
‘metabolisms’. While the sequence of biogenesis may have been
initiated by traumatic events such as collapsing bubbles (Kaison,
Furman and Zeiri 2017), repeated chemical exchanges within
stable liquid environments could also have performed this func-
tion. Some theories propose that rich mineral rock surfaces pro-
vided such an environment (Wächtershäuser 2000), which are
capable of catalysing fundamental reactions like carbon fixation
and forming polymers. Within these protective niches, stable
metabolisms could become more complex and organised, even-
tually becoming enclosed within selectively permeable mem-
branes and integrating with biological information-carrying
systems to give rise to primordial beings.
In practice, it is most likely that biogenesis was not a single
process, but a range of entangled chemical strategies that con-
tributed differently to loosely associating groups of agents, or
protolife. Becoming more organised over time, at some point
the first biological entity, or LUCA, evolved. This hypothetical
creature may not have been a singularity, but a collaborating
consortium of lively agents whose distributed tactics became
integrated, then subsequently inseparable, over the course of
evolution.
Ingenious material exchanges alone are not enough to pre-
cipitate vivogenesis — something unusual has to happen.

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 05.6
Liquid Reality

Life is a constant form of circulating matter. (Whewell 1840,

46)

Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle believed the body was gov-

erned by fluidic forces or ‘humours’ with melancholic, phleg-
matic, choleric, and sanguine qualities. The humoral theory
that governed these liquids proposed that imbalances in their
proportions could cause disorder and provoke erratic conduct,
so ‘treatments’ were choreographies of well-being that were ti-
trated to the patient’s condition. Some were subtle, such as mak-
ing alterations in dietary habits, exercise, and herbal medicines,
while other therapies were aggressive. Most illnesses were at-
tributed to excesses of the humours, which were purged from
the body using a range of techniques, including laxatives, emet-
ics, skin blistering, and bloodletting, which were thought to
draw out toxins.

The constituents of the body — blood, phlegm, yellow bile

and black bile — remain always the same according to both
convention and nature. Phlegm is quite unlike blood, blood
being quite unlike bile, bile being quite unlike phlegm. How
could they be like one another when their colours appear
not alive to the sight nor does their touch seem alike to the
hand? For they are not equally warm, not cold, nor dry,
not moist. If you give a man a medicine which withdraws
phlegm, he will vomit you phlegm; if you give him one
which withdraws bile, he will vomit you bile. Similarly,
black bile is purged away if you give a medicine which
withdraws black bile. And if you wound a man’s body so as
to cause a wound, blood will flow from him. And you will
find all these things happen on any day and on any night,
both in winter and in summer, so long as the man can
draw breath in and then breathe it out again, or until he is

193
 deprived of one of the elements congenital with him. (Ray
1934, 120)

Although zoological observations during the scientific revolu-

tion were underpinned by the bête machine, the development of
the field of physiology was described through liquid metaphors
(Nicholson 2018, 13). Sanctorio Sanctorius was the first modern
student of metabolism, who discovered the perspiratio insensi-
bilis as the loss of an invisible body substance by measuring the
quantities of his food, drink, urine, and faeces over a period of
thirty years. This ‘insensible perspiration’ became an indicator
of ongoing continuous exchanges and the premise for the phys-
icochemical basis of life (Bing 1971).

… [a unicellular organism] is a perfect laboratory in itself,

and it will act and react upon the water and the matters
contained therein, converting them into new compounds
resembling its own substance, and at the same time giving
up portions of its own substance which have become effete.
(Huxley 1897, 42)

Luigi Galvani’s (bio)electricity, or ‘animal electric fluid’, was

also considered responsible for the vitalisation of tissues, until
Alessandro Volta (re)interpreted these flows and demonstrated
them within the context of (dry)electronic circuits, which repo-
sitioned this ‘vital’ force within the context of the bête machine.

… I eagerly inquired of my father the nature and origin of

thunder and lightning. He replied, ‘Electricity;’ describing
at the same time the various effects of that power. He
constructed a small electrical machine, and exhibited a
few experiments, he made also a kite, with a wire and
string, which drew down that fluid from the clouds. (Shelley
2014, 57)

At the start of the twentieth century researchers delved more

specifically into the particulars of life and fluids where increas-

194
ingly, the study of the bodily flows that made up a creature’s
physiology were discussed in terms of metabolism. Alfred
North Whitehead developed a ‘philosophy of organism’, while
Edward Stuart Russell likened living processes to the persistent
ripples that a stone makes in a stream (Russell 1924, 6) and Ed-
mund Sinnott preferred to draw analogies between the living
realm and the fluid form of waterfalls (Sinnott 1955, 117). Lud-
wig von Bertalanffy applied liquids as a conceptual framework
for the manifestation of natural systems (von Bertalanffy 1968,
27), where biological structures arose from the flow of matter
transformed by living processes. Lifelike structures within com-
plex chemical phenomena could also be identified and used as
experimental models to test these concepts, as in the Rayleigh–
Bénard convection cell, an analogue system for exploring the
principles of fluid cells. Life as a dynamic process was particu-
larly embraced by the field of biochemistry (Gilbert 1982) being
more broadly adopted into scientific investigation by Conrad
Hal Waddington (1957, 2) and Cark Woese (2004).
Although the generalities of flow, change, and environmen-
tal responsiveness are encapsulated within a fluid metaphor of
life, exactly how these properties are expressed through living
systems remains elusive, since the dynamics and behaviour of
liquids is extremely complex. The most powerful criticism of the
‘waterfall’ analogy for life was that it was incomplete, particu-
larly with respect to its inability to produce ‘other whirlpools
like itself ’ (Thomson 1925, 123). Implicit in this difficulty was the
question of ‘modification by descent’ (see section 04.2), where
parents pass traits on to their offspring, which was at the heart
of inheritance discourses during the nineteenth century. This
concept was particularly resistant to liquid metaphors, as blend-
ing fluids leads to homogeneity, not diversity. Unlike the inert
materials used to build machines, fluid dynamics must be con-
sidered under a range of different states, and while some liquids
behave according to the classical laws of physics, others are non-
linear and capable of changing phase, or state (gas, liquid, solid).
Although the contemporary field of fluid dynamics is highly
sophisticated, the range of possibilities is so vast and operate

195
at such a range of scales — from microfluidics to oceans — that
many questions about the capabilities of liquids remain partly,
or completely unresolved.
In the early twentieth century, the liquid metaphor was adopt-
ed into the field of embryology by Jacques Loeb, who shifted the
challenge of fertilisation from the realm of (protean) morphol-
ogy to that of physical chemistry. This allowed descriptive and
often speculative work, to be empirically evaluated (Allen 2018,
6). While evo-devo, the field of evolutionary developmental bi-
ology where organisms change over time, is compatible with no-
tions of fluidity, the strategies for testing its liquid principles are
elusive, even with an understanding of chemistry. At the time
when evo-devo arose in the 1880s from the field of developmen-
tal biology, heredity was regarded ‘as identical to the problem of
development’ (Morgan 1910), but this soon changed into a more
atomistic narrative over the course of the twentieth century.

… biology … evolved two traditional approaches to

characterise the physical basis of life. In each, the ‘natural
order of rank’ is the reverse of the other. The first tradition
[molecular biology/genetics] emphasises the phenomena
of growth and replication as the major vital characteristics.
Organisms are seen to increase in size and numbers and are
thus akin to crystals. The second perspective [biochemistry/
embryology] focuses on metabolism as life’s prime requisite,
whereby an organism retains its form and individuality
despite the constant changing of its component parts. In
this respect, living beings resemble waves of whirlpools.
These alternative crystalline and fluid models of organisms
have interacted with each other for the past hundred years.
(Gilbert 1982, 152)

During the mid-twentieth century, liquid and crystal substrates

were forcibly separated as equal organising life-forces through
ideas underpinning the developing field of genetics. By posi-
tioning genetics as the primary agent of heritability, Wilhelm
Johannsen cleaved the study of (entangled) phenotype from

196
(distilled) genotype, privileging the study of genetics over em-
bryology (Sapp 1983). While many biologists tried to reconcile
the two fields, this proved theoretically and practically incom-
patible, as each discipline was now only able to give a partial
account of the other (Waddington 1940, 3). The ensuing dichot-
omy between genetics and embryology was further augmented
by ongoing debates in biochemistry and molecular biology,
where more mechanistic perspectives ousted fluidic accounts,
resulting in the Modern Synthesis (Rose and Oakley 2007; Lau-
bichler and Maienschein 2007; Reid 2007). During the 1940s
and 1950s the fields of genetics and molecular biology took a
decidedly mechanistic turn. Max Delbrück, one of the found-
ers of molecular biology, who studied gene transmission as a
precise measurement of biological effects, felt that biochemists
were misrepresenting the cell as ‘a sack full of enzymes acting
on substrates, converting them through various intermediate
stages either into cell substance of waste products’ (Gilbert 1982,
159–60). In his view, they had ‘stalled around a semi-descrip-
tive manner without noticeably progressing towards a radical
physical explanation’ (Gilbert 1982, 151). With a new emphasis
on structured information, crystals — which had been identi-
fied as the most lifelike substances in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries — were now considered ‘the nearest analogue
to the formation of cells’ (Gilbert 1982, 154). Inspired by Del-
brück, who regarded the gene as a crystal, Schröedinger’s 1944
essay What Is Life? exerted a powerful influence in validating
the study of crystallinity as a state that could unify all matter,
where ‘the most essential part of a living cell — the chromosome
fibre — may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal’ (Gilbert 1982,
159). John Desmond Bernal, who pioneered the use of X-ray
crystallography in molecular biology, also viewed crystals as
components of cells and ‘proof ’ of life (Gilbert 1982, 158), which
consolidated the Modern Synthesis as the dominant worldview
of life by the late twentieth century.

… by 1940 the lines were being drawn. Biochemistry,

concerned with intermediary metabolism and the energy

197
 that drives it, worked well within the tradition of flux
and thermodynamics. However, the portion of the life
sciences concerned with the transmission and expression of
inherited characteristics rejected this view for the tradition
of crystalline morphogenesis. Not only did the gene just not
fit into the whirlpool model, but it looked as if functional
genes (i.e. viruses) could even be crystallized. Whereas
the principal characteristic of life for the biochemist
was metabolism, life’s principal characteristic for the
molecular biologists was replication. Furthermore, the
primary unit of life for the biochemist was the result cell
(metabolically active but not replicating), whereas the unit
of life for the molecular biology was the virus — crystalline,
nonmetabolising, and capable of enormous feats of
replication. (Gilbert 1982, 159)

In 1937, Haldane predicted that classical biochemistry would

be superseded by a new branch of biochemistry arising from
the realm of genetics. During the second half of the twentieth
century, liquid and mechanistic approaches were reconciled
through the (re)approximation of molecular biology/genetics
with biochemistry/embryology to conceive of networks of con-
trol (master) switches, capable of triggering developmental cas-
cades. This more detailed understanding of the building blocks
of life has been accomplished by new tools and techniques that
are able map the appearance of creatures alongside their genetic
material. New light is now being shed on one of the most sur-
prising findings over the last 30 years in genetics — that there is
remarkably little difference between the genes that are common
to all known life forms. Although mice and humans are pheno-
typically very different, they share almost the same set of genes
(Gunter and Dhand 2002), which were also present in ancient
creatures. Alternative accounts of how such small numbers of
critical genes can be differentially expressed over a broad range
of contexts are emerging as a result of these new approaches.
For example, cellular noise, which is non-linear and leads to
symmetry breaking, seems to be extremely important in very

198
early embryo development and causes non-deterministic down-
stream effects, which result in substantial differences between
cells (Mohammed et al. 2017). The critical role of phenotypic
‘architecture’ is also being revealed in developmental process-
es, which includes factors such as epigenetic interactions, the
chemicophysical properties of developing cells and the influ-
ences of environmental parameters (Müller 2007).
While major challenges remain for evo-devo,4 its focus on pe-
culiar, particular, non-deterministic and highly localised events
provides a counterpoint to genetic theories, which deal with the
averaging of large numbers of molecules that are observed in
populations of organisms. Whether it is possible to reconcile
these perspectives within a ‘unifying biological theory’ remains
to be seen. Such a framework may be provided by new discours-
es that position metabolic networks as the dominant systems in
regulating cell function. Víctor de Lorenzo likens the interplay
of DNA and metabolism to that of politics and economy, where
both systems regulate their own autonomous agendas, while in-
fluencing each other. Positioning metabolism as ‘the economy
of living systems’, he observes that this ultimately determines
the viability of any political moves, as it frames and eventually
resolves whether any given genetic program will operate, or not
(de Lorenzo 2015).

… both the metabolites and the biochemical fluxes behind

any biological phenomenon are encrypted in the DNA
sequence. Metabolism constrains and even changes the
information flow when the DNA-encoded instructions
conflict with the homeostasis of the biochemical network.
Inspection of adaptive virulence programs and emergence
of xenobiotic-biodegradation pathways in environmental
bacteria suggest that their main evolutionary drive is
the expansion of their metabolic networks towards new

4 Challenges mainly relate to how evo-devo accounts for structural complex-

ity, which is challenging to establish using empirical modes of testing, and
its relationship to the population dynamics of classical evolutionary theory.

199
 chemical landscapes rather than perpetuation and spreading
of their DNA sequences. (de Lorenzo 2014, 226)

Since chemical landscapes radically increase the combinato-

rial potential of cell operations, Frederick Coolidge suggests a
primordial platform for vivogenesis that approximates the RNA
World hypothesis with metabolism’s first concepts. Proposing
that early nuclear building blocks were made up of a larger range
of primordial nucleotide chemical precursors than observed in
RNA today,5 they could explore and exploit emerging chemical
landscapes to evolve the relationship between ‘information stor-
age’ systems and active metabolisms, which were also likely sub-
jects for Darwinian natural selection (Coolidge 2017).
Liquid life’s challenge is not whether the fluidity of bodies is
real but how its foundational ideas become demonstrable and
testable, since few technological systems can visualise, model,
and realise its protean character. In other words, we must learn
how to build and experiment with liquids.

5 The nucleotides of RNA are: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil.

200
 05.7
Origins of Dissipative Propagation

Diderot was arguing against the mathematical mechanist

conception of matter while today mathematical, physical
and chemical physical references help to destabilise the
blind watchmaker’s unilateral responsibility: chaotic
systems, edge of chaos systems, dissipative structures,
neural networks, all those objects have opened up new
possibilities, new problems and new bridges. (Stengers
2000, 97)

While molecular interpretations of the bête machine attribute

the character-specific properties of matter to crystalline states,
liquids also confer unique order on systems. In liquid phases,
molecules can freely associate and form transitional states of
potentiality, as well as spatially orienting themselves in relation-
ship to a site.
The primary operative agents of liquid life are not bounded
cells instructed by central biological programs but are also de-
rived from the broader spectrum of propagative agents at far-
from-equilibrium states such as, dissipative structures (see sec-
tions 08.9). While these hubs of matter/energy are recognisable
as singular entities, they can also link together to form massively
distributed nuclei of activity across the surface of the planet,
which not only form weather fronts but also form types of ‘met-
abolic weather’ (see sections 01.14 and 05.23). Such structures
can be seen grinding away on the surface of Jupiter, which is
pockmarked with a number of stable and violent storms. The
most notorious of these is the Great Red Spot, which is twice as
wide as the Earth and is potentially more than 150 years old. A
lesser-known system is the String of Pearls, a caravan of eight
storms rotating anti-clockwise on the southern hemisphere of
the gas giant (Loria and Mosher 2016). Terrifyingly, the storms
(Irma, Jose, Katia) that razed the Caribbean and Florida in Sep-
tember 2017 and also in 2014 (Charley, Ivan, Jeanne, Francis)
bore remarkable similarity to this formation, raising the ques-

201
tion of whether an impending feature of climate change will
be the onset of stable, effectively permanent storms.6 Such self-
organising and persistent systems also constitute the low-level
infrastructures of organisms. Becoming increasingly organised
with time, they adapt, alter their surroundings, evolve, and con-
tribute collectively to the active forces of nature.
Existing at many different scales, dissipative structures are
more than background support for events. They are dynamic
structuring systems whose interfaces provide sites for symme-
try breaking and a range of specific spatial and material events.
In fact, stability rather than change is a conundrum for liquid
life, where permanence is an illusion orchestrated through
highly persistent but mutable structures in constant motion.
These paradoxical objects, which are simultaneously stable and
unstable, confer integrity to dynamic bodies — not through sta-
bility, but through their repetitions and iterations of networked
processes. Here, interiority and exteriority permeate each other
through a constant choreography, which takes place between
lively agents that shape developmental pathways. This tightly
coupled system, which is a hallmark of dissipative structures,
provides a highly robust, discursive platform for the synthesis
of hyperlocal solutions, although it is also vulnerable to the po-
tentially devastating effects of turbulence. Such configurations,
however, possess many more degrees of freedom than are pos-
sible within the linear relationships and hierarchical ordering
systems that typify classical machines, and can therefore mount
creative resistance to external perturbations.
Liquid bodies persist when differential gradients are main-
tained across local micro-niches and environmental locales.
Early life forms were likely leakier and more plastic than mod-
ern biological cells. Cradling dissipative bodies within them,
molecular ‘skins’ provided quiet spaces for the accumulation of
boundary-forming substances such as fatty molecules and set
the scene for open niche construction. This enabled primitive

6 This observation was made by Nathan Morrison, CTO of Sustainable Now

Technologies, on Facebook on 7 September 2017.

202
bodies to respond to, and organise around, local metabolic op-
portunities. Before biogenesis, the first liquid bodies may have
stabilised upon oily films, or within porous networks in hy-
drothermal vents (Priye et al. 2016). Pinched off by lipid films,
chemical environments became ‘internalised’ and established
matter/energy gradients. Mediated across leaky interfaces, the
accumulation and diffusion of local molecular species enabled
the first metabolisms to stabilise. With many iterations of ex-
changes, different kinds of gradients were established, setting
the foundation for primitive bioenergetics, where important
metabolic pathways that couple bioenergy and biomass were
highly conserved, like pathways leading to acetyl CoA forma-
tion (Nitschke and Russell 2013).
Even without formal borders, the compartments of the earli-
est life forms were sufficiently deformable, and capable of inter-
nalising other structured spaces through endosymbiosis. This
takes place when one body swallows another without wholly
assimilating, or digesting, its contents. Biological cell organelles
today such as the nucleus and the mitochondrion, give testimo-
ny to such remarkable mergers that took place early in eukary-
otic life — perhaps when an archaeon engulfed a bacterium and
the subsequent, symbiotic relationship became irreversibly and
successfully intertwined. Formal cellular environments would
have only been possible when membranes became sophisticated
gatekeepers of internal metabolic conditions and were capable
of regulating them in ways that enabled primordial cells to adapt
to environmental changes.
In keeping with its far-from-equilibrium nature, liquid life’s
influence on its surroundings extends beyond the limits of its
physical boundaries. Innately agentised, its behaviours, metabo-
lism, ‘liquid consciousness’ and soul substance — the winds that
surround the cellular eye of the storm — produce tangible chang-
es that can be encountered through their effects on other bod-
ies like heat, vibration, and presence.7 Embracing all agentised

7 In this instance, ‘presence’ refers to the existence of being that, by virtue

of its intangible (far-from-equilibrium state) emissions, generates effects

203
material epiphenomena (crystals, cells, bodies, ecosystems), it
is expressed across geological and evolutionary scales, its ‘vital’
agency flowing through its constituent bodies: lively materials,
metabolic networks, ecologies, and nurturing planetary systems,
and constitutes an (effectively) immortal hyperbody.

within the dimensions of spacetime, which are perceivable by other beings.

204
 05.8
Transitions

The inability of liquid life to stay still is not an error, which as-
sumes an end goal, but an impeccably tuned system with count-
less tolerances and protean states.
Liquid life persists through its fundamental disobedience,
in slingshots of thermodynamic resistance, where lively matter
twists in corkscrewing iterations of molecular ingenuity away
from the direct and efficient path towards thermodynamic equi-
librium.
So far, liquid life has successfully persisted during the ever-
changing and challenging contexts of the terrestrial realm, de-
spite five major mass extinctions and many more annihilations
during the Hadean epoch, when the Earth hissed and boiled.
This capacity to resist thermodynamic decay is embedded in
the unfathomably strange and massless fundamental particles
that constitute liquid life’s myriad bodies whose unfathomably
peculiar fields enfold us within the strangest substance in the
universe.

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05.9
Mind as Substance

The hard problem of matter calls for non-structural

properties, and consciousness is the one phenomenon
we know that might meet this need. Consciousness is full
of qualitative properties, from the redness of red and the
discomfort of hunger to the phenomenology of thought.
Such experiences, or ‘qualia,’ may have internal structure,
but there is more to them than structure. We know
something about what conscious experiences are like in and
of themselves, not just how they function and relate to other
properties. (Mørch 2017)

While Descartes justified human rationality through the soul,

other views of consciousness couple it to matter (Dyson 1979;
Armstrong 1993) and life (Shanta 2015). In Western cultures,
various concepts — higher order theories, reflexive theories,
representationalist theories, narrative interpretative theories,
cognitive theories, information integration theory, neural
theories, quantum theories, non-physical theories (van Gulick
2014) — give accounts of how awareness and capacity for self-
observation are produced. Neither fully produced within the
self, nor purely channelled into a body from elsewhere, David
Chalmers describes consciousness as a ‘hard problem’ that in-
evitably exceeds our ability to provide a complete account of its
effects. ‘Explaining’ the nature of consciousness is particularly
challenging, as like the soul, it is not governed by the (scientific)
laws of the bête machine. It is therefore impossible to provide a
rational account through the laws of classical physics.

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder.

But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a
wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this great
wealth has made its home in this poverty. (Meyer and
Bloom 1992, 37)

206
Drawing on alternative physical laws, Roger Penrose and Stuart
Hameroff invoke the power of the quantum realm within nerve
cell microtubules to offer ‘quantum consciousness’ as an alter-
native organisational model capable of offering a non-reductive
explanation of consciousness, (Hameroff and Penrose 2014;
Paulson 2017). In this book ‘liquid consciousness’ (see section
01.13) is presented as a way of discussing the receptive creativity
and ‘wilful’ behaviour expressed by matter at far-from-equilibri-
um states, which is dynamically coupled with its structure.
Dissipative systems offer a significant advantage in provid-
ing an investigative platform for understanding notions of
‘consciousness’ from first principles in non-humans, as unlike
quantum phenomena and ‘living’ biological brains, they can be
directly observed and possess an apparent degree of ‘subjectiv-
ity’, which is governed by their extreme sensitivity to context.
Each dissipative structure is an organising centre of informa-
tion-gathering and action-making, like extremely primitive cells
that can form coupled chains of activity (see chapter 09). This
simple visualisation system provides a way of observing how a
material structure can produce the phenomenological effects of
a directly coupled sensor-effector system, in a testable, observ-
able manner. Actuated by flow across interfaces, dissipative sys-
tems simultaneously alter themselves and their surroundings,
by generating inhibitors (waste products), facilitators (catalysts)
and physical obstacles (crystal skins). The decision-making ca-
pacities of these dynamic systems are located at the interface
between oil and water, where they are amplified to produce
observable, macroscale effects, through which they appear to
make ‘sense’ of the world. As chemical activity is converted into
kinetic energy, the droplet bodies are propelled forwards and
move freely, encountering other active fields that maintain their
liveliness. Contextualised and infiltrated by their surround-
ings, the material interfaces between active fields of chemical
exchange, act as sensors, translators, and effectors of an (inner)
materiality and an (outer) environment that may encode par-
ticular ideas, languages, images, and modes of expression. These
can be read as a mode of ‘analogue pattern computing’, whose

207
emerging patterns correspond with primitive (material) forms
of ‘decision making’ and constitute the emergence of a ‘dissipa-
tive mind’ (Medlock 2017).

… long before we were conscious, thinking beings, our

cells were reading data from the environment and working
together to mould us into robust, self-sustaining agents.
What we take as intelligence, then, is not simply about
using symbols to represent the world as it objectively is.
Rather, we only have the world as it is revealed to us, which
is rooted in our evolved, embodied needs as an organism.
Nature ‘has built the apparatus of rationality not just on top
of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it
and with it’, … we think with our whole body, not just with
the brain. (Medlock 2017)

The trails of transformation that emanate from these agentised

bodies are expressions of ‘metabolic weather’ (see sections 01.14
and 05.23). Like thought processes, they generate unfathomably
complex phenomena, which resist abstraction and simple causal
explanations, but also leave behind physical residues that alter
and complexify their surroundings. These spatially and tempo-
rally distributed substances may be read as a kind of ‘short-term
physical memory’ that is not encoded within the body but is
‘remembered’, or understood, through ongoing encounters with
its local metabolites. If the actions are repeated, then ‘long-
term memory traces’ are consolidated as persistent structures,
which constrain free movement within the active (cognitive)
field/space. If these are not continually reinforced, they may
be physically eroded by physical processes such as diffusion, or
actively metabolised by other agents, which constitutes a kind
of material ‘forgetting’. Beyond the prebiotic realm, colonies of
single-celled organisms also chemically coordinate their behav-
iours to establish conditions for cohabitation like biofilms, slime
moulds, and siphonophores (see section 07.4). Carrying the
seeds of sensibility across many scales, these ‘dissipative minds’
are coupled with a whole range of embodiments (and evolving

208
memories) through a range of sensations, feelings, behaviours,
and memories. The overall ongoing expression of these entan-
glements exemplifies ‘liquid consciousness’, which is always ap-
propriate for the various forms of embodiment through which
it is expressed, and neither aspires to be biological, nor ‘human’.

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05.10
In-between

Where is she? Not there — not in heaven — not

perished — where? Oh! You said you cared nothing for my
sufferings! And I pray one prayer — I repeat it till my tongue
stiffens — Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long
as I am living; you said I killed you — haunt me, then! The
murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that
ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take
any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this
abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! It is unutterable! I
cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!
(Bronte 2009, 118)

When a body is intrinsically entangled with its ‘soul substance’

and leaves residues of its presence within a space, as in the case
of dissipative structures, encounters with transitional pres-
ences and beings, that are neither fully material, nor agentised,
become possible.
Throughout the ages, these angels, demons, spirits, and
ghosts, are often encountered during heightened states and in
places that are emotionally ‘charged’. A contemporary limbo is
encapsulated by the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, which shares
Hamlet’s dilemma of being (to exist, or not), where such inde-
terminate beings are gateways between one state of existence
and another. These are not purely imaginary situations but are
based on actual experiences and have even been designed for
since antiquity through tombs, where bodies were either pre-
served through mummification, or thoroughly rotted down, to
ease their passage of their ‘soul’ into the afterworld.

When you think you’ve died, you haven’t actually died.

Death is a two-stage process, and where you woke up after
your last breath is something of a Purgatory: you don’t feel
dead, you don’t look dead, and in fact you are not dead. Yet.
(Eagleman 2010, 43)

210
From the moment that someone’s heart stops beating, life’s flu-
ids no longer sustain the tissues and territory by territory the
body dies. Advances in modern medicine however, can artifi-
cially induce physiological holding-states, where vital organs
such as the lungs and heart remain perfused and so, keep the
brain ‘alive’. These modes of life-suspension redefine the notion
of ‘death’ and those that have been resuscitated during medi-
cal procedures report memories of these transitions, which vary
from delightful to horrifying.

There were those who reported feeling afraid or suffering

persecution, for example. ‘I had to get through a ceremony
… and the ceremony was to get burned,’ one patient
recalled. ‘There were four men with me, and whichever
lied would die … I saw men in coffins being buried
upright.’ Another remembered being ‘dragged through
deep water’, and still another was ‘told I was going to die
and the quickest way was to say the last short word I could
remember’. (Nuwer 2015)

While such accounts may be little more than attempts to ra-

tionalise aberrant brain activity, studies of cardiac arrest sur-
vivors at New York University’s Langone School of Medicine
revealed that many could recall conversations at the scene of
their death, some even hearing they had been pronounced
dead (Parker 2017).

They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working;

they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of
visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not
be known to them … (Parker 2017)

Empirical evidence also suggests that the body continues to

‘live’, even after certain technical criteria for death have been
met. Animal experiments indicate that gene activity occurs for
up to two days after death, which may be a natural response to
tissue damage, and raises important genetic questions about the

211
definition of death (Williams 2016). Whether illusory or real,
these intermediary expressions of ‘life’ are the cultural domin-
ion of angels, where the mythological and material worlds min-
gle and establish the limits of what it means to be ‘alive’, ‘dead’
and acknowledge the existence of the liminal states in-between.

In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something

analogous to your Earth life, and the thought is blissful: a
life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces,
where moments do not endure, where one experiences
the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child
hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand. (Eagleman
2010, 43)

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 05.11
Linking Life and Death

Life did not crawl out of the sea onto the land; it oozed
from the sea into the land, the organic acids of its excretions
joining with the carbonic acid of the rainfall to create the
first soft mantle of soil on the Earth. Maybe two billion
years ago, the cyanobacteria began to use the sunlight to
make sugars, excreting oxygen. They were green or brown,
and their scum spread into lagoons, up rivers. The oxygen
reacted with iron and for the first time there were orange,
yellow, and brown colours in the earth. (Logan 2012, 12)

Soil is the living skin of the planet. There is not just one kind
of soil, but many different types, which form giant bodies that
are permeated with liquid life and are teeming with living sys-
tems and creatures. They reach down deep into the physics and
chemistry of Earth’s planetary system, occupying the interface
between air, water, ground, biology, the land, and chemistry.

Soil is not unalive. It is a mixture of broken rock, pollen,

fungal filaments, ciliate cysts, bacterial spores, nematodes
and other microscopic animals and their parts. ‘Nature,’
Aristotle observed, ‘proceeds little by little from things
lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to
determine the exact line of demarcation.’ Independence
is a political, not a scientific, term. (Margulis, and Sagan
1995, 19–20)

We walk and build upon these extraordinary hypercomplex,

living fabrics as if they were inconsequential but within their
substance, they forge the very webs of metabolic exchange upon
which all life ultimately depends. A teaspoon of fertile earth
houses more kinds of microbes than there are people on the
planet and bacteria also colonise our bodies as symbiotic com-
munities. Since the 1990s, this ‘microbiome’ is now recognised

213
as a distributed ‘organ’, which carries out a range of functions
(Lederberg and McCray 2001).

Life is bacterial and those organisms that are not bacteria

have evolved from organisms that were. … Gene exchanges
were indispensable to those that would rid themselves
of environmental toxins. … Replicating gene-carrying
plasmids owned by the biosphere at large, when borrowed
and returned by bacterial metabolic geniuses, alleviated
most local environmental dangers, provided said plasmids
could temporarily be incorporated into the cells of the
threatened bacteria. The tiny bodies of the planetary patina
spread to every reach, all microbes reproducing too rapidly
for all offspring to survive in any finite universe. Undercover
and unwitnessed, life back then was the prodigious progeny
of bacteria. It still is. (Margulis and Sagan 1995, 111)

While soils are bringers of life, they are also intimately and crea-
tively involved in the process of death. When a creature dies,
its microbiome is no longer constrained by the host’s immune
system and begins to consume the corpse, marking its transfor-
mation into the thanatobiome.

The microbiome goes on changing in response until death.

Then the microbes will do their best to carry on elsewhere.
First, though, they will consume the nutrients that leak
from our dying cells. (Turney 2015, 132)

Working with the soil bacteria and a community of decompos-

ers, the thanatobiome changes again to mingle with soil eco-
systems to become the necrobiome. Returning organic matter
and minerals into the life-bearing systems of soils, their webs of
exchange are orchestrated by even more diverse communities of
organisms than takes place within living bodies that are policed
by their immune systems.

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 … the dead trunk is as indispensable for the cycle of life
in the forest as the live tree. For centuries, the tress sucked
nutrients from the ground and stored them in its wood and
bark. And now it is a precious resource for its children. But
they don’t have direct access to the delicacies contained in
their dead parents. To access them, the youngsters need the
help of other organisms. As soon as the snapped trunk hits
the ground, the tree and its root system becomes the site
of a culinary relay race for thousands of species of fungi
and insects. Each is specialised for a particular stage of the
decomposition process and for a particular part of the tree.
And this is why these species can never pose a danger to
a living tree — it would be much too fresh for them. Soft,
woody fibres and moist, mouldy calls — these are the things
they find delicious. (Wohlleben 2016, 133)

Soil’s complex, evolving metabolic webs ensure that a fountain

of energy and matter is constantly circulated back into its sub-
stance and (re)emitted through fertile terrains that not only
nurture plants and animals but when they die, reintegrate them
back into the living realm.

The particle of gold falls to the bottom and rests — the

particle of dead protein decomposes and disappears — it
also rests: but the living protein mass neither tends to
exhaustion of its forces not to any permanency of form,
but it is essentially distinguished as a disturber of
equilibrium so far as force is concerned — as undergoing
continual metamorphosis and change, in point of form.
(Huxley 1897, 43)

From active processes of this kind, where creatures engulf, par-

tially digest, or fully digest others, the linking of life and death
has maintained continuity since biogenesis. As strategies for
persistence evolve, their limits and constraints have changed
over the course of 3.5 billion years, but the active upcycling

215
(Braungart and McDonough 2002) of organic matter remains
fundamental to life’s ongoingness and evolution on this planet.

I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and

microorganisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith,
George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and
Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition,
which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague
Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion
years out of date. Eldredge and Gould and their many
colleagues tend to codify an incredible ignorance of where
the real action is in evolution, as they limit the domain of
interest to animals — including, of course, people. All very
interesting, but animals are very tardy on the evolutionary
scene, and they give us little real insight into the major
sources of evolution’s creativity … I refer in part to the fact
that they miss four out of the five kingdoms of life. Animals
are only one of these kingdoms. They miss bacteria,
protoctista, fungi, and plants … Of what are they ignorant?
Chemistry, primarily, because the language of evolutionary
biology is the language of chemistry, and most of them
ignore chemistry. (Brockman 2011)

While vertebrates are much more recent in evolutionary history

than bacteria, they are used as the dominant ‘model’ in account-
ing for the lively potential of matter. In expanding our view of
the capabilities of the living realm, much more robust, diverse,
and unconventional models of ‘life’ are needed.

216
 05.12
Hydrous Bodies

The sea was the proto-soil, where earth, air, water, and
the solar fire met for the first time. It was an inverse soil,
you might say, with the liquid element providing the
matrix for the mineral salts and for dissolved gasses, a role
that the mineral elements would later come to play. But
from a certain point of view, all Earth’s later history is a
consequence of that first mixing. (Logan 2007, 11)

Our bodies are 65% water by weight, which entangles us with

the nature of other liquid bodies and their vastness. According
to Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the plane of ‘immanence’
(or birth)  is a fluid substratum, or ‘body without organs’ (BwO)
that is ‘permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all
directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad
or transitory particles’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 45). Such
BwOs are ‘organism[s] without parts which operate[s] entirely
by insufflation, respiration, evaporation, and fluid transmission’
(Deleuze 2015, 101). Such monstrous, exquisite, hyperobjects
provoke awe and consternation — like encountering the night
sky for the first time. Oscillating between the quantum and cos-
mic realms, these quasi-beings that are both inside and beyond
us, question the classical view of reality and identity, where our
concepts of finitude, the nature of objects, their relationship
with time, our baselines of stability, locality, identity, scale, or
human sanction, need to be restated.

It is wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought … I is

an other. (Rimbaud 2004b, 288)

Hydrous bodies do not possess fragile egos. They are not alien-
ated by the gargantuan, uncategorisable, or monstrous aspects

8 In a letter to Georges Izambard, Charleville, May 1871.

217
of reality, and strike robust alliances with unknowns that enrich
their portfolio of diversionary tactics in eluding entropy’s call.

218
 05.13
Origins of Liquid Life

Liquid bodies were the first protolife that were sustained by it-
erative events within a flow of resources — light, reducing gases,
crumbs of organic matter and mineral matrices, which set the
stage for the theatre of terrestrial life. This section tells a story
that conjures a pre-biological era at the origins of liquid life.
It begins on the violent surface of our molten planet — a pri-
mordial landscape of liquid fire, choking gases, and searing ra-
diation — where there is no competition for resources between
bodies. Here, excitable fields of matter at far-from-equilibrium
states start to overlap and produce undulating interfaces, where
the weirding of Earth’s matter begins.
Wraiths of matter/energy fuelled by volcanic heat and cosmic
radiation pass through each other. Sowing seeds of dissipative evo-
lution they evade the planetary system’s march towards thermody-
namic stability, or death. Imbibing the sunlight, greasy bodies pool
on rocky surfaces, the cannibalise their surroundings and feed off
each other’s turbulences.
These boiling seas are teeming with protolife.
Boundaries break and split, as tiny dissipative structures form
dominant loci of activity. Little more than fluctuations with un-
regulated metabolisms, they reach into the tempestuous fields that
roam these landscapes, exchanging structure for heat. Guided by
passions and mischief, rebellious protolife searches for spandrels
that promise opportunities for alternative modes of flourishing.
Some bodies collapse and die, while those that resist the tempta-
tion of entropy, meander through varied pathways.
As proto-organism and mineral become inseparable, they form
living rocks, which scar the world with their residues and inhibi-
tors. Spewing monster after monster into the hostile surroundings,
as kith, not offspring, lively surfaces spawn a host of liquid bodies.
None are identical to their precursors, nor are they self-similar.
Compulsively producing more oddities, each stranger than the
last, the vortices of these vagrant droplets function like gizzards,

219
grinding matter into new configurations and assimilating their
surroundings into their substance during this process.
Becoming more ordered with time, they begin to take on dis-
tinctive forms.
Over aeons, colonies of interacting bodies cooperate as aggrega-
tions and assemblages, while surreptitiously trying to digest them.
There are no ‘pure’ organisms here, just lively collectives of mate-
rial persistence that leak around their edges. Avoiding the direct
pathway towards efficient chemical collapse, they dawdle through
time in search of abundance, creativity, and subjective encounters,
leaving footsteps of chemical transformation and rich soils in their
wake. With the shock of reaching relative equilibrium, each gen-
eration of liquid bodies finds temporary rest and mingles with the
accreting soils, when maybe tomorrow, or millions of years from
now, their restless chemistry (re)enters the living realm.

220
 05.14
(Al)chemistry of Water

Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes

acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes
thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or
pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous.
It suffers change into as many natures as are the different
places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes
with the colour of its subject, so it alters with the nature of
the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous,
salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow,
green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a
conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is
cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds
up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or
burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life
or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and
at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times
is without savor, sometimes submerging the valleys with
great floods. In time and with water, everything changes.
(Deodhar 2009, 383)

Debates about the natural world and man’s ability to improve

upon it during the Enlightenment led to experimental thinking,
new apparatuses, specialised scientific practices and technolo-
gies capable of characterising the elements. Building upon the
physical distillations and purifications that were established by
alchemical practices, like Paracelsus and his mineral-based liq-
uid medicines, modern science identified the molecular nature
of substances through their atomic composition and structure,
which enabled certain predictions to be made through their
position on the periodic table of elements. With the advent of
advanced imaging techniques such as atomic force microscopy,
aided by artificial intelligence and automation (Extance 2018),

221
we are able to tell a whole lot more about the structure and char-
acter of molecules.
Consisting of two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen
atom (H₂O), the hydrogen side of the water molecule holds a
slight positive charge and the oxygen side is negatively charged.
Owing to this uneven distribution of electron density, water ex-
hibits polarity and therefore acts as a powerful ‘universal’ solvent,
being one of the most reactive and corrosive substances known.
It also absorbs large amounts of heat energy before it warms up
and cools down again since it has a high specific heat capacity,
and large volumes of water can maintain a stable temperature,
even when environmental temperatures are fluctuating wildly.
In transitioning from liquid to solid phase, it occupies about
9% more volume and therefore floats. Other unique physical
properties arise from the strong cohesion between water mol-
ecules, which exceed its affinity with the air, resulting in high
surface tension. It also participates in finely tuned biochemical
processes through its highly structured hydrogen-bonded net-
work, which enables it to form organisational templates, assist
molecular recognition, enable replication, and orchestrate pro-
tein folding. Integrated with the fundamental processes of life,
it comprises 65% of our bodies by weight, with tissues such as
the brain and the lung being nearly 80% water, and carries a
constant flow of resources through our cells.
Despite our incredibly ability to observe and analyse it, not
all aspects of water molecules are fully understood, and digi-
tal simulations are helping us better understand its unique and
constantly surprising character. For example, classical theories
predict that ‘supercooled’ water molecules should be frozen,
but they continue moving in a liquid state below 0°C. Simula-
tions suggest the reason is that the spatial distribution of water
molecules in ice is uneven and pockets of water with differing
characteristics exist and accounts for the way that ice can retain
some of its liquid properties while in solid form. This means
the properties of water are not merely a function of its global
molecular characteristics but are also configured by local spatio-
temporal relationships (De Marzio et al. 2017).

222
 Water’s material richness, strangeness, and ability to interact,
or associate with, so many substances has defined the nature of
life on this planet. By allying with water and other liquids, we
become semipermeable, protean beings that resist containment
and can therefore adapt to changing circumstances.

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05.15
Clay Code

Life’s inconstant and paradoxical relationship between inert

structures and responsive flesh (whether plant or animal) in-
vites a synthesis between mineral crystal (rigid) building blocks,
which are the units of stable structures, and the wet, soft (flexi-
ble) environments of cells. Many ancient stories relate the emer-
gence of life with the transformation of Earth’s soils such as the
Sumerian myth of Marduk who created people by killing Qin-
gu9 and mixing his blood with clay, or the golem — an earthen
structure, shaped in human form and brought to life by God’s
breath. Origin of life studies are now revealing the entangle-
ments between life’s emergence and the evolution of our dirts.

There, on a clay bank, we measured out a man three cubits

long, and we drew his face in the earth, and his arms and
legs, the way a man lies on his back. Then all three of us
stood at the feet of the reclining golem, with our faces to
his face, and the rabbi commanded me to circle the golem
seven times from the right side to the head, from the head
to the left side, and then back to the feet, and he told me
the formula to speak as I circle the golem seven times. And
when I had done the rabbi’s biding, the golem turned as
red as fire. Next, the rabbi commanded his pupil, Jacob
Sassoon, to do the same as I had done, but he revealed
different formulas to him. This time the fiery redness was
extinguished, and a vapour arose from the supine figure,
which had grown nails and hair. Now the rabbi walked
around the golem seven times with the Torah scrolls, like
the circular procession in a synagogue at New Year’s, and
then, in conclusion, all three of us recited the verse, ‘And
the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became

9 Qingu also may be written ‘Kingu’.

224
 a living soul.’ And now the golem opened his eyes and
peered at us in amazement. (Neugroschel 2006, 13–14)

When ancient seawater is experimentally simulated and added

to clay, it forms a hydrogel which soaks up fluids into its laby-
rinthine spaces. Here, complex biochemical reactions were able
to catalyse the evolution of primordial chemistry towards the
metabolisms of the living world, until membranes evolved that
were capable of performing this function for wholly independ-
ent living cells (Young et al. 2011).

… use good smooth dirt that is free of sand, rocks and

pebbles. In a small bucket mix the dirt with water. Using
your hands to combine the dirt and water, continue to add
small amounts of water until the mud is the consistency of
bread dough. Knead the mud until the mud becomes firm
enough not to lose shape when you roll it into a small ball.
Mould the mud into pies by rolling the mud into balls and
then flatten them down. You can make them as thick or as
thin as you like. (Kidspot 2017)

John Desmond Bernal first suggested that clay played a key role
in the origins of life through its ordered arrangement, high ad-
sorption capacity, impedance to ultraviolet radiation and abil-
ity to form templates for polymerisation (Bernal 1949). A whole
theory of life’s mineral origins was proposed by Alexander
Graham Cairns-Smith, where simple crystal matrices, or ‘clay
codes’, could offer physical structure, modes of synthesis, sites
of catalysts and even programming information through ‘primi-
tive geneographs’. All these systems existed within hydrated
states of clay that were responsible for organising life’s build-
ing blocks and early metabolisms, until the more potent ‘genetic
takeover’ took place, with a much-expanded molecular reper-
toire (Cairns-Smith 1965). While Cairns-Smith’s theory remains
experimentally untested, inviting criticism that ‘no amount of
vague talk about ‘clay organisms’ or ‘genetic clay’ [can] breathe
life into such ideas as a substitute for a more tangible scientific

225
basis’ (Fox 1988), increasing evidence supports notions that life
evolved along with its soils (Yang et al. 2013).

There are also people born on rocky ground, on sandstone

or granite. Their skin is rough and hard, as are their muscles
and bones. They have strong hair and teeth, and the skin on
their palms and the soles of their feet is hard. On the surface
they are tough and robust, because their bodies are like
armour. They have a lot of empty space inside, so everything
they see and hear echoes within them like a bell. (Tokarczuk
2003, 192)

In its most basic sense, clay creates a platform for prebiotic

biochemistry and its ultimate assimilation into established
metabolic networks. Although its vivogenetic properties have
not been definitely proven, the clay montmorillonite has been
shown to be catalytic in the assembly of RNA from simple nu-
cleotides, and also accelerates the spontaneous conversion of
fatty acid micelles into vesicles (Hanczyc, Fujikawa and Szostak
2003). Additionally, the role of hydrogels in the formation of an-
cient metabolic networks is being explored. Evidence ‘support[s]
the importance of localised concentration and protection of bi-
omolecules in early life evolution, and also implicate[s] a clay
hydrogel environment for biochemical reactions during early
life evolution’ (Yang et al. 2013). Working in combination with
other substances, clay’s potency creates the possibility of new
kinds of ‘agentised’ synthesis, which suggests that ceramic tech-
nologies may even enliven the living realm. Using genetically
modified biofilms to produce a specific range of metabolites,
the EU-funded Living Architecture project engages ceramic in-
terfaces to investigate the formation of a ‘designed’ set of (bio)
chemical transformations that are useful within urban living
spaces, e.g., reclaiming phosphate from wastewater.10 A better

10 The Living Architecture project has received €3.2m funding from the Eu-
ropean Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme un-
der Grant Agreement no. 686585. It is a collaboration of experts from the

226
understanding of how such molecular and metabolic processes
may be shaped by clay as various forms of ceramics situated
within technological systems, may contribute to our better un-
derstanding of living systems and how they relate to alternative
models of organisation — such as liquid life.

universities of Newcastle, UK; the West of England (UWE Bristol); Trento,

Italy; the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid; LIQUIFER Systems
Group, Vienna, Austria; and Explora, Venice, Italy, that began in April 2016
and runs to April 2019 (Living Architecture 2016). Living Architecture is
envisioned as a next-generation, selectively programmable bioreactor that
uses techniques in biotechnology and synthetic biology to design commu-
nities of cooperating organisms that are capable of extracting valuable re-
sources from sunlight, wastewater, and air and, in turn, generating oxygen,
proteins, and biomass (Armstrong 2018b).

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05.16
Colloids, Coacervates and Foam

… protoplasm has a definite structure and is not a

homogeneous lump of slime. This structure holds the secret
of life. Destroy it and there will remain in your hands a
lifeless mixture of organic compounds. (Oparin 1953, 60)

Liquid and crystalline systems first began to mix in the ‘pro-

toplasm’, which is a viscous, aqueous, clear, polyphasic colloid
that provides a matrix for many kinds of material programs.
In the nucleus, it is called ‘nucleoplasm’ and ‘cytoplasm’ in the
cell body. Composed mainly of nucleic acids, proteins, lipids,
carbohydrates, and inorganic salts, the cytoplasm provides sup-
portive ‘skeletons’ and ‘muscle systems’ that generate cell struc-
ture. Selectively enabling molecules to move in and out of the
cell’s highly choreographed environment, it regulates many vital
processes such as energy production by the mitochondria, and
protein synthesis in the granular ribosomes.
Prior to the discovery of DNA in the 1950s, cytoplasm was
believed to be a complex substance capable of conferring cells
with vital properties such as self-replication, the transmission
of heritable particles (Hodges 1889), and even with immortal-
ity (Bogdanov 2002). This gel-like substance could choreograph
the chemistry of life within cells, although without apparent
form, it was not obvious how this was achieved.

It is not a question of straight lines and planes such as

we meet in crystals, for here we have a whole network, a
whole skein of fine threads which are interlaced, separating
from one another and coming together again in a definite,
complicated order. Sometimes these threads are very fine;
on the other hand, sometimes they are thickened, fusing
with one another to form small enclosed bubbles or alveoli.
The structure of coagulates is strikingly reminiscent of that
of protoplasm. Unfortunately, this structure has not yet been
sufficiently well studied for us to be able to say anything

228
 conclusive about this resemblance. However, there can be
no doubt that we are dealing with phenomena of the same
order. There is no essential difference between the structure
of coagula and that of protoplasm. It may be, however, that
the difference between living and dead does not lie in the
organization which, as we have seen, is present in both
worlds, but in the other features which we mentioned,
the ability of living organisms to metabolise, to reproduce
themselves and to respond to stimuli. (Oparin 1953)

Alexander Oparin demonstrated that the anisotropy and non-

linearity that existed at the interfaces between liquid media,
spontaneously produced droplets, layers, and microscopic local-
ised systems known as ‘protocells’ (Oparin 1953). Highlighting
the way this self-assembling process could spontaneously struc-
ture protocellular spaces, he established a testable approach for
his theories with an experimental platform that produced in-
creasingly complex and more heterogeneous chemical assem-
blages (Sloterdijk 2011, 2014, 2016) capable of responding to a
selection process.

229
05.17
Continuous Media: Ectoplasm

Things leak into each other according to a logic that

does not belong to us and cannot be correlated to our
chronological time. (Negarestani 2008, 49)

While quantum theory begins to close the ‘gap’ left between at-
omism’s objects, Descartes’ notion of ‘extended’ matter (see sec-
tion 03.9) created the possibility of an atomic body that is per-
meated by its surroundings. Mutable like liquids, they no longer
behave like geometrically discrete objects but fields (Dirac 1927),
or strings (Smolin 2008), which draw both material and ephem-
eral forces into their substance.
The search for the interlocutors of the physical and immate-
rial realms coincided with the rise of spiritualism in the mid-
nineteenth century, and was carried out by (mostly female) me-
diums. Regarded as hysterics, they reported leaking fluid-like
substances out of their bodies during séances as a manifesta-
tion of spirit energy. Scientific luminaries like Charles Richet11
sought to discover the nature of this ‘ectoplasm’, considering it
to be a ubiquitous protoplasmic prima materia that arose from
symptomatic vibrations of a ‘sixth’ sense that was capable of de-
tecting ‘ectenic’ forces. The biological equivalent of the aether, it
propagated the vibrations of life through the cellular substance
of all beings, linking the ephemeral and material realms.

How can the vibration of reality bring about knowledge? …

we are not prejudging the question as to whether these are
vibrations of ether, or emissions of electrons … We know
that there are around us, quite close to us, many vibrations
which do not reach our normal senses, for instance those
of attraction, of magnetism, of the Hertzian waves, etc. All

11 Charles Richet was a French physiologist at the Collège de France, who was
known for his pioneering work in immunology and won the Nobel Prize for
his work on anaphylaxis in 1913.

230
 the same, it would be madness to suppose that there are
not others. Therefore we have three orders of vibrations of
reality: a) those which our senses perceive, b) those which
our senses do not perceive but which are revealed to us by
detectors, c) those that are unknown to us and which are
revealed neither by our senses, nor by detectors … When
we have fathomed the history of these unknown vibrations
emanating from reality — past reality, present reality, and
even future reality — we shall doubtless have given them
an unwonted degree of importance. The history of the
Hertzian waves shows us the ubiquity of these vibrations in
the external world, imperceptible to our senses … when a
new truth has invaded the world of humanity, even the most
far-seeing individuals can never know to what conclusions
it will lead. At times this truth entails unforeseen and
unforeseeable consequences, and that even from the rigidly
narrow point of view of our present material life. Who then
could have foreseen when the great Hertz discovered the
electric waves, that our practical
daily life would be transformed and that all the ships sailing
on the various oceans would be supplied with wireless?
(Richet 2003)

Providing a legitimate scientific platform for his theories, Ri-

chet’s observations were more than a question of physics, or
psychology, but situated at the cusp between psychical research
and the nascent discipline of plasmogeny12 (Brain 2013). Dur-
ing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ectoplasm
was ‘scientifically’ studied during paranormal theatre sessions,
where spiritual mediums claimed to be able to link the psychic
body with matter, making it possible to communicate with the
dead. During a series of 87 séances led by 16-year-old Kathleen

12 The field of plasmogeny is concerned with the origin and study of proto-
plasm, but more broadly, also incorporates a study of the life-like behaviour
of artefacts and is an early forerunner to the fields of synthetic biology and
artificial life (Brain 2013).

231
Goligher, engineer William J. Crawford (‘the Lavoisier of tel-
eplasty’) attempted to measure its appearances using a weighing
scale large enough to hold the medium, while she was sitting
in her chair. Noting a change in the distribution of mass in the
subject’s body, Crawford attributed this to the manifestation of
‘psychic rods’ (Brain 2013). Other investigators, such as neurolo-
gist Jules Bernard Luys, observed that the ‘bodies of hysterics
underwent a spasmodic consumption of energy and gave off a
‘radiating neural force’, taking the form of a luminous fluid that
flooded out of the bodily orifices, especially the eyes and mouth’
(Brain 2013, 118). Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, a Ger-
man physician and psychiatrist at the University of Munich,
corroborated these findings by reporting ‘the presence of fluid,
white and luminous flakes of a size ranging from that of a pea
to that of a five-franc piece’ (Brain 2013, 114) when mediums
were in communication with the spirit world. Richet himself de-
scribed different stages in the materialisation process:

[First,] a whitish steam, perhaps luminous, taking the

shape of gauze or muslin, in which there develops a hand
or an arm that gradually gains consistency. This ectoplasm
makes personal movements. It creeps, rises from the
ground, and puts forth tentacles like an amoeba. It is not
always connected with the body of the medium but usually
emanates from her, and is connected with her. (Richet
2010, 523)

While scientists had witnessed ectoplasm during séances in

darkened rooms and by photographing its strange appearance,
no actual samples that could be tested in a laboratory setting
were provided (MacIsaac 2014). Spiritual mediums played on
the vulnerability of their audiences using theatrical tricks to
conjure the appearance of strange wools and fabrics from bod-
ily orifices — particularly ears and mouths — as ‘evidence’ that
bridging the realms of the living and the dead was possible.
Medically trained Arthur Conan Doyle even became convinced
of ectoplasm’s reality, describing it as a gelatinous substance

232
similar to body fluids and viscous liquids (Doyle 1930), but the
non-scientist Harry Houdini was not so easy to deceive. Ac-
companied by an esteemed panel of scientists, he was invited
to assess the psychic abilities of celebrity medium Mina Cran-
don, or ‘Margery’ — the Blonde Witch of Lime Street, New York
and wife of a wealthy Boston surgeon and socialite, Dr Le Roi
Goddard Crandon. Renowned for her nude séances delicité and
assisted by her deceased brother Walter, many were convinced
by her theatre of the dead. Tables knocked out messages, bells
rung, and furniture shook with the fervour of the spirit world.
She even conjured ectoplasm from her nose and ears and re-
vealed an ‘ectomorphic hand’, from beneath a sheer kimono that
bore a remarkable likeness to a string of entrails. While previous
adjudicators had found no evidence of trickery, Houdini made a
special instrument to detect the slightest movement in the dark-
ened room. Binding his right knee so tightly that it was exqui-
sitely sensitive to the subtlest movements, he could feel Margery
play the séance table through a range of apparatuses that were
operated by her head, legs, and ankles. Owing to her popular-
ity in influential social circles, Houdini was, however, prevented
from publicly debunking her techniques and instead, revealed
the nature of her deceptions by exposing them in versions of his
own performances (Love 2013).
Although ectoplasm was never proven to be a real substance,
it was described in material terms by psychologists as composed
of invisible rays, psychic forces, and ethereal vibrations, which
could be conjured into actuality through a process of ‘ideoplas-
ty’, or mental projection (Brain 2013, 116). Embryologist Hans
Driesch took an assertively material view of ectoplasm as a me-
dium for the union of matter and spirit. Regarding it as a special
manifestation of protoplasm (Brain 2013), which contained a
spirit force that could better explain the dynamic process of em-
bryonic development in terms of the laws of physics and math-
ematics, he invoked Aristotle’s life force, or ‘entelechy’, as the
organising force that conferred living matter with flexible prin-
ciples. This new science of ‘supra-normal physiology’, or ‘super-
normal biology’, made explicit the links between ectoplasm and

233
occult phenomena, where gelatinous bodies could also shape
the course of prospective life. This groundbreaking scientific
concept outlined a principle of malleable development, whereby
undifferentiated organic tissue possessed pluripotentiality and
inspired the emerging science of embryology.

Think of the little material body, called an egg, and think

of the enormous and very complex material body, say,
an elephant, that may come out of it: here you have a
permanent stream of materializations before your eyes, all
of them occurring in the way of assimilation, of a spreading
entelechial control. (Driesch 1928, 173)

234
 05.18
Aqua Vita

Of all the fluids that fill life’s interior spaces —  vacuoles, coe-
loms, cavities, stomachs, ventricles, and vessels — none is con-
ferred with more potency than blood.
Since ancient times, it has been considered as a life force, or
ichor, and a very particular kind of plasm with mystical proper-
ties like Ambrosia13 that could be acquired in different ways, like
the witch Medea who used it to transfuse ‘life’ into the dead, the
old, and the dying (Tucker 2011):

Medea unsheathed her sword and drew a cut in the old

man’s throat, so letting the blood drain out of his body. She
then replaced it with juice from the pot. When Aeson had
fully absorbed this, either by mouth or by way of the wound,
his hair and his beard lost all of their whiteness and quickly
returned to lustrous black. (Ovid 2004, 262)

The actual transfer of blood directly between individuals re-

mained a magical notion until the Enlightenment. William
Harvey’s rationalisation of blood flow as a theory of circulation
in 1613 enabled the liquid to be empirically studied, but it did
not quell belief in its rejuvenating powers, which remained the
dominant motivation for developing the practice of blood trans-
fusion. In 1666, Samuel Pepys referred to successful dog-to-dog
blood transfusions in his diary, noting the potential medical im-
plications and also the risks of the procedure:

The experiment of transfusing the blood of one dog into

another was made before the Society by Mr. King and Mr.
Thomas Coxe upon a little mastiff and a spaniel with very
good success, the former bleeding to death, and the latter
receiving the blood of the other, and emitting so much of
his own, as to make him capable of receiving that of the

13 Ambrosia is the nectar of the gods that confers them with immortality.

235
 other. This did give occasion to many pretty wishes, as of
the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and
such like; but, as Dr. Croone says, may, if it takes, be of
mighty use to man’s health, for the amending of bad blood
by borrowing from a better body. (Pepys 2010, 209–10)

Robert des Gabets claimed that transfusing blood between be-

ings could not only transfer states of well-being, but also iden-
tity, which raised profound ethical questions for those who did
not share Descartes’ view that the soul resided outside the body.
Rumours spread that transfusing dogs with the blood from a
sheep would give them the ability to grow wool, develop cloven
hooves and sprout horns (Learoyd 2006). The first formal trans-
fusion experiments are accredited to Christopher Wren who
observed the levels of intoxication in dogs, after injecting them
with wine and ale:

Some may conceive that liquors thus injected into

veins without preparation and ingestion will make odd
commotions in the blood, disturb nature and cause strange
symptoms in the body, yet they have other thoughts of
liquors that are prepared of such things that have passed the
digestion of the stomach; for example, of spirit of urine, of
blood, etc.; and they hope likewise that beside the medical
uses that may be made of this invention, it may also serve
for anatomical purposes by filling the vessels of an animal as
full as they can hold, and by exceedingly distending them,
discover new vessels … The reader may securely assume
that this narrative is the naked real matter of fact, whereby
it is clear as Noonday … that to Oxford, and in it, to Dr
Christopher Wren, this invention is due. (Anon 1665–1666)

Despite a number of successful blood transfusions between

animals and humans during the mid-seventeenth century, due
to moral and ethical concerns the practice fell into general dis-
repute and was banned throughout most of Europe. Jean De-
nys conducted the first animal-to-human transfusions in 1667,

236
favouring the animal plasm for his experiments, as it was less
likely ‘… to be rendered impure by passion or vice’. Although
patchily successful owing to occasional haemolytic transfusion
reactions, there were no further advances in blood transfusion
for around 150 years (Learoyd 2006). This was a fortunate pause,
since advances in antisepsis and immunology had not kept pace
with this invasive practice.
In 1864, Paul Bert developed a new experimental technique
in blood transfusion called ‘parabiosis’ whereby the skin of two
mice were sewn together, and as the healing vessels fused, the
animals shared a common circulatory system (Scudellari 2015).
Significant scientific interest in blood transfusions was not how-
ever, rekindled until the second decade of the nineteenth centu-
ry, when James Blundell used them to cure fatal haemorrhage in
childbirth. Fatal haemolytic reactions arising from the mixing
of incompatible blood types posed a significant risk to recipients
until human blood groups A, B, and O were identified by Karl
Landsteiner in 1901. Compatibility between donors and recipi-
ents could now be established before a transfusion took place
and the practice of cross-matching was advocated as standard
procedure by Reuben Ottenberg in 1907.
Despite these advances, the mystical potency of blood did
not wane. The modern pioneer of blood transfusions, Alexander
Bogdanov, regarded them as a replacement therapy that could
cure sick and aged bodies. His grandiose approach to the powers
of blood transfusion extended to claims it could reverse bald-
ing and improve eyesight. Ironically, he died following a poorly
matched blood transfusion from a student suffering from ma-
laria and tuberculosis, although the student recovered entirely
following infusion with Bogdanov’s blood (Rosenthal 2002).
Further technical developments over the course of the twen-
tieth century increased the safety of blood transfusions. Between
1914 and 1918, the advent of refrigeration techniques and antico-
agulants such as sodium citrate prolonged the shelf life of the
plasma, so that blood banks could be established. Throughout
the 1920s and 1930s, voluntary blood donations for storage and
use of blood became an acceptable social practice and during

237
World War II, transfusion was regarded as a reputable and life-
saving treatment for wounded soldiers. Following this resound-
ing success, it was adopted into mainstream medical practice
and during the 1970s new technological developments in the
manufacture of disposable PVC, transfusion practices became
safer than ever before, although screening for viral antibodies
did not occur until the 1980s following the HIV epidemic.
Blood transfusions bring biological benefits to recipients that
cannot be accounted for by the expectations of replacement ther-
apy alone. During the 1950s, Clive McCay revisited the practice
of parabiosis to connect the vasculature of mice of different ages
in pairs14 as a model system for studying the effects of old age.
While some surgically ‘conjoined’ animals perished from a mys-
terious condition that became known as ‘parabiosis disease’,15
the old mice generally benefited from a range of rejuvenating
effects, while the young mice aged prematurely. While animal
research regulations established in the 1970s made it more chal-
lenging to conduct such experiments, the mystical rejuvenating
powers of blood have not been assuaged. In 2014, researchers
studying mice found that giving old animals blood from young
ones could reverse some signs of ageing, which caused a rise in
levels of a growth factor that had beneficial effects on the heart,
skeletal muscle, and brain (Kaiser 2014). Recent experiments
show that plasma proteins from human umbilical cord blood
also have ‘rejuvenating’ effects on the memory of brain function
in aged mice, with significant implications for treating degen-
erative brain diseases in humans (Castellano 2017).
Such promising scientific studies have attracted the attention
of transhumanists, allegedly such as Peter Thiel,16 who stands
‘against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ide-
ology of the inevitability of the death of every individual’ and

14 Disturbingly, if the rats were not adjusted to each other, then one would
chew the other’s head until it perished (McCay et al. 1957).
15 ‘Parabiosis disease’ may have been a form of haemolytic reaction.
16 Such claims made by Gawker have been denied by Thiel at the 2018 New
York Times Dealbook conference, who declared he was ‘not a vampire’
(Trotter 2017; Cuthberson 2018)..

238
advocates the administration of a range of biological substances
that may improve physical well-being — to the point where life
spans can be radically increased. Thiel has already admitted to
taking human growth hormone to maintain muscle mass and
regards transfusional parabiosis as a pathway towards potential-
ly infinite life extension (Kosoff 2016).

… infusions of young blood … [were sought after by] …

aged billionaires. One, who flies around in a jet with his
name emblazoned on the side … another correspondent
wrote with a more disturbing offer … [to] … provide blood
from children of whatever [the] age … required. (Sample
2015)

Young people are cloned in order to ‘harvest’ their organs,

organ-by-organ until they die prematurely in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
heartbreaking novel Never Let Me Go. While such an extreme
scenario presently remains fiction, it raises relevant ethical
questions about the Californian start-up Ambrosia, which meets
the growing real-world market for plasma transfusions from
young adults. Offering these as a rejuvenation therapy to tech
circle clients, treatments promise to boost mood, the immune
system, weight management, and much else. Unusually for an
anti-ageing treatment, it appeals more to men than women
(Haynes 2017).

As a business proposition, the transfusion of young blood

raises all kinds of fears. It raises the spectre of a macabre
black market, where teenagers bleed for the highest bidder,
and young children go missing from the streets. Then there
is the danger of unscrupulous dealers selling fake plasma,
or plasma unsafe for human infusion. The fears are not
unfounded: health has become one of the most lucrative
sectors for criminals and con artists. (Sample 2015)

For now, claims that young blood, or plasma, can extend animal
life spans are not supported by scientific data (Scudellari 2015)

239
and transfusional parabiosis undoubtedly carries unquantified
risks, such as whether rejuvenating cells in ageing bodies carry a
significant risk of cancer. Perhaps most intriguingly, despite our
detailed understanding of medical treatments and advances in
molecular biology, the crimson liquid that travels 96,000 kilo-
metres along the arteries, veins, and capillaries of the circulatory
system to carry more than 700 proteins and other substances
around our bodies, remains mysteriously irreducible.

Blood might contain the fountain of youth after all. And it

is within us all — that’s the crazy thing. It just loses its power
as we age. (Thomson 2014)

240
 05.19
Ghost of a Flea

The weightless, almost invisible, ubiquitous flea is a speck that

challenges what a unit of life may be: a droplet masquerading as
an object, a homunculus, a mini-monster, an ornate container
for liquid, a self-propagating vector of pestilence, a parasite of
sexual mingling, a host for a fluid drop of human life within an
insect body, our blood-sucking enemy, and a curse that bites.
During the Renaissance, fleas were a humorous and risqué
subject, which drew their many transgressions from the magical
powers associated with blood. In a vision, William Blake saw the
ghost of a flea that ‘told him that all fleas were inhabited by the
souls of such men as were by nature blood-thirsty to excess, and
were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of
insects’ (Varley 1828, 54–55).
The development of the compound microscope catapult-
ed the flea from the intangible to discernible realms, where
— through his careful observation and detailing of their tiny
armour plates — Robert Hooke demonstrated that the extreme
performance of fleas far exceeded their fantastical status (Hooke
2007):

… as for the beauty of it, the Microscope manifests it to

be all over adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suit of sable
Armour, neatly jointed, and beset with multitudes of sharp
pinns, shap’d almost like Porcupine’s Quills, or bright
conical Steel-bodkins; the head is on either side beautify’d
with a quick and round black eye … behind each of
which also appears a small cavity … in which he seems to
move to and fro a certain thin film beset with many small
transparent hairs, which probably may be his ears; in the
forepart of his head, between the two fore-leggs, he has
two small long jointed feelers, or rather smellers … (Hooke
2007, 19)

241
Hooke’s drawings drew the attention of craftsmen, who began
to demonstrate their technical prowess by depicting the flight-
less insects as tiny models of people, so that everyday life could
be viewed as a corpuscular version of the human scale. In 1578,
watchmaker Mark Scaliot built a lock and chain for a flea that
was made up of 11 different microscopically crafted pieces of
steel, iron, and brass, which weighed only one grain, plus the
key belonging to it.

The same artist also constructed a chain of gold, containing

forty-three links, which he fastened to the lock and key, and
upon these being attached to the neck of a flea, the insect
was able to draw them with ease. (Anon 1893, 187)

Other artisans followed suit, designing contraptions that ranged

from landaus and chaises to cannons. During the 1820s fleas
themselves, rather than the intricate objects associated with
them, became the star attraction of shows. Louis Bertolotto’s in-
sects pulled tiny carriages, danced to an orchestra, played tiny
instruments and even (re)enacted the Battle of Waterloo wear-
ing full battle regalia. In the 1900s, William Heckler claimed his
troupe of fleas were ‘skilled professionals’, who juggled, raced,
boxed, and even responded to voice commands. Gradually, flea
circuses became part of carnival sideshows and were exhibited
alongside circus ‘freaks’. They were also featured in magic rou-
tines, which resulted in the rise of the ‘humbug’ performance,
where things appeared to happen — even in the absence of fleas.

The audience see a table or stand set out with all the
fascinating gear and trappings of a miniature circus. An
arched sign at the back, proclaims the name and merits
of the show, lit up by small lights. The performers on this
apparatus and in the air above it, are talented fleas — so
the Ringmaster says. By the time the exciting and action-
packed show is finished, many spectators are sure about
the fleas, while others are doubtful, but nobody knows
for sure! The entertainer never loses sight of his job for a

242
 moment — which is to present a flea circus — a three ring
show of performing fleas! (Palmer 1975)

While flea circuses are not prohibited, enthusiasm for them has
dwindled — excepting the Munich Oktoberfest, which has up-
held this tradition for over 150 years.

I had always thought that the flea circus was … an urban

legend … Are there magnets under the table? Are there
tiny wires attached to performers? I choose to believe …
We watch the fleas play soccer. They pitch what looks to be
pieces of styrofoam, 30 times their weight, into a tiny net …
Then there was the chariot race. Pulling the chariot, said the
ringmaster, was equivalent to a human pulling a locomotive.
For all we know, the Pyramids could have been built
employing trained fleas. Afterward, we got the opportunity
to meet the actors … through a magnifying glass. (Johnson,
n.d.)

Fleas are paradoxical creatures: simultaneously fluid and crys-

tal, atom and fluid, seen and unseen. The not-quite-liquid-not-
fully-droplet flea is a synonym for trickster, which personifies
the outright contradictory aspects of liquid life.

243
05.20
Twenty-one Grams

… a cough came from the sacristy, then from the chancel,

and finally died down, still coughing, behind the altar,
behind the gymnast on the cross — where it quickly
coughed up its soul. It is finished, coughed my cough; but
nothing was finished. (Grass 2010, 342)

The idea of the soul as an ephemeral spirit entangled with a bod-

ily identity is an ancient belief that is present in every civilisa-
tion and is thought to stem from our capacity for self-awareness.
The narrative encapsulated in this dualism is highly compelling,
since it offers transcendence from the insoluble difficulties of
the material present and makes possible an unbounded world
to be. The soul itself is generally considered an animating prin-
ciple, whose presence is needed for the transformation between
a living and dead state, even if, as Georg Ernst Stahl proposed,
it is an agent that delays the decomposition of living things. The
principles are so ingrained in our societies they are likely to have
been communicated between early peoples at the dawn of cul-
tural evolution around 200,000 years ago. Archaeologists from
the Neubauer expedition of the Oriental Institute at the Uni-
versity of Chicago discovered a stone slab about a metre high
and weighing about 350 kilograms at an Iron Age city called
Sam’al in Turkey, which dated to around the eighth century BCE.
Carved on its surface was a picture of a man, which was accom-
panied by an inscription that declared that his soul now resided
within the stone slab (Small 2008).

There is something at work in my soul which I do not

understand. (Shelley 2014, 11)

While religions offered laws about the nature of the soul, the En-
lightenment brought ways of thinking and measuring that could
potentially not only characterise, but also quantify it. Since, by
definition cadaveric specimens did not have souls, it was hard

244
to establish an empirical method that could ascertain the rela-
tionship between body and spirit. In 1907, Duncan MacDougal
sought to measure the loss of mass17 that he presumed occurred
from a dying person when the soul parted from the body,18
which could be detected by a weighing scale that was sensitive
to one-tenth of an ounce (3g). Implicit in this hypothesis was
the assumption that the spirit was not immaterial like ‘mind’,
but took the form of a physical substance, perhaps something
like ectoplasm. MacDougal selected six patients with tubercu-
losis whose terminal symptoms could be clearly observed, so he
and his colleagues would be able to identify the exact moment
of death and quickly measure the differences in mass. His first
subject, a ‘phlegmatic man, slow of thought and action, [whose]
soul remained suspended in the body after death, during the
minute that elapsed before it came to the consciousness of its
freedom’, lost ‘three-fourths of an ounce’. This is around the
mass of five sugar cubes and has since been popularised as ‘21
grams’. Three other cases, ‘including that of a woman’, lost be-
tween half an ounce (14g) and a full ounce (28g) in mass. Later,
MacDougall repeated the experiment on 15 dogs, reporting the
outcomes as ‘uniformly negative’, with no perceived change in
mass at the time of death. This was interpreted as evidence that
the ‘soul’ could be weighed, but dogs did not have ‘souls’. Mac-
Dougall also planned to take X-rays of the soul, but anticipated
negative results, as he reasoned ‘in reality, the soul is a shadow
picture’ (Snopes.com 2013). These controversial experiments
were not only criticised for their speculative nature, but also the
way the evidence was gathered. The sample size was considered
too small to give significant results and other explanations for
weight loss — for example, through evaporation — were poorly

17 It is worth observing that the idea of a loss of mass at the time of death is
contrary to another (competitive) cultural trope, which suggests that, sub-
jectively, the body appears to be heavier in death, leading to the idea of ‘dead
weight’.
18 MacDougal assumes the moment of death is a precise event, rather than a
complex sequence of events that include cellular death, brain death, cardiac
death, etc. or that the soul is not trapped by or dissipates within the corpse.

245
controlled. Damningly, MacDougal’s results were heavily bi-
ased, as he only used findings that supported his initial hypoth-
esis (Wiseman 2011, 42; Kruszelnicki 2004, 200–202).
Experiments conducted using even more sophisticated
techniques, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), have
been no more forthcoming about the transition between life
and death, but raise significant ethical questions. Historically,
the dead are used to study the natural of life as an intellectual
inquiry. Joseph Paul Jernigan was a 38-year-old mechanic and
murderer executed by lethal injection. Before his execution, a
prison chaplain convinced him to donate his body to the Tex-
as Anatomy Board. Alongside an anonymous female donor, a
59-year-old Maryland housewife, Jernigan’s body was selected
by the committee to become the subject for the Visible Hu-
man Project, which was organised by the US National Library
of Medicine and completed in 1994. The male cadaver was em-
balmed in gelatine and ‘cut’19 in the axial plane at 1 mm intervals
to produce a database of 1,871 slices, representing 15 gigabits of
data. In 2000, the photos were rescanned at a higher resolution,
yielding more than 65 gigabytes, while the female cadaver was
sliced at 0.33 mm intervals, resulting in some 40 gigabytes of
data. These datasets have been used to generate 3D anatomical
models for medical research and train healthcare professionals.

Rather than comprehend the miracle of its genesis through

its passions, it is much easier to understand life through
its ‘lack’, which is how the phenomenon has largely been
(scientifically) understood. The physiological deficits that
result from physical subtractions of the body correspond
with the criteria for liveliness. Let us remove the heart,
the brain, the entrails, the head, the limbs, the eye, the
genes and the soul and watch an exquisite choreography
of unfathomably complex exchanges fall. There! Like a

19 In specimen preparation, the ‘cutting’ process actually involves grinding

into the specimen. It is a destructive process and leaves no residual ‘slice’ of
the cadaver.

246
 mediaeval Trial by Ordeal, these insufficiencies are formal
proof there was once a living thing. Since this essence can
be isolated and obliterated, it is now understood. What
beautiful poisons balance these theories, which ultimately
conclude the nature of being is bounded by a fat ‘full stop’.
(Armstrong 2018b, 56)

The images acquired in the Human Visible Project are not only
a neutral database that archives anatomical structures but ask
searching questions about how the living realm is observed and
valued. Cadaverous tissues, which are at relative thermodynamic
equilibrium, are interpreted as the equivalents of dynamic sys-
tems at far-from-equilibrium, which begs the question — what
new information is being revealed in this exercise? Moreover,
the project’s association with human dissection as a data col-
lection exercise is a morally dubious development within an al-
ready ethically questionable system of capital punishment and
volunteer ‘coercion’ (Hildebrandt 2008).

At the trial the prisoner exhibited the utmost indifference

to his fate, and appeared to entertain no fear for the
consequences of his guilt. He maintained his firmness
throughout a most feeling address of the learned judge,
in which he was sentenced to death, but exhibited some
emotion when he was informed that a part of the sentence
was that his body should be given over to the surgeons to be
dissected. (Anon, n.d.)

247
05.21
Weird Liquid

… aridity, dust and desert only elude water because they

have already forged an alliance with a different species of
wetness. Monster and alien vistas are indexed by climate
and meteorology … [where] the universe is ideated by
elemental alignments in which air, fire and earth are paired
with questionable liquidities which either possess deranged
properties or share more than two properties at the same
time with their neighbouring elements. In the case of the
former, the derangement and confusion of primary and
secondary properties — wetness and coldness — leads to
the rediscovery of the elements earth and air as a New
Earth and a Fresh Air. Miasma, putrefaction, unground,
nigredo and so on refer to the alchemical dispositions or
the cosmogenetic problems inherent to these revolutionized
elements. Yet excessive properties of the moist element
signal something more abysmal. If air and earth can afford
water only through one property at a time — either wet or
cold — then in considering these liquidities (wet alternatives
to water) with more than two properties, we cannot help but
submit ourselves to certain ire and troubling speculations
… the additional or so-called extraneous properties
attest to missing links. In other words, these properties
betoken other outsider elements to which the weird liquid
species are coupled … [and] impose the otherworldly
building processes … that … are built upon meteorological
taxonomies; for meteorology suggest the weather-
harnessing power of these alien building processes …
Dead seas bring rains and hails which are either crystals
impregnated with sand of red and black particle, and
sometimes even dead creatures. The desert is frequently
haunted by pebble and sand rains, which not only being
with themselves hordes of peculiar monsters, but also
become teratological entities in themselves. The task of the
desert and aridity is to invoke and to couple with alternate

248
 fluids; but the task of foreign moistures is to smuggle in
the outsider elements as familiar atmospheric phenomena
in the form of weather anomalies or havocs. (Negarestani
2008, 98–99)

Liquids do not always behave according to our expectations of

them. The double slit experiment, which experimentally estab-
lished the wave/particle duality of quantum physics (Davisson
and Germer 1928), is only part of the repertoire of this realm.
When light particles condense in a state known as a Bose-Ein-
stein condensate (the fifth state of matter), they can form liq-
uid light. Like all superfluids, this condensate has zero friction
and viscosity. Historically liquid light was only formed at tem-
peratures close to absolute zero, existing for only fractions of a
second, but using a Frankenstein mash-up of light and matter,
it can now be formed at room temperature using light–matter
particles called polaritons. Under these conditions, photons are
so highly coordinated that they resist the characteristic distur-
bances produced by obstructions in their path to flow around
objects and even corners (Lerario et al. 2017). Such extraordi-
nary states challenge the classical notions of fluids, and solids,
and point towards a stranger, quantum reality, which may be
experienced in the everyday reality through encounters with
monstrous materialities.

249
05.22
Making Ground

The cartography of oil as an omnipresent entity narrates the

dynamics of planetary events. Oil is the undercurrent of all
narrations, not only the political but also that of the ethics
of life on earth. (Negarestani 2008, 19)

Dark liquids inhabit the ground beneath the soils. These dismal
substances have lurked here for millions of years, metabolising
slowly under pressure, as they turn like rancid milk. Possess-
ing their own agency, they are changing our climate and global
culture.
Historically, the ground is recognised as a generative and fer-
tile matrix, but the source of this potency has been contested.
Medieval accounts about the formation of land were based on
Biblical accounts, which claim the world is between 6,000 and
12,000 years old.

As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to

stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre
or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized
remains belong to antediluvian civilization, the mind is
startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the
millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and
an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose
ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet
of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. (de Balzac
1977, 40–41)

The demand for metal purification practices that heralded the

Industrial Revolution required an empirical analysis of ore-
bearing ground. In De Re Metallica, ‘On the Nature of Metals’,
Georgius Agricola created the foundations for a systematic
study of the Earth’s rocks and established the founding prin-
ciples for the scientific study of mining, metallurgy, and geol-
ogy (Norman 2017). In 1666, intrigued by how one rock could

250
grow inside another, Nicolas Steno characterised the nature of
fossils20 as snapshots of life at different moments in the planet’s
history, ensuring that his observations concurred with Biblical
timelines and the advent of the Great Flood (Pennsylvania State
University 2017).

… And on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the

ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. (Gen 8:4)

Unlike Steno, Robert Plot recognised ‘the [giant] figure of the

lowermost part of the thigh-bone of a Man or at least some oth-
er Animal’, in the ‘Formed Stones’ section of The Natural History
of Oxfordshire of 1676. This stone was likened to the scrotum
of a giant man by Richard Brookes in the eighteenth century,
but it was not until 1970 that Beverley Halstead rediscovered
these early accounts of fossils and recognised the drawings of
‘scrotum humanum’ as evidence of a therapod dinosaur (Car-
nall 2017). Increasingly, the scientific study of the ground was
formalised through the study of mineralogy, which could not
only reliably locate valuable ores but also contradicted Biblical
accounts. James Hutton argued that geological timescales were
much greater than Antediluvian accounts, which according to
John Phillip were around 96 million years. However, there was
discord even in secular accounts specifically between ‘Neptun-
ists’ and ‘Vulcanists’, who differed in their view of the causes of
extinction events that shaped the Earth. Neptunists argued they
were the work of water, and Vulcanists, acts of fire. New names
were invented to correspond with the recognition of particular
epochs: the Carboniferous was associated with the formation of
coal; Cretaceous with the deposition of chalk; and the Jurassic
invoked the limestone Jura mountains.
During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the
‘sudden’ cataclysmic theories of land formation were replaced
by Louis Agassiz’s theory of Ice Ages, where huge amounts of
earth moved across landscapes, prompting mass extinctions of

20 In Latin, fossilis refers to anything dug out of the ground.

251
mega flora and fauna. Around the late twentieth century, the
‘slow’ apocalypse was once again challenged by the possibility
of a ‘sudden’ catastrophic event, where asteroids were the new
agents of apocalypse, which saw the end of the dinosaurs. Once
again, the Earth became a place where ‘powerful deluges, co-
lossal landslides, gargantuan volcanic eruptions, supersonic
impacts from extraterrestrial objects — played a role in shaping
our world’ (Bjornerud 2015).
Contemporary geological debates centre on ‘sudden’ man-
made geological impacts. While some, like rising global tem-
peratures, may seem slow to us through the experience of lived
time, from a geological perspective, they are taking place rapid-
ly. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer argue that global human
civilisation is generating irreversible planetary-scale impacts,
which is irreversibly changing its character (Crutzen and Sto-
ermer 2000). Although the impacts themselves are scientifically
uncontroversial, their relationship to geological time remains
hotly contested and whether we are presently in the Holocene,
or Anthropocene, is still under consideration by the Interna-
tional Geological Congress (Carrington 2016).

The ‘Anthropocene’ is a term widely used … to denote the

present time interval, in which many geologically significant
conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human
activities. These include changes in: erosion and sediment
transport associated with a variety of anthropogenic
processes, including colonisation, agriculture, urbanisation
and global warming, the chemical composition of
the atmosphere, oceans and soils, with significant
anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements
such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals,
environmental conditions generated by these perturbations;
these include global warming, ocean acidification and
spreading oceanic ‘dead zones’, the biosphere both on
land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation,
species invasions and the physical and chemical changes …
(Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy 2016)

252
As we bear witness to large-scale depletion of polar ice, a rise
in ocean acidification, ‘new’ carbon dioxide released into the
atmosphere from fossil fuels and toxic plastic deposits gener-
ating continent-scale islands in the ocean gyres, our current
toolsets are not designed for practically addressing ongoing
ecocide — particularly at such a speed, or scale, of multiple si-
multaneous events. Ironically, the industrial systems and modes
of consumption that have produced them are the very same pro-
cesses that we are focussing on as a way of combating this situa-
tion. Try as we might, without a distinct change in technological
platform to underpin human development, we are fiddling while
our homes burn.

253
05.23
Metabolic Weather

There is no other planet within twenty parsecs that has

the like of it, and perhaps there is no other place anywhere
at all that has such air. The air is the archetype of restless
immanence. It is full of invisible movements and invisible
contents. Through what is does and what is brings, it makes
and unmakes the world it envelops. There is no actor more
powerful on this earth, yet for the most part we studiedly
ignore it … All the phenomena of weather and climate
come from the restless motions of the air, the gyres, and
all their permutations that bring rain, snow, fog, hail, sleet,
black ice, tornadoes, hurricanes, the layers and the heaps
of the clouds, the rising smoke of the chimneys. We can’t
control the weather, but nevertheless the weather changes as
we change the contents of the air. (Logan 2012, 19–20)

‘Metabolic weather’ arises from energy gradients, density cur-

rents, katabatic flows, vortices, dust clouds, pollution, and the
myriad expressions of matter that detail our (earthy, liquid, gas-
eous) terrains, which sets the scene for the process of living, life-
like events, and even life itself.
The potency of weather resides in its incessant flow, which is
produced by the juxtaposition of gaseous and aqueous bodies at
different temperatures, acting as the transport system for other
agents. At the macroscale, ‘weather’ is a slow-moving field of
enfolded dirts, water, and air; chemically, it is a highly active ter-
rain where matter/energy is transformed into peculiar events,
such as acidic rain, which excoriates alkaline surfaces like lime-
stone. The field of termolecular chemical reactions describes the
chemical processes that govern combustions, cloud formation,
planetary atmospheres, and climate change (Caughill 2017).
They are highly complex and uncommon, involving the simul-
taneous breaking and forming of chemical bonds between three
molecules, ions, or atoms. Undergoing various transitional
states that alter their reactiveness, they can (re)combine in many

254
ways (Burke and Klippenstein 2017). Although these reactions
were theorised during the 1920s, because of their complexity
they could only recently be studied using state of the art com-
puters, which ‘can provide a unique lens into harsh chemical en-
vironments ill-suited for experimental techniques for studying
individual reaction dynamics’ (Bergan 2017). These modelling
systems not only change the way complex chemistry is viewed,
but also may have a broader impact on our study of chemical
reactions, which offer insights into the planetary chemistry re-
sponsible for cloud formations, climate change, and evolution of
pollutants (Burke and Klippenstein 2017). Importantly for met-
abolic weather, the sequence of reactions produces a plethora of
turbulent structures, which are interconnected on a planetary
scale and influence the conditions for terrestrial life. If we are
to have any influence over these active fronts, their recognisable
features must first be named.

… during the second world war when meteorologists

forecasting weather ahead of battles began to draw cold
fronts and warm fronts on maps… Jacob Bjerknes …
discovered the different air masses around the world and
the stormy weather that occurs on the edges of these air
masses … [and] … likened them to the battle fronts across
Europe, so he decided to call them fronts. (Meyers 2015)

Naming things so they may be controlled is an ancient prac-

tice that shapes how we make sense of our world. According
to the book of Genesis, power resides in words where humans
acquired power over animals by naming them. In finding the
names for experiences, our thoughts become real, so we are no
longer musing but acting, casting ‘spells’, or exerting influence,
upon the world. Abracadabra, which is often used to announce
a trick in magic shows, is Aramaic for ‘I create what I speak’.
While the scientific Enlightenment changed naming into a
practice of classifications, encyclopaedias, and taxonomies, the
fundamental belief that finding the true names and nature of
things increases our influence in the world, persists.

255
 While it is relatively straightforward to describe and name
objects with discrete boundaries — apple, chair, cat, saucer,
bridge, sun — or particular actions and events — fall, buy, show,
run, it is much more challenging to find specific names for
things that we cannot observe in their totality, like the entire
surface of the sea; abstractions, as in the objects associated with
computer programming; or things that are constantly changing,
like clouds.

… clouds have certain general forms which are not at all

dependent upon chance but on a state of affairs which it
would be useful to recognise and determine. (Hamblyn
2001, 103)

The visible patterns produced by weather fronts arise from a

stream of transitions, so by interpreting these soft, dynamic
structures as stable bodies, the chances of predicting their be-
haviour, or even controlling them, is increased. Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck invented the first cloud classification system, while he
was ill in bed. Staring out the window he noted basic typolo-
gies: en voilé (hazy), attroupés (massed), pommelés (dappled),
en balayures (brooms) and groupés (grouped). Back then, before
meteorologists could plot weather fronts and fields of equal at-
mospheric pressure, or isobars, the skies were read according to
their cloud formations. Lamarck’s system did not catch on and
was superseded by Luke Howard’s much more accessible Lat-
in-based system, which used technical terminology and signs,
namely: cirrus (curl of hair), cumulus (heap) and stratus (layer),
terms that are now in common usage (Howard 1865). Consider-
ing these different cloud species as ‘good visible indications of
the operation of [their] causes as [the equivalent of] the coun-
tenance of the state of a person’s mind or body’ (Zajonc 1984,
36), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recognised a kindred spirit in
Howard’s true typology of clouds. Popularising this gentle em-
piricism of the skies, he ensured the ‘open secrets’ of the natural
world became accessible to all.

256
 From all my strivings in science and art it must be clear
how precious to me is this process, bestowing form on the
formless and a system of ordered change on a boundless
world. (Zajonc 1984, 38).

Even today, locally reading the details of actual clouds is a

better predictor of events than a meteorological map. Despite
our better understanding of its constituent events, the weather
remains unpredictable as a global happening, sometimes as-
tonishingly so. Many incidents of red rain have been described
throughout the ages. In the Iliad, Homer described ‘bloody
rain-drops on the earth’ (Homer 1987, 264), and although Pliny
and Cicero also report such portents, Cicero suggests their caus-
es are earthly, not supernatural, as arising ‘ex aliqua contagione
terrena’21 (Tatlock 1914). Ernst Chladni complied a catalogue
on widespread occurrences of red rain and snow since ancient
times and attributed some of these to mineral causes such as
dust, or biological agents like lichen (Chladni 1826, 2022), while
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg observed the widespread occur-
rence of red rain and recreated it using a mixture of red dust
and water (Wickramasinghe 2015, 160). More recently, in 2001,
50,000 kg of particular matter fell in the southern Indian state
of Kerala (Louis and Kumar 2006) and an initial report from
the Department of Meteorology suggested that this rainfall was
chemical in origin. Studies commissioned by the Indian govern-
ment analysed samples, which indicated that the red particles
possessed capsules but no DNA and were thought to be spores
of a lichen-forming alga belonging to the genus Trentepohlia
(White, Cerveny and Balling 2012). Chandra Wickramasinghe
contested these findings and suggested the recovered particles
‘represent an unknown microorganism of extraterrestrial ori-
gin’ (Wickramasinghe 2015, 161–67). Red rain was also reported

21 The Latin translates as ‘from some earthly contagion’.

22 Ernst Chladni’s last catalogue entry dated 3 May 1821 reads: ‘Red rain at
and near Giessen, during a calm, from a moderate-sized stratus … [that
contained] … chromic acid, oxide of iron, silica, lime, a trace of magnesia,
carbon, and several volatile substances, but no nickel.’

257
in 2013 over the Rakwana in the Kiwul-alla area, and then in
mid-November 2015, across the Indikolapelessa and Moneralga
district in Sri Lanka. On analysis, these samples confirmed the
presence of Trentepohlia spores (Rajgopal 2015). Although many
theories regarding the ontology of red rain exist, its formation
remains perplexing and is likely to have various and highly con-
tingent causes (Gat et al. 2017).
Outpourings of creatures falling from the sky have been re-
ported since ancient times, which Pliny the Elder attributed to
the natural but remarkable properties of water:

Water engulfs lands, quenches flames, climbs aloft, and lays

claim to even the sky, and by a covering of clouds chokes
the life-giving spirit that forces out thunderbolts, as the
world wages war with itself. What could be more amazing
than water standing in the sky? But as though it were a mere
trifle to reach such a great height, the water sucks up with
itself shoals of fish and often stones as well, carrying more
than its own weight aloft. (Pliny the Elder 1991, 272)

While transportation of a single species of creature from a

stream of pond as a consequence of ‘weather’ may seem extreme,
hurricanes and tornadoes are powerful enough to destroy build-
ings and may feasibly lift large particles in suspension into the
atmosphere (Radford 2010; BBC News 2014). With the onset of
climate change, the once seemingly recognisable patterns that
Lamarck and Howard described are becoming increasingly un-
reliable. While showers of creatures are visible indicators that
something in the natural cycles is unusual, the Anthropocene
has introduced invisible agents into the atmosphere as new car-
bon dioxide. Having been quiescent for around 350 to 300 mil-
lion years, this ancient source of carbon was first sequestered
and buried on a massive scale by plants as biomass and turned
into fossil fuels by subsequent geological events. With the ad-
vent of the Industrial Revolution which burned heavy oil to
fuel powerful machines like the Hornsby–Akroyd engine, this
recalcitrant carbon released by these dark ancient substances

258
is invading our skies and impacting on our weather systems as
global storming.
Metabolic weather is more than an atmospheric phenome-
non, but also penetrates into all the terrains composed of atomic
‘dusts’ that are held to the Earth’s surface by gravity — air, water,
and the soils. A generative platform for irrepressible synthesis,
constant mutability, and evolutionary transgressions, it may one
day precipitate the occurrence of new kinds of ‘life’. While the
chances that this will happen are extremely small, that life has
already occurred on this planet, significantly increases the like-
lihood of its recurrence.

… maybe life arose more than once at different locations

on the early Earth. Those other organisms might have their
own biochemistry and a separate evolutionary history …
there may be some organisms hiding on Earth today that
are based not on DNA and proteins but on a more primitive
type of biochemistry … Even if [it] were living out in the
open, the life detection tools that we have today would not
find it … because they assume that all metabolisms must
be similar to our own … There’s no reason in physics or
chemistry why these different ways of building a life-form
wouldn’t work … If life is easy to make and is widespread,
then it should have happened many times on Earth … The
best way to test for that is to look for it. (Zimmer 2007)

259
 06

LIFE AS RESTLESS FLÂNEUR

This chapter explores how liquid life resists
the decay towards thermodynamic equilib-
rium by working in conjunction with highly
structured and specific environments like
soil, eggs, and placentas to bring about the
conception, differentiation, development,
and maturation of living systems.

261
 06.1
Chicken and Egg

… while they waited for the sun to go down again, she

told them about the great big world outside the chick run,
or the days when she was a chick, or the story she liked
telling best of all — the Miracle story about Eggs. How
the broken fragments they had hatched from were once
smooth, complete shapes; how every chicken that ever was
had hatched out in exactly the same way; how only chooks
could lay such beauties; and how every time they did, they
were so filled with joy that they could not stay quiet, but
had to burst into song; and how their song was taken up
by England the cock and echoed by every single hen in the
Run. (Gage 1981, 11).

The inception of the bête machine provokes an existential para-

dox. Does a fully mature adult body, like a chicken, exist first to
create an egg, or is an egg a necessary precondition for a chicken?
This apparent paradox is a consequence of its secular, du-
alistic framing which considers living beings to pass through
discrete stages. However, the propagation of multicellular bio-
logical systems is sustained by ongoing exchanges between
lively bodies at different stages of development. Liquid life’s fun-
damental interconnectedness generates an inescapable ecology
of exchange, where bodies are inextricably permeated by and
entangled with others and their environments. Without asso-
ciated networks of other beings (such as the bacterial biome,
trees, earthworms, and mitochondria), living beings wither,
fade, and die out.
The conundrum of the chicken and egg only arises when
stages in a single lifecycle are conceptually isolated from each
other. Chickens are biological transformers that produce bio-
logical seeds of potentiality, where not all sexual encounters are
potent. Eggs are also transformational sites for choreograph-
ing the developing chicken-body through folded membranes,
which mediate the relationships between lively chemistries and

263
energy gradients to generate recognisable and repeatable body-
types. Transitioning between various states of being, the conti-
nuity between chickens and eggs persists, but is never absolute.
Every aspect of egg-ness (e.g., fertilised, unfertilised, egg shell
fragments) and chicken-ness (e.g., chick, pullet, hen, cockerel)
continue to give rise to creatures that share a ‘chicken’ ontology
but do not always epistemologically qualify as such. Chickens
may one day ‘evolve’ to become something ‘else’.
By viewing chicken-ness and egg-ness as a continuum, the
question of which stage precedes the other becomes redundant,
since the various forms of chicken–egg are continuous expres-
sions of an ongoing living process that is characterized by a
range of anatomical structures and physiological events, some
of which result in offspring. Rather than a paradox, the various
stages of life are produced by an ongoing function of complex
interdependencies, whose manifestations fluctuate accordingly
with time, encounter, and location. The continuity and sense
that unites all recognisable developmental stages is cleaved only
by deterministic object typologies that are imposed on living
systems through dualistic thought.

264
 06.2
Liquid Soils

I! I called myself a magician, an angel, free from all

moral constraint, I am sent back to the soil to seek some
obligation, to wrap gnarled reality in my arms! (Rimbaud
2005, 302)

Eggs and placentas are highly organised substrata that link the
cycles of life and death. Primed by liquid infrastructures they
act like fleshy soils, with microsites that complexify the build-
ing blocks of life, so that specific lifeforms can emerge. The
apparatuses of fertility — allantois, chorion, amnion, egg sac,
and placenta — choreograph mini-worlds. Pulsing with liquid
protocols, they guide the synthesis of particular states of be-
ing through manifolds of material organisation, which differ-
entially introduce time, space, and complexity into embryonic
developmental pathways. As pluripotent tissue masses become
organised through various spatial configurations, their twists,
rolls, and folds alter according to changing needs. As one set of
material negotiations is completed, another begins, until these
enfleshings form recognisable tissues and organs, which are ca-
pable of supporting a self-regulating being.

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06.3
Egg

I am their sign and epitaph,

the goose egg : 0 :
even the least of these — that is me…
Can we say to the unborn, Egg, who are you? Egg, divulge
your design. (Sandburg 1970, 324)

The amniotic egg typical of birds, reptiles, and dinosaurs pro-

duces four extraembryonic membranes that choreograph the
vital material exchanges necessary for embryogenesis. This ar-
moured world may be leathery, as in turtle eggs, or mineralised,
as in the shell of an ostrich. Each egg contains a liquid space that
enables embryos to develop outside a maternal body, but within,
the developing creature is not blind to the world.
The tough outer membrane, or chorion, that shelters the em-
bryo, captures these external vibrations and transmits them into
this microworld like the beat of a drum.
Powered by the developing heart, the amnion choreographs
the embryo’s metabolism through a rich network of blood ves-
sels and enables the conceptus to respire. Shaped by osmotic
forces and genetic programs, these iterations continue until an
immature being forms, complete with heartbeat and cirulation.
Nitrogenous waste from the maturation process is gathered
in another membrane called the allantois, which stretches from
the embryonic gut to the chorion and is anchored to the inside
of the egg shell, being left behind when the chick hatches.
The yolk sac meets all the embryo’s nutritional needs from in-
ternal reserves that are pre-provided by the maternal body and
is unsurprisingly large in comparison with the conceptus. Once
stores are exhausted, the chick, with a fully developed auditory
and vibratory understanding of the world, regards this depleted
space as a threat to its survival.
With sufficient strength, frustration, urgency, and encour-
agement from the shrieks of its kin, the chick breaks out of its

266
watery world into an alien realm, where it rapidly establishes an
alternative way of surviving.

267
06.4
Placenta

… ‘placenta’ was first used by Realdus Columbus in his

book De Re Anatomica published in 1559. Until then there
was no specific name for it and it was simply called the
‘afterbirth’. Descriptions of this ‘afterbirth’ were already
well documented in ancient literature, including the Old
Testament where it was referred to as the ‘Seat of the Soul’
or the ‘Bundle of Life’. (Loke 2013, 11)

As in the amniotic egg, mammalian embryos develop in liquid

environments, supported by a range of membranes. These are
not leathery skins and shells, but a placenta, a fleshy temporary
organ snuggled deep in the mother’s pelvis that ‘occupies a po-
sition midway between the baby and mother, in a kind of ‘no-
man’s land’’ (Loke 2013, 6). Enfolding embryos within a muscu-
lar cathedral of flesh, the placenta unites them with the mother’s
bloodstream through tissue cavities that are soaked in maternal
blood. Here, they negotiate their terms for survival — nutrition,
respiration, metabolism — so they can be accommodated until
they are semi-autonomous. At the moment of birth, foetuses
make a lightning change in reorganising their blood system, as
valves slam shut in response to their inflating lungs, so they may
thrive in air.
The evolutionary origins of this shared organ between moth-
er and child evolved from a developmental journey of opportu-
nity and survival that began after the worst mass extinction ever
at the end of the Permian period about 250 million years ago.
The creatures that would become mammals appeared 160 mil-
lion years ago and acquired their placentas through a sexually
transmitted infection, which affected the cloaca. The vectors of
this disease were syncytial retroviruses, which are particularly
prone to integrating their codes into the genetic makeup of host
cells that caused cloacal and embryonic tissues to fuse together
into a single, synchronous organ. This early placenta was a fu-
sion of cells that became so vascular and muscular that eggs

268
could thrive within its pouch-like outgrowth of the maternal
excretory cavity. While the tissue proliferation should have only
lasted for an adult lifetime, the proximity of the infective agents
to pre-mammalian sex cells increased the likelihood that the vi-
ral codes would be incorporated into their DNA and — although
certain mammalian groups such as pangolins were missed
out — became part of the story of mammalian evolution.
This strange evolutionary pathway was discovered by genetic
analysis when the placental hormone syncytin was found to
share homologies with syncytial retroviruses. Mediated through
cell-cell fusion, these infections became integral to their hosts’
reproductive cycles on around six separate occasions (Zimmer
2012), resulting in muscular placentas that enabled mammalian
embryos to bind to their mothers during the most vulnerable
time of their development.

269
06.5
Hydatids

The strange embryonic cancers known as hydatid moles and

chorionic carcinomas problematise beliefs that developing life
is innately benign. Both types of cancer are made up of greedy,
ambitious, and unruly cell populations that do not engage in
diplomatic negotiations with metabolic or genetic networks and
lack meaningful relationship with their communities. These
virulent beings are as old as multicellular life. Evidence of tu-
mour formation has been found in hydra, which are creatures
that existed during the Vendian epoch around 650–540 million
years ago. Possessing a very simple body plan that is composed
of only two cell layers, which are maintained by three independ-
ent stem cell lineages (Bosch 2009), hydra appear not to age or
to die of old age (Martinez 1998). Tumours arising in the stem
cell population may therefore accumulate in large quantities,
as they are not removed by programmed cell death. These ma-
lignancies affect only female hydra and share similarities with
ovarian cancers in humans (Domazet-Lošo et al. 2014). Within
a ‘normotypical’ body, cell proliferation and coordinated cell
death are critical for shaping the emerging embryo. In this way,
embryos become appropriately structured and differentiated,
through the rolling, folding, and invaginating of body cavities,
which enables their independent existence, away from the nur-
turing environment.
Hydatid moles arise from ‘empty’ fertilised eggs where the
paternal genome takes over embryogenesis. Their rare and slow-
growing tissue masses are full of empty cysts with a character-
istic ‘grape-like’ appearance. Those that begin to differentiate
generate unruly structures with resemblances to hair, teeth, se-
baceous glands, and bone. A small number of hydatids become
choriocarcinomas, which are monstrously malignant cells that
are life-threatening to the host.
Both cancers unleash the relentless pluripotency of liquid life
to the point of wilful disobedience. This is not an ‘error’ in their
nature but unconstrained vigour, which refuses to cooperatively

270
engage with nurturing systems. Trapped down long, winding
blind alleys, the virulent cells strive to resist decay towards equi-
librium, creatively inventing their way towards autonomy but
ultimately fail in this quest, since they consume both their host
and themselves in the process.

271
 07

LIQUID BEINGS
The relationships between liquid environ-
ments and their inhabitants are explored
through their exudates, developmental cy-
cles, cultural provocations, embodiments,
and appearances. Many of these creatures
defy classical conventions of body plan,
behaviour, and character, posing paradoxes
of existence that exceed the programmatic
logic of the bête machine.

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 07.1
Liquid Paradoxa

It is useless and tedious to represent what exists, because

nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer
the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial.
(Baudelaire 1955, 233)

Since ancient times, unclassifiable bodies have inhabited in-

subordinate liquid landscapes, which were entangled with their
character. Even today, many of these beings remain largely un-
scrutinsed, or imagined. In the Icelandic saga of Örvar-Odds,
a crew bound for Helluland (Baffin Island) encounter two sea
monsters. One of these beasts — the hagufa, or sea-mist — is
thought to be the Kraken, which appears more like a land mass
than a creature and seems incapable of reproducing itself:

Now I will tell you that there are two sea-monsters. One is
called the hafgufa [sea-mist], another lyngbakr [heather-
back]. It [the lyngbakr] is the largest whale in the world, but
the hafgufa is the hugest monster in the sea. It is the nature
of this creature to swallow men and ships, and even whales
and everything else within reach. It stays submerged for
days, then rears its head and nostrils above surface and stays
that way at least until the change of tide. Now, that sound
we just sailed through was the space between its jaws, and
its nostrils and lower jaw were those rocks that appeared in
the sea, while the lyngbakr was the island we saw sinking
down. However, Ogmund Tussock has sent these creatures
to you by means of his magic to cause the death of you
[Odd] and all your men. He thought more men would have
gone the same way as those that had already drowned [i.e.
to the lyngbakr, which was not an island, and sank], and
he expected that the hafgufa would have swallowed us all.
Today I sailed through its mouth because I knew that it had
recently surfaced. (Boer 1888, 132)

275
During the sixteenth century, the systematic rationalisation of
these creatures began. Conrad Gessner composed Historiae
Animalium, a 4,500-page encyclopaedia of animals, which in-
cluded animals like the unicorn, the basilisk, and mermaids,
although he had only come across them in medieval bestiaries
(Senter, Mattox and Haddad 2016). This one-man search engine
founded modern zoology through a database of encyclopaedic
works, as a means to understand the moral lessons within the
animal kingdom and the divine truths they revealed.
However, Ulisse Aldrovandi is considered the ‘father’ of natu-
ral history. Inspired by Gessner, he assembled a spectacular cabi-
net1 of around 7,000 curiosities as a theatre of natural history. In
addition to his encyclopaedic collection, he also made publica-
tions. The most famous of these is the Storia Naturale, which is
considered the most complete description of the mineral, vegeta-
ble, and animal kingdoms of nature of the time, while his Mon-
strorum Historia documented ‘monstrous’ human and animal
deformities, as well as mythological beasts (Aldrovandi 2002).

… Natural Things, such as either [Nature] hath retained the

same from the beginning, or freely produces in her ordinary
course; as Animals, Plants, and the universal furniture
of the World. Secondly, her extravagancies and deficits,
occasioned either by the exuberancy of matter, or obstinacy
of impediments, as in Monsters. And then lastly, as she is
restrained, forced, fashioned, or determined, by Artificial
Operations. All which, without absurdity, may fall under the
general notation of Natural History … (Plot 1677)

While early natural historians took an inclusive approach to

the diversity of creatures, Carolus Linnaeus began to erase un-
known and fabulous creatures from his accounts. In his first edi-
tion of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus included a section on ‘Para-
doxa’ (monsters) — a category of uncategorisable beings — to

1 Some of the specimens can still be seen at the Museum Aldrovendi in Palaz-
zo Poggi, Bologna.

276
demystify the natural world, which was largely characterised
by chimeras and allegorical beasts like the Pelican (Linnaeus
1735, 29). Although he had not seen a Kraken, he likened it to
a cuttlefish, classifying it as a cephalopod Microcosmus mari-
nus.2 He also gave an account of it in Fauna Svecica (Linnaeus
1746) as a ‘unique monster’ that inhabited the Norwegian seas.
In later editions of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus removed these
references, apparently relenting that he had included imaginary
creatures in a scientific text. Prone to changing his mind about
his classification system, his rationalisation of the living world
became a lifelong process of discovery and refinement, which
banished such creatures to the realms of folklore.
However, ‘monsters’ could not be entirely rationalised away
and with the progressive study of the natural world, the scien-
tific value of anatomical non-conformity was championed by
Francis Bacon in Novum Organum (1620), by categorising bio-
logical ‘errors’, so their origins could be better understood (Leroi
2005, 1). Later, William Harvey in On Animal Generation (1651)
even named causal links between development and adult form,
suggesting that monstrous chickens were produced from eggs
with two yolks (Leroi 2005, 10).
While advances in reproductive technologies and the advent
of genetics have provided a deductive toolset though which the
inheritance of traits can be described, the relationships between
genes, organelles, cells, body parts, and overall phenotypes, are
still far from resolved. Treating organic materials as building
blocks that can be compiled like machines, using advanced bio-
technologies like biobricks and genetic sequences, continues to
prove particularly challenging, as creatures are ‘other’ than the
sum of their ‘parts’ (Bull 2015).

2 Linnaeus also referred to Microcosmus marinus in his publication Fauna

Svecica (Linnaeus 1746).

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07.2
Eradicating Monsters

He grew up convinced that he was just the dregs of someone

else, someone better … he wrote about the Idea and its
Shadow, that something real and individual can exist,
perfect in its uniqueness, along with something more hazy,
reflected, and, like every reflection, discontinuous, full of
imperfections and thus false … (Tokarczuk 2003, 160)

Although gene-editing methods using natural enzymes, such as

CRISPR, may one day eliminate rare genetic diseases, they are
not ‘error’-free and, despite He Jiankui’s claim to have altered
the DNA of twin girls before birth (Sataline and Sample 2018),
are far more expensive and risky than embryo selection. To con-
fer an egg with favoured traits, many of them must first be har-
vested so they can be fertilised, studied, and selected outside the
womb before the appropriate genes may be implanted.
While genetic sequencing is now affordable to the point
where gene-sequencing for ancestral and medical reasons is
available as a commercial service, interpretations must remain
circumspect. Only for a rare number of instances does one gene
code for a single trait. Far more commonly, multiple genetic se-
quences influence each other and are also sensitive to environ-
mental influences, so it hard to make specific predictions based
on the presence, or absence, of a single gene. Furthermore, de-
sirable qualities like ‘intelligence’ (see section 02.4) are not easy
to define let alone genetically isolate, as they are based on exist-
ing value systems (Ball 2017a). Despite insights into embryolog-
ical development and advances in molecular control, in striving
to prevent monsters through their rationalisation, we are more
likely to produce them.

Our very understanding of who we are, of the life-forms

we are and the forms of life we inhabit, have folded bios
back to zoe. By this I mean that the question of the good

278
 life — bios — has become intrinsically a matter of the vital
processes of our animal life — zoe. (Rose 2006, 83).

Despite Bacon’s wish for a controllable natural world, wherever

we impose command-and-control tactics upon living systems,
they find ways of subverting our intentions by producing hy-
brids, chimeras, shapeshifters, mutants, and all kinds of terato-
genic in-betweens.

It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed

its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway
into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
… The Thing cannot be described — there is no language
for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such
eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic
order. (Lovecraft 2002, 67)

As we move from an age of physics to one of biology, we dis-

cover a time of monsters, whose nature exceeds our ability to
control them. Alternative value systems must be found if we are
to appropriately and creatively engage their transgressive recal-
citrance.

[We cannot] disregard the life and the passion of the

creature, which [are] its essence … in the thought of Nature
herself, there is, in a plant, nothing else but its flowers.
(Ruskin 1900, 62)

279
07.3
Liquid Development

‘… like blowing glass,’ like liquefying a part that needs

sculpting and then letting its new form set. (Cepelewicz
2018)

‘See through’ zebrafish (danio rerio) embryos are used as a high-

ly accessible model for the study of vertebrate development,
turning from a ball of cells into a fully-formed fish outside the
mother, where it is possible to observe their protean character
from the inception of their lives.
Alongside the traditional focus on morphology, more recent
studies evaluate the distribution of internal forces and better
characterise their transformation through their material prop-
erties. Focusing on the long axis of the embryo’s body, Otger
Campàs showed that developing cells can freely flow past each
other at the tip of what becomes the tail, just like liquid. Closer
to its head however, cells are increasingly jammed together and
behave more like a viscous solid like glass, colloids, and foams
(Serwane et al. 2016).
Tissue liquidation happens as the result of rapid cell division,
where multiplying cells become round and detach from their
neighbours. This occurs so rapidly that they eventually lose so
many contacts they reach the ‘fluidity transition’. Occurring
suddenly, at a very specific time and location within the em-
bryo’s development, this mechanical change turns part of the
zebrafish to liquid (Petridou et al. 2018). The various fluid states
and forces determine how the developing body elongates and
sculpts various structures along its axis. Previously, the posi-
tion of cells was thought to result from finely-tuned and gradual
forces that guided everything into place, similar to moulding
ceramics. However, these recent studies reveal that embryologi-
cal development is comprised of disruptive transitions where
creatures are strategically liquefied, moulded, and allowed to set
into their new form (Cepelewicz 2018).

280
 These embryological findings attest that liquid life is com-
prised of many fluids, fluid states, and transitions, which under-
pin the irreducibly protean nature of organisms. We are liquid
at our origin and our core.

281
07.4
Siphonophores

All of these definitions of individuality are in alignment in

most of the organisms we are familiar with. A bird, a rose
bush, and a fly are all individuals as functional entities,
according to their ancestry, and as units of [natural]
selection. This makes it easy to get lulled into thinking of
individuality as a monolithic property. (Encyclopedia of
Life 2017)

Siphonophores are spectacular colonial creatures that chal-

lenge the singular nature of ‘being’. While their progenitors
have been on this planet for a billion years (Steele, David and
Technau 2012), their precarious organisation, reminiscent of a
feather boa, evades clear and efficient explanation. Fragile, and
fragmenting even under the slightest touch, their peculiar com-
position offers insights into the complexity of multicellular life
and raises questions about the nature of embodiment. Around
180 species of siphonophores are known which, like Praya dubia,
can sometimes reach 40–50 metres in length (longer than a blue
whale). Broadly speaking, they are long, thin, clear gelatinous,
and efficient predators, which use their many tentacles and lethal
venom to ensnare crustaceans and small fish. While the Portu-
guese man o’ war, Physalia physalis, dwells on the surface of the
sea and rhodaliids use their tentacles to attach themselves to the
ocean floor, the vast majority are pelagic swimmers that move
gracefully in the water column of the open ocean (Sirucek 2014).
Once considered a distinct species of animal known as
cnidarians (Haeckel 1888), they were later found to have evolved
from colonial hydrozoans, which are made up of cells that form
societies together and are related to jellyfish, anemones, and
corals. Currently, siphonophores are arguably identified as su-
perorganisms, as they grow from a single embryo by budding
off genetically identical zooids, which are the cells that make
up the creature’s body, which then become differentiated and
spatially organised into highly specialised types. Each plays a

282
particular role in the colony, including: protection, digestion,
locomotion, reproduction, and making artificial (biolumines-
cent) light to attract food. Rather than separating as individuals,
siphonophore zooids remain entangled and become integrated
into the superorganism. Grouped through species-specific re-
peating patterns along the creature’s stem, they perform specific
organ tasks.

Unless disturbed, Stephanomia apparently remain perfectly

quiescent, and in an inclined position. The pneumatophore
causes the whole organism to float to the top of still water,
and that part of the stem bearing the nectophores hangs
vertically below it, but the rest of the stem falls away from
the basal nectophores at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
The reason for this seems obvious, for in this position the
long contractile filaments hang separately, vertically, and
evenly spaced, whereas if the whole organism assumed a
vertical position in the quiescent state the filaments would
hang down together as one cluster, with a relatively small
volume of water with its contained organisms exposed to
their influence … Contact of any small particle with a single
filament or tentacle causes the instantaneous contraction
of the latter towards its associated gastrozoid. Stronger
stimulation of one or more filaments not only results in
their contraction, but also that of the stem itself up to the
base of the nectophores. (Berrill 1930)

Buoyed up by the pneumatophore, a gas-filled float, at their tip,

muscular nectophores propel the siphonophore superorganism
through the water like a beating heart, where individual move-
ments are coordinated by a distributed nervous system. Form-
ing a deadly, graceful net, their tentacles wave food towards the
organism, which triggers deadly stinging cells. These cnidocytes
are arguably the most complex cells of any animals, as they are
densely packed into the cnidoband, which fires the sticky cni-
docytes as a single unit from the tentacles and injects toxins into
the prey through a hollow harpoon. Along the stem, the many

283
mouths and stomachs of gastrozooids feed the colony with their
digested products. While specialised zooids are continually
added to the creature by budding, new colonies are produced
sexually through gonozooids that bear numerous spheroidal
female and male gonophores. These egg and sperm cells are re-
leased into the open water, where they dance briskly together
around the fertilisation site before they fuse and start a new col-
ony that arises from a single embryo. While each cell has some
independence from the colony, and is capable of its own move-
ments, zooids cannot reproduce or survive independently but
depend on the creature’s collective specialisations. While their
developmental and physiological complexity exceeds rational
accounts of the nature of being, siphonophores’ exquisite chore-
ography celebrates the existence of wondrous monsters.

… how could there be Chimera with three bodies rolled

into one, in front a lion, at the rear a serpent, in the middle
a she-goat that her name implies, belching from her jaws a
dire flame born of her body? If anyone pretends that such
monsters could have been begotten when the earth was
young and the sky new … it is no indication that beasts
could have been created of intermingled shapes with limbs
compounded from different species. (Lucretius 2007, 198–99)

284
 07.5
Liquid Experiences

Every time I walk on grass I feel sorry because I know the

grass is screaming at me … Plants are extraordinary. For
instance … if you pinch a leaf of a plant you set off electrical
impulse. You can’t touch a plant without setting off an
electrical impulse … There is no question that plants have
all kinds of sensitivities. They do a lot of responding to an
environment. They can do almost anything you can think
of. (Ritzer and Smart 2001, 532)

Alternative forms of embodiment necessitate different kinds of

consciousness. Descartes only attributed self-consciousness to
humanity and so regarded the screams of animals as no more
than physiological ‘noise’, produced by simple reflexes. Perhaps
the same error is now being made with plants, which, viewed
from the perspective of the bête machine, are slow and unintelli-
gent clockwork-like mechanisms. In his 1751 treatise Philosophia
Botanica, Carl Linnaeus proposed that the opening and closing
of flowers could be used to tell the time. Based on field observa-
tions, he divided flowers into three categories: the meteorici that
open and close with the weather; the tropici, which follow the
changing hours of daylight; and the aequinoctales, which ‘open
precisely at a certain hour of the day and generally shut up every
day at a determinate hour’ (Tortello 2015).
While plants appear to be solid, they possess a liquid heart.
Plunged randomly into the belly of a site, seedlings are equipped
with an extremely robust molecular vocabulary that helps them
orchestrate the site around them, to bring the necessary flow of
resources, which will enable them to thrive. Working with light,
soil structure, nutrients, water, toxins, microbes, temperature,
gravity, and chemical signals from other plants, plants bend
the world around them to meet their needs. Since their move-
ments and responses happen much more slowly than animals,
we largely overlook their potency.

285
 During the nineteenth century, a range of scientific experi-
ments explored the possibility of plant sensibility, which mir-
rored ongoing debates regarding ‘vitalism’ and ‘brute’ ma-
terialism. Charles Darwin identified the plant radicle as the
anatomical structure capable of making decisions about the
plant’s environment (Darwin 2009). Taking an animistic per-
spective, Gustav Fechner suggested in 1848 that plants were ca-
pable of emotions, which could affect their growth and in 1900,
Jagadish Chandra Bose began conducting experiments using a
crescograph to establish how seasons and external stimuli affect-
ed plant life, which allowed people to take better care of plants.
In 1920, Patrick Geddes, who explored ways of integrating tech-
nological and natural process to give rise to a ‘eutechnic’ age,
where technology would harmonise with the Earth’s needs (Bud
1993, 68), noted that Bose had found plants to possess ‘all the
characteristics of the responses exhibited by the animal tissues’
(Geddes 1920, 121). These provocations were regarded as having
limited value for modern science at the time, but by the latter
part of the twentieth century, owing to widespread awareness of
planetary systems, they were given new importance. Notions of
non-anthropocentric notions of ‘intelligence’ could be studied
in new ways with the capacity to study tissues in molecular de-
tail, with insights brought by ecological sciences. It now appears
that plants have evolved the capacity to make decisions about
how they respond to their surroundings, with up to 20 distinc-
tive types of sensory systems that possess similarities to animal
senses, including smell, taste, sight, touch, and sound, which is
thought to act as a ‘radar’ system to locate nearby objects.

… our ‘fetishization’ of neurons, as well as our tendency to

equate behavior with mobility, keeps us from appreciating
what plants can do. For instance, since plants can’t run away
and frequently get eaten, it serves them well not to have any
irreplaceable organs … A plant has a modular design, so
it can lose up to ninety per cent of its body without being
killed … There’s nothing like that in the animal world. It
creates a resilience. (Pollan 2013)

286
The flows of matter that take place within and between plant
bodies at a specific site, as well as other species like fungi and
bacteria, collectively produce coherent environments and land-
scapes that regulate terrains as large as forests. Sharing a com-
mon information-processing infrastructure, these ecosystems
coordinate their collective actions through air, water, soil, as
well as the actions of many different organisms (Trewvas 2003).

… now we know that trees can learn. This means they must
store experiences somewhere, and therefore, there must
be some kind of storage mechanism inside the organism.
Just where it is, no one knows, but the roots are the part
of the tree best suited to the task … the root network is in
charge of all the chemical activity in the tree … For there to
be something we would recognise as a brain, neurological
processes must be involved, and for these, in addition to
chemical messages, you need electrical impulses. And these
are precisely what we can measure in the tree … (Wohlleben
2016, 82–83)

The astonishing, inner worlds of plants can be viewed through

their liquid exchanges, which casts them — not as automa-
ta — but as social beings that can count, learn, remember, feel
pain, communicate, have families, and nurture their kin. Cer-
tain trees may even entwine their welfare like a married couple
and, should one of them fade, they then die together. The open
exchanges that occur within forests are not limited to specific
plants species, but extend throughout the entire ecosystem to
create the conditions for the thriving of all (Wohlleben 2016).

The [couple’s] life is mysterious, it is like a forest, from far-

off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but
closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow,
the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only
prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds,
spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee
at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers. And

287
 all of this dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving.
There are really two kinds of life. There is … the one you are
living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes
the trouble, this other we long to see. (Salter 1975, 23–24)

288
 07.6
Distributed Bodies

Surpassing our expectations of lived time and space, as well as

out-weirding siphonophores in their modes of organisation, the
clonal superorganisms of certain plants reach unprecedented
dimensions that challenge the familiar stories of life.
The pando grove of Populus tremuloides, a male quaking as-
pen tree in Utah’s Fishlake national forest, is a single organism
that looks like a forest. Covering more than 100 acres of land, its
47,000 genetically identical trunks, or stema, push up through
the ground from a shared network of roots with a combined
biomass of around 6 million kilograms (Casselman 2007). Al-
though individual trees live between 100 to 150 years, the super-
organism is around 80,000 years old and is likely to have been
spreading its clones for more than a million years (Bartels 2016),
but it is not unique in its epic dimensions.
Covering the greatest surface area of land for any known
organism is a honey fungus, which is a resident of the Blue
Mountains of Oregon. Composed of several different species
of parasitic fungi in the genus Armillaria, it colonises and kills
a variety of trees and woody plants which are strewn with the
edible yellow-brown fruiting bodies (mushroom) of its much
larger network of rhizomorphs and hyphae, which collectively
form a vegetative mass known as the mycelium.

The mushroom spawn lives thanks to the fact that it sucks

up the remains of juices from whatever dies, whatever is
decaying and soaking into the earth. The mushroom spawn
is the life of death, the life of decay, the life of whatever has
died … All year the mushroom spawn bears its cold, wet
children … it gives them all the strength to grow and the
power to spread their spores … to all corners of the world.
(Tokarczuk 2010, 158)

Mycelia can span staggering areas of land and frequently persist

longer than any animal. In 1998, a gargantuan fungus, Armillar-

289
ia solidipes,3 was discovered in Oregon, which occupies almost
2,400 acres of soil — the equivalent of around 1,665 football
pitches — and is estimated to be around 2,400 years old.

The mushroom spawn grows under the entire forest … In

the earth under the soft forest flow, under the grass and
stones, it creates a tangle of slender threads, strings and
bundles, which it twines around everything. The threads
of the mushroom spawn have great strength and push
their way in between every clod of earth, tangle around
tree roots and restrain huge boulders in the infinitely
gradual onward motions. The mushroom spawn is like
mould — cold, white, and delicate — underground lunar
lace, damp, hem-stitched mycelia, the world’s slimy
umbilical cords. (Tokarczuk 2010, 157)

In 1992, a 1500-year-old fungus, Armillaria gallica, which lives

in hardwood forests near Crystal Falls, weighing around 9,500
kilograms and traversing 37 acres, was discovered, while an
Armillaria solidipes was distributed over an area of 1,500 acres
in southwestern Washington (Fleming 2014).
The oldest known plant does not live on the land but is an
aquatic clonal species of Mediterranean seagrass, Posidonia oce-
ania. Beginning its life at the time of the Ice Ages in the late
Pleistocene, it is said to be 200,000 years old. Descended from a
terrestrial lineage of monocotyledons — which include grasses,
lilies, and palms — they are anchored by roots that distribute
nutrients through an internal vascular system (Reynolds 2018).
These vegetal clonal creatures work together as one, creeping
like liquids through time and space to collectively resist entropic
decay and shape our environments by stealth through their per-
sistent metabolic exchanges.

3 This species was previously known as Armillaria oystoyae.

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 07.7
Life as Paradox

The intellectual and mechanical odyssey of the western

mind rests on the rejection of new paradoxes, forgetting
that life itself is paradoxical. This blindness does not come
for free, there is a price to pay for ignoring the paradoxes of
life. (Chatelin 2012, 9)

The modern story of life is as much about scientific storytelling,

as gathering repeatable, measurable evidence. The pioneers of
this narrative making were explorers and natural philosophers
like Charles Darwin, who recorded their observations in diaries,
as illustrations, and through surveys. No matter how peculiar
their findings turned out to be — such as the co-evolution of
orchids and insects, where Darwin predicted the existence of a
long-tongued moth to draw from the long nectary of Angraecum
sesquipedale — mechanistic principles were routinely applied to
establish causality in their observations, which in some cases,
caused remarkable distortions in perception and understanding.

At last I understood the mechanism of the flower. (Darwin

2001, 100)

When viewed through the familiar sequences of causal relation-

ships, where offspring are smaller than their parents, creatures
like the ‘paradoxical frog’, whose adult form is smaller than the
tadpole, was interpreted as a ‘retrograde’ creature by research-
ers, thought to represent a ‘missing link’ in the story of evolu-
tion.

Pseudis is a peculiar South American frog, peculiar in

the fact that it grows smaller as it becomes adult, and in
possessing a nearer approach to a thumb than any of its
relatives. It is much to be doubted whether there is anything
in the actual history of an individual belonging to this

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 genus that calls for an amount of notoriety to which the
most common toad or frog may not aspire … In fact, as
often happens in the case of men, Pseudis owes much of his
reputation to a mistaken estimate. If we might trace him
from as early a period as men have seen until well advanced
in life, we should probably see nothing more than takes
place in the history of all batrachians … His first mention in
literature … [is] through some Dutch collectors in Surinam,
[when] Albert Seba secured specimens of the adult and
of the large larvae with and without limbs. Comparing
the smaller with the larger he came to the conclusion that
the development was retrograde: that the animal was at
first a frog, then acquired a tail, then lost its limbs, and
finally — the remote resemblance between the soils of
the intestine and the sucking disk of the gobies probably
suggesting the idea — became a fish … This version of the
story was at first accepted by Linné [Linnaeus] … A little
exercise of imagination enables one to see them grasping
and swinging from the branches of the plants by means of
the opposable thumb; whether this is its use is a question.
One can imagine the tail and feet both required in the
pursuit of rapidly moving prey or in escape from lively
enemies, but it is only supposition. However, we shall
wait another chapter in the history before accepting [this
creature] as one of the ‘missing links’; the reputation of
Pseudis as a deceiver is too well established. (Garman 1877)

Linnaeus was so convinced by this interpretation that he de-

scribed it as ‘Frog Changing into Fish’ in the Paradoxa of his
first edition:

Frog-Fish or Frog Changing into Fish: is much against

teaching. Frogs, like all Amphibia, delight in lungs and
spiny bones. Spiny fish, instead of lungs, are equipped
with gills. Therefore the laws of Nature will be against
this change. If indeed a fish is equipped with gills, it will
be separate from the Frog and Amphibia. If truly [it has]

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 lungs, it will be a Lizard: for under all the sky it differs from
Chondropterygii and Plagiuri. (Linnaeus 1735, 29)

By the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus had named

the creature Rana paradoxa.
While scientific rationalism imposes its narrative of me-
chanical order upon the living world, our everyday experiences
appreciate the extraordinary nature and innate disobedience of
natural systems that not only have the power to surprise us, but
sometimes seemingly overturn the established laws of physics.
Life’s peculiar phenomenology remains resistant to rational and
universal explanations, where tales of natural paradoxes are not
always celebrated, as recounted in the temptation of Saint An-
thony. Although the holy man’s faith ultimately triumphs over
the temptations and horrors of sin and evil, it comes at the price
of being confronted with his worst nightmare — the disintegra-
tion of the order of natural realm.

Then a singular being appears — having the head of a man

upon the body of a fish … He approaches through the
air, upright, beating the sand from time to time with his
tail; and the patriarchal aspect of his face by contrast with
his puny little arms, causes Anthony to laugh … ‘Respect
me! I am the contemporary of beginnings. I dwelt in that
formless world where hermaphroditic creatures slumbered,
under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the deeps of
dark waters — when fingers, fins, and wings were blended,
and eyes without heads were floating like mollusks, among
human-headed bulls, and dog-footed serpents. Above the
whole of these beings, Omokoca, bent like a hoop, extended
her woman-body. But Belus cleft her in two halves; with
one he made the earth; with the other, heaven; — and the
two equal worlds do mutually contemplate each other. I, the
first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss that might
harden matter, and give a law unto forms: — also I taught
men to fish and to sow: I gave them knowledge of writing,
and of the history of the gods. Since then I have dwelt in the

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 deep pools left by the Deluge. But the desert grows vaster
about them; the winds cast sand into them; the sun devours
them; — and I die upon my couch of slime, gazing at the
stars through the water. Thither I return!’ (Flaubert 2002,
126–27)

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 07.8
Living Drop

Just think of all the things that are transparent and seem
not to be so. Paper, for instance, is made up of transparent
fibres, and it is white and opaque only the same reason that a
powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper, fill up
the interstices between the particles with oil so that there is
no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and
it becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but
cotton fibre, linen fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and bone,
Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp, in
fact the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood
and the black pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent,
colourless tissue. So little suffices to make visible one to the
other. For the most part the fibres of a living creature are no
more opaque than water. (Wells 2012, 91)

In transitioning from water to air, creatures developed thicker

integuments that became skins, and established firmer negotiat-
ing boundaries with their surroundings. Occupying an exquisite
twilight zone between interior and exterior, the fluid bodies of
frogs offer a unique view and ‘living’ window to their precarious
and environmentally nuanced existence.
The tiny, newly discovered species of glass frog Hyalinoba-
trachium yaku, lives in the Ecuadorean Amazon. With a distinct
mating call and unique DNA profile, it is entirely transparent.
Its see-through abdominal skin renders the lower jaw, urinary
bladder, reproductive system, head, pericardium, and heart
completely visible (Kluger 2017). It is so clear that in the Kichwa
language it is called yuka, or living drop of water. This shadow-
less bead of life produces eggs, albeit unusually on the under-
side of leaves, from which tadpoles drop into the water, but with
its discovery came the realisation that its habitat is under seri-
ous threat by road development and ongoing oil exploitation.
With their pending extinction, even if these rare creatures are
preserved in museum collections, they don’t provide the same

295
detail about their existence as in real life. Not only do their eyes
lose their vital spark, but the preservation process actually alters
their appearance, making it difficult to tell different populations
of glass frogs from each other.
Diaphanous, or see-though, frog specimens are more widely
used as indicators of environmental pollution in urban surveys
to reveal the presence of harmful mutagens, as their permeable
bodies are closely coupled to fluctuations in their surroundings.
When 60 frogs were studied on toxic land near Krasnouralsk,
which is located in central Russia’s Tyumen Oblast region, sev-
eral specimens were found to have minor structural changes,
including dark pigmentation and extra digits (Keartes 2016). In-
habiting a twilight zone between the land and water, the incred-
ible permeability of frogs, as highly organised ‘drops’ of water
that are deeply entangled with their habitats, is matched only
by their robustness and ultimate fragility, where life is fluid at
its core.

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 07.9
Bombardier Beetle

There is (they say) a Wild Beast in Paeonia, which is

called Bonasus, with a Mane like an Horse, but otherwise
resembling a Bull; and his Horns bend so inwardly, with
their Tips toward the Head, that they are of no Service for
Fight, and therefore he hath recourse to Flight for Safety;
and in it throwing out his Dung at intervals to the Distance
of three Acres, the Contact of which burneth them that
follow, like so much Fire. (Pliny 1991, 21)

Capable of transforming the mundane into the spectacular, the

bombardier beetle sprays its aggressors with boiling hot, caustic
fluids from special glands in its hind abdominal section. These
weapons can be angled in virtually any direction, like a personal
pepper spray. The apparatus has been claimed by proponents
of intelligent design to be an example of irreducible complex-
ity — in other words, a biological feature that is too complex to
have evolved without influence by an external agency, or ‘intel-
ligent design’ (Behe 2006, 31–45).
At first glance the system seems highly complex, as the beetle
mixes its arsenal on demand from stores that are situated in the
chambers of its hindquarters. When aggravated, two chemical
precursors — hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinones — are dis-
charged into a reaction chamber that is lined with cells, which
secrete catalytic enzymes. Here, the peroxide and hydroquinone
are catalysed in situ to form intense heat and oxygen, which gen-
erates the pressure needed to expel irritant p-quinones in the
direction of the aggressor. Released through openings at the tip
of the abdomen in a hissing volley of blasts (Chandler 2015),
these noxious sprays are capable of incapacitating insect aggres-
sors like ants. The chemical burn also deters much larger foes,
such as amphibians.
Although ingenious, these ingredients are rather common
and uncomplicated metabolic products and bombardier beetles
have figured out how to store and combine them — rather than

297
breaking them down, or using them up. Hydrogen peroxide
is a natural metabolic by-product in almost all creatures, and
insects already produce quinones to harden their shells. While
there is no convincing fossil record to chart the specific evolu-
tion of this species, it redeploys an established portfolio of bio-
chemistry without recourse to predetermined mechanisms, or
external creators (Simon 2014a).

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 07.10
Slippery Face

While mathematical narratives, such as the Golden Ratio,

sought to establish ‘beauty’ in nature through an understanding
of symmetrical frameworks, some creatures refuse to conform
to these expectations.
Long-tailed short-faced eels, or Pythonichthys macrurus, are
rarely caught since they bury themselves face first into the muck
and silt of shallow seawaters, using their solid, conical skulls as
drill bits. Found in tropical waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean
off Panama and in the Atlantic Ocean near the Caribbean Sea
and the west coast of Africa, they were first identified in 1912 by
Charles Tate Regan, who classified them under the genus Heter-
enchelys. In a recent trawl survey, two of these long and slithery
creatures rebuffed the Enlightenment dictum of symmetry at-
tributed to nature, being oddly skewed like flatfish and their fac-
es strangely slipped to one side. With tiny eyes, tilted jaws, and
most of their teeth surrendered, the eels had developed blind
sides, where one specimen possessed a single eye that was com-
pletely buried in flesh (Martinez and Stiassny 2017). Their bod-
ies were also asymmetrical, with one flank assigned the status of
a colourless underbelly (Buehler 2017). Although the study sam-
ple was small, it remains unclear whether these shape-shifters
are one-off variants of mostly bilaterally symmetrical species,
or if they share the perplexing asymmetry of the flatfish clade,
which re-sculpture their heads during development, so that one
eye migrates to join the other.

The bones in [the young flatfish’s] skull bend and shift

as one eye forces its way to the opposite side of the head.
Its whole body begins to tip over, so it has to swim at an
angle. One of its flanks turns a sickly pallor; the other
becomes colourfully flecked, matching the speckled sand
on the seafloor. Eventually, when it is large enough, the
transformed flatfish sinks and settles on its newly blind
side. It is now a young adult bottom-feeder with two eyes

299
 on the same side of its head, a contorted mouth, and one
fin squashed against the sand. It will spend the rest of its life
this way. (Jabr 2014)

With its face fully displaced on one side of its body, the crea-
ture’s whole world changes. It abandons ways of swimming to
navigate the ocean, and as its vertical orientation in the water
changes, its inner ears overrule its eyes. Clinging to the sea floor,
the flatfish learns how to lie perpetually sideways.
Slowly as our facial skeleton grows and ossifies, the muscles
inserted into our facial skin produce rapidly changing expres-
sions that wrinkle with age, emotion, and gravity, so that we
may smile and frown at the world.

… Skin on skin becomes conscious, as does skin on mucus

membrane and mucus membrane on itself. Without this
folding, without the contact of the self on itself, there would
truly be no internal sense, not body properly speaking,
cœnesthesia even less so, no real image of the body: we
would live without consciousness; slippery smooth and
on the point of fading away. Klein bottles are a model
of identity. We are the bearers of skewed, not quite flat,
unreplicated surfaces, deserts over which consciousness
passes fleetingly, leaving no memory. (Serres 2016, 22)

Faces are far from superficial organs. When we augment, or

alter them, using makeup or surgery, our emotions and feel-
ings change too, although exactly how these are entangled is
not fully understood (Neal and Chartrand 2011). In the case of
mud-dwelling creatures, their relative invisibility and functional
freakiness ensures that their anatomical slippages and morpho-
logical chimerical tendencies, continue to remain closely guard-
ed secrets of the deep.

Its deviation from the identity principle consigns it to fable,

imagination and legend. Yet in this impossible location …
its identity is successful … Rather like an ordinary animal

300
or man, one can speak of right or left, or one can speak
of left or right. Plus a weld, a seam in the middle … but a
chimera accentuates seams, it makes the blatantly obvious
… Here the otherwise impossible mixture is successful.
Here the sensible is successful. (Serres 2016, 62)

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07.11
Faceless Fish

Providing no indication that it wishes to be categorised, or rec-

ognised, this pink slug-like creature is about the size of a cat. But
it’s certainly not a cat, or a slug, or a ‘cusk’-eel, or any other eel
for that matter. This thing, is faceless. Slamming on the deck like
a freshly cut piece of butchers’ meat, it’s unrecognisable, except
for its razorblade smile.
It’s rare.
The first people to come across such a beast were the crew of
HMS Challenger, who in 1872 had loaded the vessel with speci-
men jars and embarked on a scientific expedition. Until the
late nineteenth century, when Michael and Georg Ossian Sars
dredged Norway’s fjords and found the first living sea lilies at a
depth of three kilometres, it was assumed that the deep sea was
lifeless. Previous knowledge of the seas was confined to the first
few fathoms of the ocean, with scant knowledge of their depths.
Since Britain wanted to rule the waves, it needed to know what
was beneath them. The Challenger mission was to make these in-
visible realms known by cataloguing all the life in all the Earth’s
oceans and seas (Fox-Skelly 2015). During this expedition, the
faceless fish was pulled out of the Coral Sea from a depth of
4.5 kilometres. As it slopped on to the deck, the ventral mouth
of the eyeless creature grimaced. Its dead nostrils pointed ac-
cusingly at its captor, like false eyes, from the top of its head.
They gave it no apology, for it showed no face to scowl at them
with, and kept its secret face hidden under its skin, along with
its name — Typhlonus nasus.
Five more of these slimy beasts were caught in a trawl in 1951,
in deep water off East Kalimantan, Borneo, where they have no
need of eyes in these lightless realms, as luminosity is deployed
as a treacherous metabolism that deceives curious prey. With-
out trickster eyes, these abyssal creatures cannot be seduced by
light’s deadly lure and so, thrive without its temptation in the
ocean depths of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Japan and Ha-
waii.

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 Having been dug up like a tenacious root from the sea floor,
along with suffocating quantities of garbage, the faceless fish4
now lies on the floor of the Investigator, a contemporary Aus-
tralian scientific expedition (Brady 2017).
It smiles at its captors, because it cannot see what contempt
they project on to it (Marine Biodiversity Hub 2017).

4 A species of cusk-eel.

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07.12
Vampire Squid

Because the vampyroteuthis is an animal of the deep sea,

and because we are animals mired in the very depths that
the vampyroteuthis occupies within us, the most important
science for our purposes is biology. Its importance is also
unmatched because it provides us with an almost mythical
model of life’s unrealised possibilities. This model is that of
the protocell, a primaeval archive of life’s potential on earth.
Above all, the protocell is an especially vivid reminder of
life’s fitful development, over the course of which some
possibilities were renounced for the sake of others. Biology
thus enables us to perceive, in the vampyroteuthis, a share
of the universal potential that has lain dormant within us.
(Flusser and Bec 2012, 73)

The ‘vampire squid from hell’, or Vampyroteuthis infernalis, is

a ‘living fossil’ that exists in blissful stasis, which declares the
process of natural selection is a preservative and conserving
force, rather than a creative one (Shear and Werth 2014). First
described in 1903 by Carl Chun during the Valdivia expedi-
tion (1898–1899), which was a zoological, chemical, and physi-
cal voyage that set out to explore the areas of the oceans that
were not covered by the Challenger expedition, it dwells in the
oxygen-starved twilight zone of the deep sea at depths of 600 to
1,200 metres. The haunting blue eyes of these cephalopods stare
over a purple-winged red cape, which is stretched over their
eight arms. When threatened, this web of flesh, around the size
of a rugby ball, reverts to become a shocking mantle of spiny
‘cirri’, which bears remarkable semblance to the deadly crown
of thorns starfish. Masters of morphological confusion, at one
moment they are hypervisible, glaring through bioluminescent
markings on their rear and the tips of their arms — or releasing
a mucus-coated cloud of luminescent particles and at the next,
they are almost indistinguishable from their surroundings.

304
 With time on their side, these slow-moving creatures have
drifted in the ocean twilight zone for around 350 million years.
Unlike other cephalopods that feast on live animals, vampyro-
teuthes are detritovores, which reel in ‘marine snow’, which is
made up of slowly decomposing particulate organic matter
that originates from microscopic algae, marine creatures, faecal
pellets, and snot. Using a mucus-coated filament, vampyroteu-
this catches these particles to sustain its exceedingly frugal life-
style (Hoving and Robison 2012). Lingering between decay and
preservation, evolution, and stasis, lightlessness, and brilliance,
vampyroteuthis persists indefinitely within its ecological purga-
tory.

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07.13
Octopus Thoughts

Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a

parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as
much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet can pour
its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of
an orange … Their mouths are in their armpits … They
breathe water. Their appendages are covered with dextrous,
grasping suckers, a structure for which no mammal has an
equivalent. (Montgomery 2015, 1–2)

Living aliens; octopuses are expressions of liquid life that can

touch, taste, navigate, and camouflage themselves to such a so-
phisticated degree that their activities are considered too com-
plex to be entirely centrally coordinated according to the logic
of the bête machine. Linnaeus named the octopus ‘singulare
monstrum’: a unique monster. Located in a bulge behind their
heads, their vital organs pulse blue-green blood around their
body and through their three hearts. Having delegated deci-
sion-making processes to its body, the mantle performs mul-
tiple functions. From squirting water jets, breathing, excreting,
propelling themselves through the water and deploying an inky
weapon against predators, octopuses are capable of incredible
flexibility and acts of transformation (Hochner 2013). Electro-
physiological studies of their activity during feeding show that
during muscular activity, nerve impulses collide with each other
to produce a ‘joint’ in a position that allows the octopus to place
food in its mouth (Sokol 2017b).

She appears to be sleeping, plastered to the roof of her lair.

Her skin texture and colour are almost indistinguishable
from the rock, her pendulous head and mantle hanging
upside down. Her left eye is open but her pupil is a hair-thin
slit. Her right eye is obscured by the thick part of one arm,
its suckers facing me, until the arm curves backward, out
of sight. The tips of five of her arms hang in curling tendrils

306
 from the roof and sides of her lair. I can’t see her gills or any
sign of breathing. The movements of her body appear to
be due only to the current in the water … I must train my
brain from seeing nothing at all to seeing subtle changes, to
recognising that suddenly, a great deal might be happening,
all at once. (Montgomery 2015, 94)

While these cephalopods are strange, unnerving, and magical,

their disarming otherness doesn’t end with their bodies. They
extensively practice a type of genetic alteration called RNA edit-
ing, which is very rare in the rest of the animal kingdom, which
enables them to fine-tune the information encoded by their
genes without altering the genes themselves. Their usage of RNA
editing is so much more extensive than any other animal group
that it is likely to be associated with their extremely developed
brains. Only the intelligent coleoid cephalopods — octopuses,
squid, and cuttlefish — can do this to re-code genes that are im-
portant for their nervous systems, while nautiluses, which are
much more ancient and less smart, cannot. Although it’s not
possible to assert this prolific use of RNA editing as being entirely
responsible for their alien intellect, it is a very compelling hy-
pothesis that potentially could be tested by disabling their RNA-
editing enzymes — and observe what happens next (Yong 2017).

Imagine if your snot was a genius. (Aranyszin 2017)

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07.14
Vanishing Circles of the Spotless Mind

Puffer fish are valued in Japan as a delicacy known as fugu

sashimi,5 which can cause mild intoxication or, in rare cases,
death due to an incredibly powerful neurotoxin found in the
fish’s ovaries and liver. But until now, no one also knew that they
were artists. (Platt 2012)

Life’s fundamental persistence is embodied in the male puffer

fish, which carves a ribbed circular structure into the sea floor
by swimming in a circular motion. Countering its constant eras-
ure by the currents, the creature that is around the size of an
index finger, shapes the fine seabed sediments with his fins to
form valleys around the edges of the cuts. Finally, he decorates
the ridges with shells, coral fragments, and coloured sediments.
Then, he watches and waits.
The female swims lazily towards him, and he gleefully stirs
up the fine sand at the centre of the nest.
With a shrug, she lays her eggs and leaves.
The devoted father spends six days minding the brood and at
the appointed time, the hatchlings split their cases.
Then, they are gone (Main 2013).

… everything is corroded by the brine … there is no

vegetation worth mentioning, and scarcely any degree
of perfect formation, but only caverns and sand and
measureless mud, and tracts of slime wherever there is
earth as well, and nothing is in the least worthy to be judged
beautiful by our standards. (Plato 1961, 91)

Swimming this way and that, the male puffer fish continues to
build ‘underwater crop circles’ in the sand, toiling against their
inevitable erasure.

5 Fugu is the Japanese term for pufferfish, or blow fish, which are served as a
delicacy and contain a potentially deadly neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin.

308
… memory is what leads us to the objects of our desire, has
made it plain that it is to the soul that all impulse and desire,
and indeed the determining principle of the whole creature,
belong. (Plato 1961, 1114)

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07.15
Structuring Mind

… the snare of this spider is of composite structure,

consisting of a pyramid of web, within which, near its base,
is suspended a dome of the same material, and hanging
beneath the open bottom of the dome is a horizontal sheet
of cobweb … in the mind of the araenologist the special
interest of the basilica spider is not its architectural skill, not
its beautiful markings, but the fact that it seems to form a
link between the orb-weaving and the line-weaving spiders.
(Popular Miscellany 1878)

Certain kinds of spider web reveal the structural thoughts of

their makers. Around half of all known spiders use silk webs to
trap their prey, which is highly sought after, as it is incredibly
strong and light. Making silk is the art of turning liquid to solid.
Starting out with a fluid protein produced in the abdomen, spi-
ders use their spinnerets to extract a liquid filament and apply
physical force, which converts it into a solid silk fibre. Com-
bining the elasticity of silk with the surface tension of sticky
droplets, the fibre behaves under tension as a stretchy solid,
but under compression, it becomes liquid-like and capable of
shrinking while maintaining a constant tensile force (Elettro et
al. 2016).
Adding graphene and carbon nanotubes to a spider’s drink-
ing water, can alter the properties of spider silk to produce
filaments that are five times stronger than usual, which com-
pare with some of the strongest materials known such as Kev-
lar (Leary 2017). Farming spiders for their silk is tricky, as the
right kind for making fabric is produced only seasonally and
individuals have a habit of eating each other if they meet (Leg-
gett 2009). They also bite their handlers. Nonetheless, in 1898 a
technique for milking female gold orb spiders was designed to
extract single filaments of up to 25 metres long from each spider
using a ‘silking’ machine. A row of stocks pinned 12 spiders at
a time down by applying gentle pressure on their backs. Here,

310
they lay quietly while their threads were rapidly wound onto a
reel by hand. In 2009, this technique was repeated using a total
of a million spiders to make a unique gown for the American
Museum of Natural History in New York, which was the largest
piece of cloth made from natural spider silk in the world (Leg-
gett 2009).
While humans are interested in spider silk for utilitarian pur-
poses, from the perspective of the arachnid, it is a self-spun ex-
tension of the arachnid body, which becomes a sensor by relay-
ing vibrations from environmental events (Sokol 2017b). Since
this is how many spiders understand reality, the web-map of silk
threads encapsulates an area of attention and meaningful rep-
resentation of a personalised world. In a very literal sense, webs
embody the ‘thinking’ of arachnids through the way their food-
collection territories are constructed and may even reveal the to-
pology of (liquid) arachnid thought (Japyassú and Laland 2017).

311
07.16
Liquid Fish

There was salt in the sack so the eels would wriggle

themselves to death in the salt and the salt would draw the
slime from their skin and innards. For when eels are in salt,
they can’t help wriggling and they wriggle until they are
dead, leaving their slime in the salt. (Grass 2010, 136)

The oceans spawn liquid creatures but none encapsulate living

goo like the hagfish. Living at depths where it is senseless to pos-
sess bones, hagfish are scaleless, almost sightless, ‘jelly’ eel-like
creatures that have persisted for around 330 million years. They
spend most of their lives writhing upon the ocean floor, distin-
guishing only between light and dark. Here, they sniff and feel
for dead and dying fish using several pairs of barbels, which are
sensory tentacles around their mouths. A single nostril on the
top of their heads perforates their skull, which encases a mas-
sive knot of forebrain that is rich in olfactory areas. This then
tapers into an embryonic-like neural tube that is not protected
by a spine. Their primitive circulatory system is made up of four
hearts, one that serves as the main pump, while the other three
are accessory chambers. Fitting like a loose sock, their capillary-
dense, pink to grey-blue skin, allows them to absorb food and
‘breathe’ — even when they are buried in carcasses and mud.
While their reproductive habits are largely unknown, species
are hermaphroditic with females laying batches of around 30
tough, yolky eggs that have a tendency to clump together owing
to velcro-like tufts at their poles. Hatchlings are hermaphroditic
miniatures of their parents that will change to either male or
female as they develop, and may even alter their sex from season
to season.
Firmly attaching themselves with their biting mouth and
rasping tongue to passing fish, they bore into the unsuspect-
ing host. Burying themselves face first into their temporary
soft home, they shear off flesh using horizontally sliding plates
bearing tooth-like projections. When no live large prey can be

312
found, they feed on worms and other small invertebrates on
the ocean floor and will even settle for rotting cadavers. Hav-
ing barely changed over the last 300 million years, they can be
found as deep as 1,700 metres, and prefer to stay near the soft
silty sea floor so that, when attacked or threatened, they can
bury themselves while exuding a gelatinous slime into the wa-
ter that can quickly smother the gills and mouth of a predator.
Once the threat has gone, the hagfish ties itself into a knot to
wipe its slime away and ‘sneezes’ out any clog from its nostril
(Bates 2014).

Intrat et devorat pisces; aquam in gluten mutat.6 (Linnaeus

1758)

The properties of this incredible viscous exudate are only just

being understood.
Hagfish slime forms in mucin vesicles in special glands,
where they are bundled into skeins. These are looped into coni-
cal layers that, on deployment, can reach up to 15 centimetres.
Seawater unravels these fibres by dissolving the protein glue
holding tens of thousands of filaments that are tapered at both
ends together. Although 100 times smaller than a human hair,
they are ten times as strong as nylon and a mere teaspoon of
slime will fill a cereal bowl in just a few seconds without the fi-
bres tangling (Winegard and Fudge 2010). Once activated, they
form a gloopy net of threads like a fine sieve, which are around
three orders of magnitude more dilute than typical mucus secre-
tions (Fudge, Levy and Gosline 2005).
Hagfish slime can also be added to cooking recipes as a spe-
cial kind of gluten.

6 When Linnaeus first came across the hagfish, he classified it as a worm in

the tenth and later editions of his Systema Naturae, where he succinctly de-
scribed its behaviour — it ‘enters into and devours fishes; turns water into
glue’ (Fernholm 1998, 33). Despite anatomical evidence to the contrary, Jo-
han Ernst Gunnerus endorsed Linnaeus’ view, calling the creature a ‘Sleep-
Mark’, or slime-worm (Fänge 1988, xiii).

313
 Hagfish Slime Cheddar-Gruyere Scones
4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
4 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (two sticks) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch
cubes
2 cups (packed) coarsely grated extra-sharp yellow cheddar
cheese (about 9 ounces), or a mix of 6 ounces cheddar and 3
ounces gruyere.
1–1/2 cups chilled heavy whipping cream
6 tablespoons hagfish slime
Preheat oven at Gas Mark 4

Blend flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt in a food

processor. Cut in the butter quickly until the mixture
resembles coarse meal. Add cheese. Whisk together the
cream and hagfish slime in a small bowl. With the food
processor running, add cream mixture through a feed tube.
Process until the dough just holds together.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface.

Divide into quarters. Pat each quarter into a round
just short of 1 inch high. Using a clean, sharp knife, cut
each round into six wedges. Transfer half the wedges to
ungreased baking sheets lined with parchment paper,
spacing them about 2 inches apart.

Bake the first batch of scones for about 20 minutes until the
edges just start to brown and a toothpick comes out clean.
Transfer them, still on their parchment paper, to a wire rack
to cool at least 10 minutes. Bake the second batch of scones.

Serve warm, or at room temperature. The scones will stand

for about 8 hours. Do not refrigerate. To reheat them, warm
them at Gas Mark 4 for about 5 minutes. (Museum of Awful
Food 2006)

314
The hagfish’s highly structured relationship between liquids and
soft material substrates — mud, rotting flesh, and snot — entan-
gles them with the bowels of the world’s ecosystems.

315
07.17
Liquid Fat

… the front of the sperm whale’s head is a dead, blind wall,

without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort
whatsoever … So that this whole enormous boneless mass
is as one wad … the blubber wraps the body of the whale,
as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with
this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so
thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man
who has not handled it. (Melville 1992, 280)

Guardians of life, liquid fats are ‘angel’ substances that main-

tain the boundaries of bodies. At 37°C, the body temperature
of warm-blooded mammals, their fats are liquid and stable. As
critical components of the cell membrane, they provide an in-
terface between the inside and the outside of the organism that
establishes a tension and dialogue between fluid fields and pro-
tects biochemical networks within the cellular environment by
resisting the relentless encroachment of water. Phospholipids,
which are an essential part of all cell membranes, have a highly
polarised molecular structure,7 the duality of which cannot be
collapsed and so maintains a contrary but relatively stable exist-
ence at the interface between fat and water. While maintaining
chemical stability, mammalian lipid ratios confer a range of fatty
tissue properties and provide a high-energy store for metabolic
processes. Marine mammals, which have to endure prolonged
exposure to freezing environments, are typically insulated with
blubber8 with low melting points over a range between 13°C
and 70°C, which remain fluid even in bitterly cold conditions,
although the most important polyunsaturated fatty acids gen-
erate an overall melting point of less than 15°C. Some marine

7 The polarised structure of Phospholipids means that one aspect of the mol-
ecule has a strong affinity with water, while the other strongly repels water.
8 Blubber is a metabolically active, subcutaneous tissue that contains large
amounts of unsaturated fatty acids.

316
mammals, such as the beluga (Delphinapterus leucas), have high
concentrations of a highly unusual biosynthesised, branched
short-chain isovaleric acid with an extremely low melting point
of 37.6°C, which upholds the liquid status of the outer layer.
Fats are liquid life’s survival strategy. Operating as interlocu-
tors that form protective and energy-giving layer between aque-
ous bodies and their environments, they also cushion against
the lethal effects of energy depletion and extreme environmen-
tal variations.

317
07.18
Liquid Eye

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances

for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting
different amounts of light, and for the correction of
spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed
by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the
highest degree. (Darwin 2010, 227)

Life moved to the land for the view.

The first optical structures are thought to have evolved
through liquid physics in aquatic creatures that peered over
the surface of water. Like crocodiles, these creatures sought to
catch an extended view of their surroundings (Ouellette 2012).
Not all creatures with eyes moved to the land — some merely
surveyed it.
Although box jellyfish (Cubozoa) evolved during the pre-
Cambrian period around 500 million years ago and lack a for-
mal brain, they possess 24 eyes. This visual navigation system,
which involves no less than four types of special-purpose eyes,
means that they are capable of advanced behaviour, namely, re-
sponding to light and avoiding obstacles. Most of the box jel-
lyfishes’ visual organs are rather primitive, like the pit and slit
eyes, which merely detect light, but eyes in the upper zone are
far more complex (Bentlage et al. 2010).
In the species Tripedalia cystophora, which is found in Carib-
bean mangrove swamps, upper zone eyes possess retinas and
corneas that are structurally similar to vertebrates and cepha-
lopods. They can also see in colour, establish the size of things
and as they gaze up at the sky on cup-like structures, recognise
images. Actively navigating their surroundings by drawing
positional inferences from terrestrial and solar cues, they stay
close to mangrove shorelines that are rich in food. An ‘extreme’
downward-looking fish-eye view of the whole mangrove floor
is obtained through a similarly organised eye with a large lens
(Garm, Oskarsson and Nilsson 2011).

318
 Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole
might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The
light shines through it, and the dark enters it … (Le Guin
2001, 1)

Lenses within the lenses, the eyes of box jellyfishes comprise

their entire bodies. Producing recognisable patterns within
their ganglion retinas by focusing light through their bodies
by coordinating it with movement, they contravene the maxim
that intelligence depends on central organising systems. Dem-
onstrating that structured liquids can generate programs that
are meaningful to life, the intelligence of box jellyfish is tuned
to their prevailing value systems and contexts. Not every living
thing wants to play chess.

319
07.19
Double Take

… comb jellies come in a wide variety of other body types

and ecological niches. One spherical species, known … as
the sea gooseberry, dangles long tentacles that snag smaller
prey such as copepods. Then there are some that look a
bit like biplanes, known as lobates, which cruise along
‘like crop dusters,’ … instead of dangling their tentacles,
theirs are situated along their mouth to snag prey and
ferry it inside. Still other species have adapted their cilia
into serrated teeth … they have this whole field that looks
almost like a velcro strip or something, with all of these
teeth pointed in the same direction … and they can actually
ratchet themselves over and bite off chunks of other jellies
that they’ve captured … I use the analogy of spiders …
because spiders can have a sticky web, they can leap out
and ambush things, they can make little lasso webs … and
ctenophores have similar range of different feeding modes,
depending on the species. (Simon 2014b)

Comb jellyfish9 (Ctenophora), our planet’s original aliens, are

distinguished by being the oldest and strangest of all marine
animals. These ‘aliens of the sea’ are paradoxes (Zimmer 2014),
which disintegrate at a touch while being voracious predators
with cannibalistic tendencies. Riding the ocean water columns
mouth-first, these planktonic creatures use their iridescent
‘combs’ of cilia to move up and down and are the largest crea-
tures to use this method of locomotion. Comb jellyfish capture
their prey by secreting sticky substances from their colloblasts,
which they quickly ingest through their primitive mouth and
expel any debris out through their anus. Although they lack
eyes, they possess ten proteins for generating light, as well as

9 Comb jellyfish are different from box jellyfish (Cubozoa), which belong to
a different phylum, Cnidarians. Although they share superficial similarities
with each other, neither are true jellyfish (Scyphozoa).

320
other proteins called opsins that detect light, which may func-
tion as a regulatory feedback system. Owing to the ancient na-
ture of comb jellyfish, these genetic sequences are likely to hold
secrets about the evolution of vision (Mjoseth 2012).
An extraordinary network of subepidermal neurons lies
beneath their rows of combs, which are quite unlike those of
any other animal. Not only unique in their structure, they also
secrete a range of peptide neurotransmitters that regulate their
neural networks, which lack the usual spectrum of chemical
messengers such as serotonin, dopamine, and acetylcholine,
which are common to all other animals.

When we look at the genome and other information [in

the comb jellyfish nerve cells], we see not only different
grammar but a different alphabet … (Singer 2015)

Comb jellyfish challenge the prevailing view of evolutionary

biology, which holds that complexity is built up over time. Ac-
cording to this perspective, neurons will only have evolved once
on this planet, most likely around the time that sea sponges ap-
peared. The peculiar nature of comb jellyfish suggests they may
be the first group of animals to have branched off the tree of life
even earlier than sponges did and evolved an entirely independ-
ent developmental pathway from all other animal species. While
evolving something as complex as neurons ‘by accident’ more
than once seems unlikely, the alternative scenario where sponges
which evolved from a common ancestor let something as valu-
able as a neurone degenerate, is equally unlikely (Singer 2015).
Confronting us with an existing, parallel view of evolution
that asks how different biology would be if the ‘tape of life’ was
run from its starting point again (Gould 1989, 48), comb jelly-
fish provide a real-life case study of an alternative organisational
framework for ‘life’.

321
07.20
Tardigrade

… beneath their cuddly exteriors lie unmatched reserves

of endurance. In times of drought, tardigrades pull in their
legs, contract and shrivel, and turn into ‘resting’ stages called
‘tuns’ in which metabolism all but stops. It is the tun, not
the tardigrade, that is tough … give a tun a drop of water,
and it will rehydrate to form a tardigrade, as if nothing had
happened. It’s hard to top a tardigrade. (Gee 1998)

Seeking immortality, life’s capacity to resist the decay towards

equilibrium is as strange as it is varied. The tardigrade, the most
resilient of all organisms, is also known as the ‘water bear’ and
‘moss pig’. Having evolved around 500 million years ago, these
segmented, tiny creatures about a millimetre in length have
grub-like bodies with eight legs and ‘hands’, and four to eight
claws on each. Most use their sharp teeth in their compact heads
to digest the sap from algae, while some species are carnivores
and a few are cannibals that prey on other tardigrades.
At times of environmental stress, tardigrades reduce their
metabolic activity to as low as one-hundredth of normal levels.
This state of suspended animation is further conserved within a
glass-like structure (Stromberg 2012) from which they may be
fully revived after a few hours of hydration. This amazing capac-
ity to enter into a vitrified state is conferred by tardigrade-spe-
cific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs). The ‘glass coffin’-
producing capacity of TDPs is so powerful that tardigrades must
‘wear’ protection at all times by having a thin coating of water
around their bodies. In their hydrated form, TDPs are jelly-like
and lack the typical well-defined three-dimensional structures of
most known proteins, but during desiccation, these proteins so-
lidify into a glassy structure, enabling them to survive for decades
in a state of cryptobiosis. Glass-coated tardigrades can withstand

322
irradiation,10 boiling liquids, extreme pressure, environments as
cold as −200°C and up to around 150°C, as well as the vacuum of
space without any protection (Coghlan 2017a). While ‘extremo-
philes’ are physically adapted to life in extreme environments,
tardigrades are not. They are simply able to weather disaster
through a vitrification escape route, by becoming liquid stone.

10 Tardigrades can survive irradiation, as they possess the ‘damage suppressor’

Dsup gene (Chavez et al. 2019).

323
07.21
Blood Stones

Too often, the adaptationist programme gave us an

evolutionary biology of parts and genes, but not of
organisms. It assumed that all transitions could occur
step by step and underrated the importance of integrated
developmental blocks and pervasive constraints of history
and architecture. A pluralistic view could put organisms,
with all their recalcitrant, yet intelligible, complexity, back
into evolutionary theory. (Gould and Lewontin 1979, 597)

The evolutionary journey of sea squirts is the story of the trans-

gressive material states of creatures that gave rise to the very
first backbone-producing organisms, whose ancestors gave rise
to the phylum of vertebrates. Stinking like an armpit under its
rock-like protective integument made of tunicin, at depths that
can reach 70 metres off the Peruvian and Chilean coastlines, the
piure (Pyura chilensis) feeds by siphoning seawater through its
body, using a basket-like internal filter to capture plankton and
oxygen from its surroundings. Split by a blood-red interior, this
stone-with-organs lives in dense colonies. Each creature feeds
by drawing water into its body through one siphon, referred to
locally as an ‘udder’, and ejecting spent fluids through another.
Through this primitive exchange, the piure possesses an apocry-
phal ‘heart’ and an interior exchange of fluids that might con-
ceivably be considered a circulation. Its colonial existence and
odd fleshy-rocklike appearance do not prevent molluscs, fish,
and humans from feasting on its ‘bitter and soapy’ crimson flesh
with aphrodisiac qualities, which is rich in iodine, vanadium,
and iron.
More than a strange stone that contains soft marine meat, it
is a chordate, a creature bestowed with a primitive throat and a
cartilaginous backbone-like rod, or notochord. Like all species
of sea squirts, its lifecycle is complex, where sessile adults release
sperm and eggs into the water. On hatching, the tiny male, free
swimming larvae are made up of only about 2,500 cells and de-

324
velop a notochord that runs the entire length of their tail before
they settle down and metamorphose into a sessile, stone-like
adult. At puberty, they develop female organs and are therefore
capable of ‘selfing’, or fertilising their own eggs but prefer to
cross-fertilise with others (Crew 2012). While sea squirts pos-
sess a number of vertebrate-like genes, they share many more
characteristics in common with bacteria, fungi, and plants,
which are combined to serve their own specialised needs.
As mixtures of liquids and solids that change throughout
their complex life cycles to take on one form or another, sea
squirts have set benchmarks in development protocols that
draw actual circumstances together with a spectrum of contexts,
creating the opportunity to imagine and invent what their prog-
eny ‘could’ be.

325
07.22
Fishing Bats

How do you capture the flying dragon? … Only with a

net made of mist … Thick cumulus clouds and the black
threads of the net both reflected in the water … When they
pulled the fine net taut, it became invisible … and they
seemed to be holding on to empty space, knotting empty
space in their hands. (Ackerman 1991, 29)

Life’s precariousness is embodied in the long-toed fishing bat.

With the lightest skim of the water, it screeches and impales
a small fish from out of the waves with its large, sharp claws
(Nowak 1999). Rising and dipping like a wayward plastic bag,
this minuscule creature flutters close to the surface under a
darkening sky, searching for ripples produced by the fins of
small fishes (Suthers 1965). Gathering in groups amongst caves,
hollow trees, and rock fissures (Gannon et al. 2005), colonies
of bats emerge every night for around 2.5 hours to go foraging
when the moonlight is most subdued (Brooke 1994). This ‘lunar
phobia’ increases the chances these hunters will not be backlit
against the sky as they approach the water (Börk 2006). Dancing
upon the interface between the sea, sky, and shimmering scales,
these predatory phantoms search for their prey with varying de-
grees of success and may harvest up to thirty fish a night.
Sometimes, liquid engulfs liquid, when a fish catches the bat.

326
 07.23
Back to the Cat

While its ‘catness’ is still recognisable, the organic softness of the

creature’s outline is partially digested by a field of light glaring
from a computer screen.
The hard drive purrs, as the agitated tip of the computer’s
power supply fishes for small creatures, like a mouse. Heat flows
between the interlaced bodies.
One struggles to lose energy to its surroundings, so its cool-
ing fan whirrs harder, while the other basks in excess heat,
dreaming of dark spaces and the blurry flash of fur that can be
caught at a claw’s stretch.
Only when the computer powers down into energy-saving
mode does the liquid life stop vibrating and separates from its
sleeping box.

327
Part IV

MAKING
 08

LIQUID TECHNOLOGY
This section examines the capacities of
liquids to produce work at the cellu-
lar and human scale in ways that differ
from machines. A range of materials and
techniques are discussed that may form a
‘soft’ technological palette and portfolio
of effects, which speak to the principles of
liquid life.

331
 08.1
Engineering Water

My house … is diaphanous, but it is not of glass. It is more

of the nature of vapour. Its walls contract and expand as I
desire. At times, I draw them close about me like protective
armour … But at others, I let the walls of my house blossom
out in their own space, which is infinitely extensible.
(Bachelard 1992, 51)

Liquids have long been known to possess structure and charac-

ter, from the turbulent currents that shape the hunting grounds
for fishermen, to arched fountain sprays, the bottomless valley
of Charybdis and raindrops that bleed onto window panes. As
we are not in control of these configurations, we must constant-
ly negotiate our relationship with them.
Since ancient times, we have sought to better understand
the elusive, yet mighty forces of the fluid realm. In his treatise
Meteorologica, Aristotle describes the principles of hydrologic
cycle, where water evaporates by the action of the Sun and forms
vapour that condenses as clouds (Koutsoyiannis and Angelakis
2003). From the third century BCE, the invention of hydraulic
engineering enabled the dynamics of fluid forces within closed
bodies of water to be understood and harnessed. Leonardo da
Vinci, who considered water as the driving force of all nature,
established the central narratives of modern hydrology that
began to reveal the organisational principles through which it
could potentially be commanded.

The whole mass of water, in its breadth, depth, and height,

is full of innumerable varieties of movements, as is shown
on the surface of currents with a moderate degree of
turbulence, in which one sees continually gurglings and
eddies with various swirls formed by the more turbid water
from the bottom as it rises to the surface. (Ball 2009, 10–11)

333
Da Vinci had witnessed the terrible force of the Arno River ‘de-
vouring’ people, animals, plants, and the ground itself, when its
banks burst on 12 January 1466, and again in 1478. Setting out to
know his ‘enemy’ through drawings, he showed how the struc-
ture of water flowed faster and more linearly in the centre of riv-
ers than around the shallow sides of their banks (Ball 2009, 11),
then he designed mechanical systems to control and constrain
these forces. Studying the hydra-headed rivulets that writhed
through deltas and curling vortices within rivers, he applied this
knowledge to link Florence with the sea through a navigable ca-
nal. This involved cutting a series of giant steps with locks and
siphons to enable ships to sail up into the hills. He also worked
on a system of locks and paddlewheels to wash the streets of
Milan and even invented a way of cleansing the disease-carrying
marshes of the Val di Chiana.
Rather than working through the innate properties of liq-
uids, da Vinci constrained and channelled them through appa-
ratuses, rendering their forces compatible with the logic of ma-
chines, through which they could be subordinated to perform
simple tasks like turning switches, screws, and gates. This highly
effective approach continued to be developed throughout the
Enlightenment.

334
 08.2
Living Water

Were water actually what hydrologists deem it to be — a

chemically inert substance — then a long time ago there
would already have been no water and no life on this Earth.
I regard water as the blood of the Earth. Its internal process,
while not identical to that of our blood, is nonetheless very
similar. It is this process that gives water its movement.
(Bartholomew 2003, 110)

Viktor Schauberger, like da Vinci before him, observed the way

that water moved, as he was interested in better understanding
how, through continual movement, water became uniquely live-
ly. Regarding water as a living organism that was conceived deep
under the ground in the cool, dark cradle of forests, he imagined
its life-giving potency was conferred through the stages of its
natural lifecycle. Rising slowly from the aquifers as a juvenile
form of pure ground water, it was enriched with mineral impu-
rities and spurted to the surface as a spring. Tumbling through
streams and rivers, this ‘living’ water became even more com-
plex and mature, until it eventually joined the sea. Through its
various forms — blood, sap, plasma — Schauberger believed
that ‘living’ water, was Earth’s lifeblood. Schauberger was par-
ticularly interested in the way that ‘living’ water self-regulated
its character through lively, corkscrewing, hyperbolic spirals.

With the right lighting, it is possible to see the path of

levitational currents as an empty tube within the veil of
a waterfall. It is similar to the tunnel in the middle of a
circulating vortex of water plunging down a drain, which
brings up a gurgling sound. This downwardly-directed
whirlpool drags everything with increasing suction with
it into the depths. If you can imagine this whirlpool or
water cyclone operating vertically, you get the picture of
how the levitational current works and you can see how

335
 the trout appears to be floating upward in the axis of fall.
(Bartholomew 2003, 15)

Believing that the energy and vigour of these dissipative struc-

tures could also be weakened by pollution and stasis, Schauberg-
er produced a number of inventions that sought to counteract the
effect of industrial catastrophes on the rivers. Pioneering a sci-
entifically verifiable framework for a study of natural processes,
he used simple but effective physical interventions, which were
informed by his deep knowledge of the forest and its systems to
produce natural turbulence; for example, adding a large boul-
der strategically in the middle of a river. Technologies like the
‘vortex-generator’ and ‘river generator’ were naturally energetic
structures that produced and propagated ‘living’ water anew.
These revitalising systems could also perform useful work such
as driving propellers and rapidly transporting logs downstream.
Although Schauberger dedicated his entire life to demonstrat-
ing how working along with the natural technology of the living
world could be applied to everyday challenges, he failed to per-
suade ‘techno-academic’ scientists that their rationalist approach
to natural phenomena, and their domination of them, would re-
sult in environmental devastation. Consequently, the principles
of ‘living’ water are no longer applied to bodies of water as a revi-
talising system, or alternative technology. We may wish to revisit
these principles and explore more fully their potential.

336
 08.3
Rainmaking

Working with water is more than manipulating a material; it

requires engagement with all phases of the water cycle, each of
which is essential for the farming practices that feed our cities.
Summoning the rains is an ancient practice whereby cultures
channelled rainfall through rituals, like rain dances. These were
succeeded by agrarian technologies that used the formation of
artificial waterways, irrigation systems, and aqueducts to help
divert the flow of streams and rivers to arable lands. In the mod-
ern era, we have learned how to build instruments that can hold
back tides, like the MOSE project in Venice (United Nations Of-
fice for Disaster Risk Reduction 2012), and even induce strategic
downpours. The challenge remains in our expectations of con-
trol over them.
The first devices that suggested rain could be ‘made’ were
particle detectors. In 1911, Charles Wilson developed a cloud
chamber using a sealed container filled with supersaturated
water vapour. As cosmic rays moved through the space, they
produced paths of ionised matter, around which water droplets
condensed, with the appearance of tiny contrails. The droplet-
making principles of this apparatus were applied in 2010 as the
Teramobile, which is a laser that fires short pulses of infrared
laser light into the atmosphere and represents an eco-friendly
form of cloud seeding, compared with its chemical forerunners
(Teramobile 2008; Harris et al. 2017).
An electromagnetic device to make rainfall was developed
by Juan Baigorri Velar in 1938. While the internal workings were
kept a secret, it was known that circuit ‘A’ could produce slight
drizzles, while circuit ‘B’ generated downpours. Although Ve-
lar received international offers to buy his machine, he refused,
insisting that the device was designed to serve Argentina’s dri-
est regions. Today, nothing remains of the mysterious machine
(Vintini 2013).
The first breakthrough in the technology of chemical cloud
seeding took place in 1946 at a General Electric facility in Sche-

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nectady, New York, where three researchers, Vincent Schafer,
Irving Langmuir and Bernard Vonnegut, established a produc-
tive basis for the use of chemicals to initiate chain reactions that
crystallised naturally forming ice in the clouds. The dispersants,
which originally included silver iodide, potassium iodide, and
dry ice, could therefore increase or alter the distribution of natu-
ral rainfall. Their work led to the development of further chemi-
cal agents that could produce similar strengths of precipitation,
such as liquid propane and hygroscopic materials like table salt.

‘Rainmaking’ or weather control can be as powerful a war

weapon as the atom bomb, a Nobel prize winning physicist
said today. Dr. Irving Langmuir, pioneer in ‘rainmaking,’
said the government should seize on the phenomenon of
weather control as it did on atomic energy when Albert
Einstein told the late President Roosevelt in 1939 of the
potential power of an atom-splitting weapon. ‘In the
amount of energy liberated, the effect of 30 milligrams of
silver iodide under optimum conditions equals that of one
atomic bomb …’ (Novak 2011)

With growing interest in weather-manipulating technologies,

Wilhelm Reich was asked to intervene in a drought in 1953.
Adopting a typically controversial approach, he asserted that
drought was the result of build-up of orgone radiation in the
atmosphere — a hypothetical, omnipresent libidinal life force,
which Reich claimed was responsible for gravity, weather pat-
terns, emotions, and health. His rainmaking device therefore set
out to automatically remove excess orgone. This ‘cloudbuster’
was formed from a set of hollow metal tubes that were con-
nected at the back end to a series of flexible metal hoses and
placed in water, a medium that would supposedly draw orgone
energy to the ground like a lightning rod. The instrument was
then aimed into areas of the sky to disperse orgone accumu-
lations. Seemingly, Reich’s apparatus worked and he continued
developing orgone accumulators, which attracted the attention
of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). After one of his

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associates violated an injunction to stop him shipping them out
of Maine, Reich was sentenced to two years in prison, where he
died from a heart attack (Atlas Obscura 2013).
Representing a newfound freedom from nature, rainmaking
technologies demonstrated that humans could command the
weather and unleash the fury of the tempest. Artificial rainfall
was also of interest to military forces as a delivery system for
chemical and biological warfare. However, rainmaking tech-
nologies cannot be controlled with the precision of machines.
Even the most plausible cloud-seeding devices are unreliable,
as they are severely challenged by the highly nuanced and un-
predictable nature of weather. In fact, the statistical ‘noise’ natu-
rally produced by weather greatly overwhelms the possibility
of success of any interventions that are possible with anthro-
pogenic agents. For starters, the stratiform clouds targeted by
these technologies are fragile structures, with a poor capacity
for precipitation on demand, and most droplets evaporate again
before they reach the ground. Importantly, the effects of cloud
seeding are contingent upon environmental conditions. For ex-
ample, hilly terrain that bounds mountainous regions can cause
reliable rainfall patterns, while flat agricultural lands are much
more mixed in their responses and carry the additional risk of
precipitating thunderstorms. Misplaced doses of cloud-seeding
chemicals, poorly judged sites of delivery and changing contexts
are also likely to result in failure to produce rain. To compound
these difficulties, it is currently impossible to digitally model
the appropriate parameters for effective micro-casting forecasts.
Evaluation difficulties also arise, as existing cloud formations
are the targets for the production of rain and it is not possible to
distinguish between how much rain would have fallen naturally,
or has been induced (Langewiesche 2008). The very nature of
rainfall currently exceeds the capacity for modern technologies
to constrain it, but in the process of these experiments and ex-
plorations, our engagement with hypercomplex systems is im-
proving — but we are certainly not ‘there’ yet.

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 We conclude that the initiation of large-scale operational
weather modification programs would be premature. Many
fundamental problems must be answered first … We believe
that the patient investigation of atmospheric processes
coupled with an exploration of the technical applications
may eventually lead to useful weather modification, but we
emphasize that the time-scale required for success may be
measured in decades. (Novak 2011).

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 08.4
Sonifying Liquid

… molecular evidence linking hippos and whales

overwhelms dissenting fossil evidence to the contrary
… The biggest problem with thinking of hippos as close
relatives of whales is that the oldest hippos are only about
twenty million years old, nearly thirty million years younger
than the oldest whales, and that body-wise, the similarities
are very limited. The long ghost lineage of hippos, between
forty-nine and twenty million years ago, implies … that the
ancestors of hippos were so unlike modern hippos that we
do not recognise them … (Thewissen 2014, 159)

Whales and hippopotamuses not only share a surprising ances-

try (Thewissen et al. 2007), they are also peculiarly adapted to
aquatic life by using sound to communicate through water. The
sounds of baleen whales originate in folds in the larynx, whose
vibrations are then transmitted through the ventral grooves be-
fore being finally emitted into the water. In toothed whales, the
movement of thick membranes called phonic lips is triggered by
air that enters the nasal tract. This causes the surrounding tissues
to vibrate and produces a sound that passes through the skull
to reach the melon, a fatty sound box in the forehead, which
modulates and focuses the sound beam in the water. They also
listen to their watery world through special structures in their
jawbones (National Geographic 2011). In contrast, hippopota-
muses can communicate through both air and water, respond-
ing to signals in these separate media at the same time. Hippos
bellow and grunt, in a manner not dissimilar to whales, where
their voices travel through the air and across a fatty layer around
their neck into the water. Like other terrestrial mammals that
can clearly detect air vibrations, hippos have ears but also use
their jaws, like whales, to transmit sounds in the water through
their body. These aquatic vibrations travel through their bones
and into the middle ear, where they are translated into auditory
signals. Hippos, therefore, are immersed within a dual auditory

341
realm weaving together the liquid language of their evolution-
ary ancestors with the rarefied vibrations of the gaseous realm.
We, without listening jaws,1 may also experience the auditory
landscapes of hippos and whales using hydrophones to capture
the intensified effects of sound in liquid environments. Packets
of sound travel much faster and over longer distances in water
than through air, as molecules are much more closely packed
together. It is also possible to feel the physical presence of sonic
vibrations, which produce a spectrum of real, potentially use-
able, physical effects.
Although sound waves are influenced by many factors such
as salinity, temperature, and pressure, they can be used passively
to gather information about an underwater landscape. Listen-
ing-only technologies, such as SOund Navigation And Ranging
(SONAR), detect waves that are travelling through the water and
use them to gather spatial information about the environment,
which can be used to generate images.
Active processes like echolocation can also be used where
shock waves are applied to achieve specific effects. Changes
between an emitted and received signal provide directional
information about obstacles; or, at higher energies, may even
be used to generate forceful impacts. Pulse waves will travel
through a medium without causing too much harm until there
is a density discontinuity — then, they act like an explosion,
ripping matter apart.
Technologies that lock aquatic sound into highly repetitive
patterns, perhaps something like cymatics (Jenny 2001, 8), are
also possible. These structures are produced by the periodic or-
ganisation of standing waves, which can mobilise loosely associ-
ated particles — from sand to ferrofluids.

Since the various aspects of these phenomena are due to

vibration, we are confronted with a spectrum which reveals
a patterned, figurative formation at one pole and kinetic-

1 Bone conductivity is used to directly stimulate the cochlea using electronic

implants in people with sensorineural hearing loss.

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 dynamic processes at the other, the whole being generated
and sustained by its essential periodicity. (Jenny 2001, 11)

‘Bodies’ produced by the oscillations of actively colliding fields

set the scene for lifelike events by establishing energy gradients,
generating density currents and producing katabatic flows, cre-
ating vortices. They may even result in ‘organs [that] are not
homogeneous masses, but tissues of the utmost delicacy which
go on developing and repeating themselves indefinitely’ (Jenny
2001, 18). Such liquid bodies maintain their structure through
the constant flow of energy through their particle systems,
which enable them to adapt fluidly with alternations in their
environment; namely, the frequency and intensity of vibration.
As long as these vibrational energies are sustained, the resultant
bodies possess agency and may even be regarded as possessing
a ‘life’ of their own. In highly constrained environments, such as
the abyss, continuous flow systems may arise as fields of infernal
heat from geothermal systems are rapidly cooled in the pres-
surised, freezing ocean and recursively heated again as they fall.
These hypercycles (cyclically linked, self-replicating, metabolic
reactions) (Eigen and Schuster 1979) are rich in organic build-
ing blocks such as hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and sulfur (Martin
and Russell 2007) and are considered as possible sites and ap-
paratuses for the initiating sequence of ‘life’ — through the onset
of (liquid) biogenesis.

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08.5
Glassmaking

A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it

shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can, with that
same breath, shatter and destroy it. (DuMaurier 2004, 11)

A frozen supercooled liquid, glass is a fluid that has never set,

where covalently bonded silica crystals do not take back their
original form after melting, but become an amorphous solid.
Possessing some of the order of solids, as well as the random-
ness of a liquid, it remains pliant, and can be shaped by a variety
of approaches.
The first forms of glass were naturally sourced as obsidian,
which forms during volcanic eruptions when silica in granite
or sand becomes molten and which also spontaneously formed
in the New Mexico desert sand following the detonation of an
atomic bomb prototype in 1945. Glass may have originally been
manufactured as a by-product of metalworking, or through de-
veloping glazes in ceramic practices. Glazes used for coating
stone beads have been discovered that date back to 4000 BCE,
and sand casting (pouring molten glass into moulds), may have
appeared around 1500 BCE (British Glass Foundation 2013).
Glass blowing (using air to expand a ‘gob’ of glass wrapped
around an open pipe that is turned to form a range of complex
formations) appeared from around the first century BCE, when
glass engraving (using tools to mark the surface) also became
increasingly common. During the fourteenth to sixteenth cen-
turies CE, glass-cutting techniques were developed to give daz-
zling finishes to the material and float glass techniques (where
molten glass is floated into sheets upon molten metal to produce
sheets of glass) were developed in the mid-nineteenth century,
which made the industrial manufacturing of glass possible.
Glass became a versatile and inspirational building material
for early modernists such as Bruno Taut, who thought it could
re-tune Geist (the spirit) and Volk (the mass of humanity). Hav-
ing already made incredible use of coloured glass, mosaics, glass

344
paintings, glass bricks, and floors to construct the Glass House
pavilion for the German glass industry for the Werkbund (the
German Work Federation) exhibition in Cologne in 1914, Taut
was inspired to design a new city. Using glass building materi-
als to embody his vision of an intellectual socialist revolution,
he positioned a crystalline beacon at its centre to unify people
through transcendent notions of the collective good.

The cathedral was the container of all the souls that prayed
in this way; and it always remains empty and pure — it is
‘dead’. The ultimate task of architecture is to be quite and
absolutely turned away from all daily rituals for all times
(Taut 1919, 53–54).

Today, additive manufacturing techniques use cartridges that

are heated to 1000°C to develop glassware, which is built up
from cooling liquid layers (Temperton 2015). The properties of
glass can be altered by a range of additives and finishes, which
have been refined during its long history in artisan and industri-
al practices, which determine the strength, malleability, colour,
and physical properties that, in recent times, can now react to
light and temperature, conduct electricity, and transmit infor-
mation (British Glass Foundation 2013).
While glass is well-known for these unique and malleable
properties, water can also behave as an amorphous solid al-
though its potential has not been fully explored. Glassy water,
or amorphous ice2, behaves somewhere between (disordered)
water and (crystalline) ice. While they do not naturally form on
Earth, they constitute the dominant form of water in the uni-
verse, occurring most frequently on interstellar dust, comets,
Kuiper Belt objects, icy moons (e.g., Europa and Ganymede)
and other cosmic structures like Saturn’s rings (Loerting et al.
2015).

2 Different forms of amorphous ice are distinguished by their densities.

345
 We know a lot about glasses that form from ordinary
silicates, sugars and metals … They’re making golf clubs
out of glassy metals these days. But how important is the
glassy state of water. And what can it tell us about ordinary
water, which is such an anomalous liquid? … [Glassy water
suggests] a different sort of thermodynamics in water than
… in any of these other molecular glass-forming liquids.
(Phys.org 2008)

The strangeness of glassy bodies resonates with the peculiar

nature of cosmic matter, which becomes complicit with Earth’s
laws as soon as it approaches terrestrial environments. Our un-
derstanding of what appears to be ordinary matter, like water
or glass, may not be at all ‘usual’ within the cosmos but highly
localised within the cosmos, where worlds with dynamic liquid
infrastructures are extremely different from our own. Owing to
our familiarity with the chemistry of our own world, it is gener-
ally assumed that only ‘Goldilocks’ planets are capable of bear-
ing life, however alternative life-generating environments may
be possible.
The gas giant HD 189733b is 63 light years from Earth. It has a
‘blue marble’ appearance that is thought to be due to its molten
glass rain. Since only one side of the planet permanently faces
the star, daytime temperatures soar to 930°C and it is rapidly
bleeding its atmosphere into the cosmos at a rate of 100–600
million kilograms per second (Poppenhaeger, Schmitt and
Wolk 2013).

… the nightmare world of HD 189733b is the killer you

never see coming. To the human eye, this far-off planet
looks bright blue. But any space traveler confusing it with
the friendly skies of Earth would be badly mistaken. The
weather on this world is deadly. Its winds blow up to 5,400
mph (2 km/s) at seven times the speed of sound, whipping
all would-be travelers in a sickening spiral around the
planet. And getting caught in the rain on this planet is more
than an inconvenience; it’s death by a thousand cuts. This

346
 scorching alien world possibly rains glass—sideways—in its
howling winds. The cobalt blue color comes not from the
reflection of a tropical ocean, as on Earth, but rather a hazy,
blow-torched atmosphere containing high clouds laced with
silicate particles. (Loff 2017)

While the conditions in this world are completely hostile to our

carbon-based chemistry, in a liquid world where glass rains from
the skies, it might be possible that alien silicon-based chemistry
organises in ways that prompt tenacious dissipative structures.
Although we are unlikely to test this in any meaningful way
soon, this strange planet draws attention to our presumptions
about life on Earth that deeply shape our expectations, not just
about life on other worlds, but what conditions that are neces-
sary for ‘life’ on our own planet. This will not be life as we know
it — but other kinds of infrastructures capable of producing dy-
namic, persistent liquid bodies.

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08.6
Liquid Apparatuses

We already have digital computers to process information.

Our goal is not to compete with electronic computers
or to operate word processors … Our goal is to build a
completely new class of computers that can precisely control
and manipulate physical matter. Imagine if when you run a
set of computations that not only information is processed
but physical matter is algorithmically manipulated as well.
We have just made this possible at the mesoscale.3 (Katsikis,
Cybulski and Prakash 2015; Carey 2015)

To negotiate with the liquid domain, we need to establish how

fluids may not only be screens for projecting ideas, substrates to
work upon or bodies that can power machines, but also become
operational as liquid technology and substrate for analogue
computing. Vladimir Lukyanov’s 1936 ‘water computer’ could
solve (partial) differential equations to address calculations in
geology, thermal physics, metallurgy, and rocket engineering.
The computation was performed by translating physical prop-
erties into (real) numbers, then titrating fluid displacements
within a series of interconnected, water-filled glass tubes and
then levelling the parameters through the equalising flow of wa-
ter under gravity. This hydraulic integrator was used until the
1980s, when personal computing became cheap, configurable,
and powerful enough to run complex equations.
Water bodies have also been programmed to generate large-
scale spectacles in public spaces such as the Palace of Versailles,
the Villa da Pratolino, the Tivoli gardens and the hydraulic gar-
dens of the brothers Salomon and Isaac de Caus. These mechan-
ically enlivened liquid systems deploy the same kind of tactics
as da Vinci, where the power of water movement is controlled

3 The experiment explores the capability of synchronous logic-based droplet

control to enable algorithmic manipulation of materials at the intersection
of computer science and fabrication.

348
through hydraulically operated circuitry to produce largely pre-
determined effects. These spectacular gardens may also be re-
garded as architectural-scale water computers, whose spectacu-
lar water features demonstrate the dominance of machines over
the natural realm and whose potential for an alternative kind
of liquid technology and performance, remains only partially
explored (Pruned 2012).

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08.7
Soft Robots

It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed

its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway
into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
… The Thing cannot be described—there is no language
for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such
eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic
order. (Lovecraft 2002, 167)

Typically, robotic systems are considered animated machines,

where the ‘brute’ mechanical body, often made of steel, or al-
uminium, is provided with an external energy source. Algo-
rithms that encode pre-programmed motion patterns instruct
its tasks from the inside-out, which may be informed by feed-
back from inbuilt mechanical sensors. By contrast, the respon-
siveness of living systems comes from the outside-in as embod-
ied intelligence, where soft, elastic, and flexible materials like
soft skin, hairs, elastic muscles, tendons, and various fluctuant
organs direct the movement of rigid mechanical components.
Operations are governed by local reflexes that are modulated
by a central ‘brain’.
Two types of applications of liquid technologies are relevant
to the emerging field of soft robotics: those systems that are ac-
tuated by external liquid pneumatic or hydraulic forces, which
engage with the dynamics of non-linear materials, and those
whose soft bodies are internally agentised and receptive to ex-
ternal conditions.
Externally powered ‘soft robots’ are actuated by ‘liquid’ forces
that work with the plasticity of soft structures, which can adapt
and endure complex unstructured environments. Challenges
are ‘solved’ both centrally and locally, using the responsive ap-
paratuses of non-linear ‘sensing’ materials, where intelligence is
embodied in the structural systems that fine-tune pre-formulat-
ed external programs. Delegating task-solving to the periphery
of the operational program makes it easier for robots to perform

350
complex tasks (Iida and Laschi 2011). For example, fabricated
transparent, hydrogel-based robots can perform a number of
fast, forceful tasks, including kicking a ball underwater, and
grabbing and releasing a live fish. Actuated through an assem-
blage of hollow, hydrogel structures that are connected to rub-
bery tubes, these robots can be inflated into different orienta-
tions by the rapid inward movement of water, which enables it
to curl up or stretch out (Chu 2017).
Soft bodied robots without internal actuators such as ‘walk-
ing’ gels and dynamic droplets (see section 08.13 and chapter
09) are both activated and modulated by their contexts, which
enables degrees of ‘soft’ control. The chemical ‘inchworm’ cre-
ated at the Shuli Hashimoto Applied Physics Laboratory at
Waseda University, Tokyo is a colour-changing, ‘walking’ gel.
Actuated by a periodic, oscillating Belousov-Zhabotinsky re-
action, where the concentration of reagents periodically in-
creases and decreases (Belousov 1959; Zhabotinsky 1964) the
polymers in the gel shrink or grow in response to cyclical vari-
ations in the presence of ruthenium bipyridine ions. Traction
for this movement is gained on a notched surface, so the en-
tire ‘self-organising’ chemical system generates its own control
and mechanical signals from within its body operating within
environmental constraints (Maeda et al. 2007; Simonite 2009).
Modulating the performance of such agentised soft robots can
involve fine-tuning environmental conditions. At Brandeis Uni-
versity, researchers have created a gel from a solution of bovine
protein tubes and bacterial motor proteins that is capable of
spontaneous movement. The gel is activated by mixing it with
energy-rich adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which enables the
individual tubes and proteins to slide past each other to form
patterns or bundles that grow and eventually fall apart in a cy-
clic fashion. The movement and formation rate of these patterns
can be modulated by altering the concentration of ATP while the
character of motion is adjusted by changing the number of tubes
in the original solution (Yirka 2012).
The control of autonomously agentised systems, or liquid
technologies, requires a more detailed engagement with the en-

351
vironmental design than mechanically operated systems. Life is
the ultimate embodied computer where, through various forms
of molecular memory (DNA, brain, tissue receptivity), agents
can make informed decisions about how to act by comparing
internal models of ‘self ’ with the actual external conditions.

352
 08.8
Natural Computing

The future is unknowable, though not unimaginable. Future

knowledge cannot be had now, but it can cast its shadow
ahead. In each mind, however, the shadow assumes a
different shape, hence the divergence of expectations. The
formation of expectations is an act of our mind by means
of which we try to catch a glimpse of the unknown. Each
one of us catches a different glimpse. The wider the range
of divergence the greater the possibility that somebody’s
expectation will turn out to be right. (Lachmann 1977, 59).

Computation is a mode of thinking and practice that enables

the world to be sorted, ordered, and valued, so that new knowl-
edge may be acquired. In this book ‘computing’ is considered a
way of interrogating the processual building blocks of ‘decision-
making’ proposed by Descartes’ ‘rational thought’ — a thing that
doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and
also imagines and has sense perceptions. Implementing mod-
els of the world, the computing process can be iteratively tested
and altered through the recognition of different ‘states’, or stored
information/inputs (memory). In particular, computing within
the material realm is considered, as it is very different to the
symbolic exchanges of digital computers that are encoded into
patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’).
In a digital computer, binary information (0,1) is grouped
into ‘bytes’ (usually eight digits) and moved around into differ-
ent physical storage areas according to a set of instructions, or
algorithm, where they are etched into electronic components,
and can collectively perform specific ‘applications’, or ‘apps’ (Ep-
stein 2016). Since massless electrons carry digital information,
the speed of calculation is limited by the hardware, and not by
information travel speed.
In contrast, natural computing (Denning 2007; Zenil 2013)
places matter at the heart of its computational processes and op-
erates through ‘actual’ material paradigms, which explore the

353
computational strategies and parallel processing abilities of liv-
ing and dynamic physical systems. This is only possible when
matter is at far-from-equilibrium states, where the atomic realm
is capable of making decisions and therefore, exerting effects in
the world, which are shaped in relation to external events.
The internal agency of atoms (Dyson 1979, 249) responsible
for this ‘decision-making’ resides in their structure where, for
example, chemical bonds spontaneously associate through weak
and strong molecular forces to produce different kinds of mol-
ecules. John Dalton symbolically represented the mass of atoms,
calculated from the averages of large sample numbers, so they
could be theoretically and practically combined in ways to make
new substances, or compounds. The computational capacity of
the molecular realm reached a new threshold with the advent
of supramolecular chemistry, or chemistry ‘beyond the atom’,
which is concerned with the use of weak intermolecular interac-
tions to produce different configurations of molecules. Donald
J. Cram, Jean-Marie Lehn and Charles J. Pedersen were awarded
the 1987 Nobel Prize in this field for developing structural and
functional building blocks that could be used to build up larg-
er molecular architectures, so materials could be synthesised,
which had not previously existed in the history of the universe
(Steed and Atwood 2009).
Alan Turing was interested in how the combinatorial pro-
cesses that occurred within the natural realm (chemical, physi-
cal, developmental, adaptive, evolutionary) could produce
morphogenetic forms (Turing 1952). While Turing’s inquiry
was mathematically symbolic, he inspired the field of natural
computing that is interpreted according to respective interests
and existing knowledge sets within a range of overlapping dis-
ciplines, and has given rise to a range of derivative practices.
For example, morphological computing arises from the field of
robotics and engineering, which exploits the physical dynam-
ics of non-linear material systems to perform a computational
task (Füchslin et al. 2013); ‘collective computing’ observes how
adaptive biological systems solve problems (Sokol 2017a); while
unconventional computing aims to enrich, or go beyond, the

354
standard models of computing such as the Turing machine and
von Neumann architectures, which have dominated computer
science for more than half a century (Adamatzky et al. 2007).
Collectively, these emerging practices are generating new com-
puting systems, which are producing new insights into the na-
ture of the world such as soft robotics (Shepherd et al. 2013),
slime mould computing (Adamatzky et al. 2013) and reaction
diffusion computing (Adamatzky and De Lacy Costello 2003).
Although digital computing plays a critical role in all fields of
computing, the analogue modes of advanced computation raise
questions about number theory, hardware systems, and appro-
priate programming languages for working directly with matter.
For example, when slime mould ‘computes’, it does not use our
number systems.

… biological systems … are collective … They are all made

up of interacting components with only partly overlapping
interests, who are noisy information processors dealing with
noisy signals. (Sokol 2017a)

In living systems, material iterations, or oscillations, perform

the role of numbers. They are not symbolic gestures but actual:
an orbital pathway around the Earth, a pulse, a blink, a footstep,
a bowel contraction, the tide, and rain. These iterative, persis-
tent occurrences are not exact, self-similar, regular, or universal,
and constitute nature’s ‘beats’. These numerical-equivalent sys-
tems are nothing like numbers at all. As Henri Lefebvre notes,

the departure point for this history of space is not to be

found in the geographical descriptions of natural space,
but rather in the study of natural rhythms, and of the
modification of those rhythms and their inscription in space
by means of human actions, especially work-related actions.
It begins, then, with the spatio-temporal rhythms of nature
as transformed by a social practice. (Lefevbre 1991, 117)

355
Simultaneously fields and particles, atoms, and molecules are
in constant oscillation at the atomic scale as their active fronts
collide, interdigitate, collapse, or persist long enough to shape
the course of proximate events. The next level of organisation
involves the generation of hubs and ‘attractors’ that shape and
characterise spaces and environments across many scales, like
the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which produces colourful,
fractal-like patterns (Belousov 1959; Zhabotinsky 1964). With-
in these potent fields of activity, excitable molecules can then
make decisions about their configuration and spatial distribu-
tion in relationship to other atoms. Material expressions arise
from molecular ‘discourses’ that take place through agile mo-
lecular fields of potential and even quantum states. While these
events may provide a basis for prediction, since they arise from
probabilistic systems, they are not absolute indicators of events.
However, they create the conditions for shaping outcomes that
can be clearly observed at the macroscale in systems like the
pulsatile connecting tubes of slime mould colonies (Adamatzky
and Schubert 2014). While repetitions within lively systems cre-
ate bifurcations that demand molecules make choices and ul-
timately, result in irreversible events; such agentised matter is
not ‘alive’.

356
 08.9
Dissipative Structures

Life then is a vortex, more or less rapid, more or less

complicated, the direction of which is invariable, and which
always carries along molecules of similar kinds, but into
which individual molecules are continually entering, and
from which they are continually departing; so that the form
of a living body is more essential to it than its matter. As
long as this motion subsists, the body in which it takes place
is living — it lives. When it finally ceases, it dies. After death,
the elements which compose it, abandoned to the ordinary
chemical affinities, soon separate, from which, more or
less quickly, results the dissolution of the once living body.
It was then by the vital motion that its dissolution was
arrested, and its elements were held in a temporary union.
All living bodies die after a certain period, whose extreme
limit is fixed for each species, and death appears to be a
necessary consequence of life, which, by its own action,
insensibly alters the structure of the body, so as to render its
continuance impossible. (Cuvier 2006, 6)

Dissipative systems are paradoxical structures like tornadoes

and whirlpools that form spontaneously when reactive energy/
matter fields overlap. Characteristically, they resist Newton’s
law of increasing disorder (or entropy) to produce dynamic, yet
persistent, material systems with recognisable forms of organi-
sation. While dissipative gravitational fields are likely to give
rise to celestial bodies such as planets and galaxies, everyday
examples include convection currents, turbulent flow, cyclones,
hurricanes, and living organisms, which are ‘the most stable
and complexly differentiated dissipative structures in existence’
(Nicholson 2018, 8). Less commonly encountered dissipative
systems are ones that can be constructed, or produced, such as
lasers, the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction and Rayleigh–Bé-
nard (convection) cells, which are formed when a layer of liq-

357
uid is heated from below, so that hexagonal convection cells are
formed in the layer of liquid.
Dissipative structures challenge our expectations of objects,
as they are simultaneously structures and also processes that
produce lifelike patterns, which cannot be distilled into any dis-
crete phenomena, but perform a range of recognisable activi-
ties with many variations. While no two twisters are exactly the
same, their unique qualities are instantly recognisable. Charac-
teristic to all life is the extension of their influence beyond their
apparent boundaries, semi-permeability and deep entangle-
ment with context — not as an afterthought, but as a primary
condition of existence. Dissipative structures are coupled to
an as yet unspecified, but mathematically proven, internal re-
organisation and reordering process, which becomes more ef-
ficient at remaining stable over time by diffusing energy into
its surroundings. This extends way beyond the apparent ob-
ject boundary and also impacts on its environment. Think of
a cyclone that can influence extensive landscapes through the
winds it sets up, long before a storm chaser reaches the eye of
the storm. Consequently, in possessing a dynamic energy cloud,
dissipative structures are not blind automata, but demonstrate
a kind of primitive subjectivity that is not only extruded into,
and responsive to its environment. Such agentised expansion
constitutes an active and hyperlocal decision-making system
that operates through auras, fields, and fuzzy zones. Dissipative
structures may also assimilate passive objects into their bodies,
slingshotting them into higher levels of thermodynamic order,
unless the objects themselves obstruct the flow of exchange. Im-
agine Dorothy’s house as it becomes loosely coupled with the
tornado in which it is swept up and carried to the Land of Oz,
where it is eventually dumped along with the energy that the
tornado is trying to shed.
Dissipative systems are important infrastructures in the evo-
lutionary story of life, whose flows of material and energetic
exchange constitute the webs of life and death. Although their
ultimate destiny is to collapse back into nothingness, their very
presence alters the probability of further lifelike events. Over

358
time, the collective actions of dissipative networks may even
become organised enough to function as oscillators, which
can compute and pattern their surroundings. Such dissipative
chains of events have already persisted on Earth long enough to
support the transformations arising from energetic and mate-
rial exchanges between organisms over the course of 3.5 billion
years and constitute the fundamental infrastructures for life.

359
08.10
Dissipative Adaptation

While any given change in shape for [a dissipative] system

is mostly random, the most durable and irreversible
of these shifts in configuration occur when the system
happens to be momentarily better at absorbing and
dissipating work. With the passage of time, the ‘memory’
of these less erasable changes accumulates preferentially,
and the system increasingly adopts shapes that resemble
those in its history where dissipation occurred. Looking
backward at the likely history of a product of this non-
equilibrium process, the structure will appear to us like
it has self-organized into a state that is ‘well adapted’ to
the environmental conditions. This is the phenomenon of
dissipative adaptation. (England 2015, 922)

As systems dissipate energy they become increasingly ordered

over time, so that their complexity and stability increases,
without the need for organising codes. In the late 1990s, Gavin
Crooks and Chris Jarzynski showed that a small open system
driven by an external source of energy could irreversibly take up
a new configuration, as long as it shed energy into its surround-
ings. The ‘memory’ of these changes preferentially accumulated
within the body of the dissipative structure and increasingly
adopted configurations that were ‘well adapted’ to their envi-
ronmental context (Eck 2016).

This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some

temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend
over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and
better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic, or
chemical work in their environments … (Wolchover 2014)

‘Dissipative adaptation’ proposes that matter rearranges to chan-

nel the flow of energy through its structure increasingly more
effectively. It accounts for how molecules can remain stable and

360
even become more effectively organised by dumping excess en-
ergy into their surroundings. It is a mode of analogue computa-
tion that increases the organisation of lively matter without re-
course to central organising systems like biological code, such as
RNA or DNA. This process does not just reference the past states
of dissipative structures, but also creates a platform for alterna-
tive ways of designing and engineering with lively materials.

361
08.11
Is Dissipation Enough?

It is obvious that organisms differ from flames, whirlpools

and other dissipative structure in a number of ways. For
a start, organisms exhibit a far greater degree of stability,
being able to maintain themselves for much longer periods
of time. The key to their extraordinary stability lies in their
ability to store energy, which enable them to manage their
metabolic needs without having to rely on a constant supply
of experimental energy, like other dissipative structures.
In addition, organisms are distinctive in that they are
demarcated by a physical boundary — a semi-permeable
membrane — which helps regulate the intake and outtake of
materials flowing through them … Organisms … derived
from previous organisms, and their structure reflects the
gradual consolidation, through the eons of evolution, of
an intricate higher-order self-organizing dynamic among
component self-organizing processes. (Nicholson 2018, 16)

Dissipative structures that spontaneously occur in nature do

not completely describe all those characteristics that we recog-
nise as ‘life’ (Moreno and Mossio 2015, 18). While they do not
provide literal accounts of biogenesis, they exhibit principles
of organisation that enable further exploration of how matter
becomes lively. Given that the Modern Synthesis assumes the
fundamental building blocks of life are inert, dissipative systems
generate experimental apparatuses to rethink our assumptions
of living processes through lively matter, and enable different
kinds of questions regarding the nature of life to be explored.
They also help us (re)consider the trajectory from non-living to
living matter in ways that are consistent with the principles of
liquid life.

362
 08.12
Making Liquid Life

Liquid life offers a metaphorical and physical way of developing

the character of living things through the perspective of fluid
substance that were banished like the soul, from the bête ma-
chine and Modern Synthesis.
Finding ways to convert the principles of liquid life into a
toolset of materials, apparatuses, and prototypes that enable
these ideas to be further explored in testable and observable
ways, is akin to ‘nailing jellies to walls’. To date, testing the liq-
uid nature of life in practice has been an observational pursuit
(a natural philosophy) without meaningful ways to explore its
actuality an experimental capacity. With advances in our under-
standing of matter at far-from-equilibrium states (spectroscopy,
particle tracking), dissipative structures (characterisation of
dissipative adaptation), natural computing (reaction/diffusion
waves) and biotechnology (difference analysis, microarrays), it
becomes possible to develop a design-led exploration of liquid
life, which is situated within a realm of constant flux and insta-
bility, whose outcomes are contextual and contingent and there-
fore, seeks to raise possibilities rather than predict outcomes.
Unlike the classical worldview, where the relationships between
things is abstracted and simple, the fragility, incidental nature,
and unpredictability of lively systems requires a different way of
producing effects.
Shaped by curiosity and provoked by odd juxtapositions,
design-led experiments begin with sculpting questions using
spatial, material, and temporal ‘liquid’ tactics. Establishing ter-
rains of rebellion, soft systems, and resistance against entropy,
which are coerced and seduced towards desired states and en-
counters, they reveal and make familiar a realisable framework
for ‘liquid life’.

363
08.13
Visualising Lively Liquids

… a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that

organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix.
(Adams 2009, 158)

A range of dynamic droplet systems exist that exhibit strik-

ingly lifelike properties. The most commonly observed model
of self-organising non-linear systems is the Rayleigh–Bénard
convection cells, which are hexagonal structures that are caused
by convection currents when a thin layer of fluid is open to air
and submitted to a vertical temperature gradient (Bénard 1900).
They operate by way of a gravity-driven positive feedback sys-
tem, where molecules in liquid states continually move through
colder fields as they rise and results in instabilities that produce
the characteristic, morphologically stable ‘structure’, which re-
sembles biological cells (Rayleigh 1916).
David Deamer has observed hydrocarbons in amoeboid bod-
ies splitting into daughter cells (Wolchover 2017c), while Manu
Prakash observes water and propylene glycol-based droplets as
mimicking the behaviours of living cells (Abate 2015; Cira 2015)
and Martin Hanczyc and colleagues have also designed droplets
that can be induced to go through cycles of fusion and division
(Caschera, Rasmussen and Hanczyc 2013).
Arguably, the most lifelike droplet system was first discovered
by Otto Bütschli (Bütschli 1892), whose spectrum of body mor-
phology and behaviour is much more diverse than the previous
examples4. By adding a drop of strong alkali (potash) into a field
of olive oil (oleic acid) at room temperature, Bütschli created
a recipe for life whereby the drop transformed into a complex
structure with strikingly lifelike behaviours. Extruding proto-

4 In contrast to Rayleigh–Bénard cells, the Bütschli system’s metabolism pro-

duces varied structures that may facilitate the transition from apparent or-
der to lifelike behaviour

364
plasmic-like tentacles into its surroundings, he likened it to a
simple, single-celled organism (or protist) such as an amoeba.
In 2009, this system was observed for the first time in a mod-
ern laboratory at low power (×10) under a light microscope with
a backlit stage, which enabled the droplets to be seen more eas-
ily. Each alkali droplet broke down into stable but mobile struc-
tures around 1 mm in diameter, which produced soapy deposits
(sodium oleate) that recorded their movements like automatic
drawings. Iterations of the experiment produced various trajec-
tories that shared common characteristics. Droplets could move
around their environment, sense it, and respond to each other
through coordinated population-scale events. Such extraordi-
nary lifelike behaviour may be a consequence of the relative
abundance of the ‘food source’ in which the beads of alkali are
immersed, which provides unlimited energy for the structure-
producing exchanges. Through the principles of dissipative
adaptation, these lifelike characteristics persist long enough to
result in increasingly organised agents and complex behaviours
(Armstrong 2015). While the Bütschli system is not ‘alive’, it can
be practically applied to construct an apparatus that explores
how primordial (liquid) agents produce diverse and persistent
structures. This constitutes both a visualisation tool and native
experimental platform for directly observing and exploring
questions pertaining to liquid life (Armstrong 2015).

365
Part V

BEING
 09

LIQUID APPARATUS
‘Beings in transition’ are agents of discov-
ery that take the form of lifelike droplets,
which interrogate the theory, qualities,
characteristics, and apparatuses of liquid
life. In this chapter, an account of the
Bütschli system is given, based on the
study of dynamic droplets under a light
microscope, which provides fourteen
phenomena associated with various stages
of Bütschli droplet development. These act
as a language, or ‘angelology’ for liquid life,
through which its imaginary and technical
capacities are developed. Quotations from
a variety of sources are juxtaposed with
experimental accounts to introduce ‘qual-
ity of living’ into design-led observations,
where chemical events acquire a specific
cultural context. These provocations lay the
foundations for poetic experiments by Rolf
Hughes in chapter 10, and notations by
Simone Ferracina in chapter 11.

369
 09.1
Lively Liquid

… like the sceptics of atomism who could see no way of

verifying the totally invisible or the ancients for whom the
stuff of the stars was unknowable; or Mendel himself who
did not believe that the material basis of heredity would
ever be discovered. Not being able to see experimental
approaches is part of the paucity of the imagination.
(Cairns-Smith 1987, 135)

Liquid technologies are not constrained by or translated into the

operational structure of the machine, but retain the potential
to create transformative events, experiences, and habitats. The
strangest and most creative of these is the Bütschli system, which
establishes a unique dialogue with the living realm, by provid-
ing access to a realm of low-level ‘agentised’ material operations
that inhabit fields, interfaces, and protean bodies that continu-
ally respond to their environment. While it is evaluated through
the specificity of these encounters, being concerned with ‘this’
particular molecule, or ‘these’ specific qualities, in ‘that’ precise
place, its operations are very different to the kind of push-button
or touch interface that has been developed for machines.
Arising from the edge of chaos, Bütschli droplets take their
first rebellious steps against inertia through the stages of birth,
life, and death (Armstrong 2015, 87). Moving through lifelike
transitional states of existence, they splinter away from their ini-
tiating field of organisation, in material expressions that range
from simple droplets to structured configurations and popula-
tion-scale assemblages. Embodying an explosion of proto-Cam-
brian chemical diversity, they offer a glimpse into the parallel
world of liquid life1.

1 At ×10 magnification, radiant aqueous bodies cast shadows on a dark oil

background with their turbid trails of osmotic structures formed by soap
precipitates. At ×40, the narrow field of view reduces the field contrast and
the droplets appear like wraiths, which grow scaly skins against a slate back-
ground.

371
 Around 80% of the initial droplets rapidly develop thick
encasings that form deposits on the base of the Petri dish like
chemical snow. While many perish in the initial stages of this
journey, some prevail and persist, becoming increasingly organ-
ised. Some break free to reach the container’s edge, where they
turn back in upon themselves to traverse liquid fields that are
contaminated, or ‘structured’, by their own waste products. Oth-
ers circle in groups where they steadily increase in mass through
the production of deposits and become tethered to the bot-
tom of the Petri dish, where they strain restlessly against their
moorings. Those that do not ‘perish’, steadily accumulate soft
deposits, or ‘osmotic structures’, at their interface that eventu-
ally prevent the droplets from ‘feeding’. Encased in their soapy
cocoons, these droplets eventually reach a tipping point in their
thermodynamic order and plummet towards thermodynamic
equilibrium, or ‘death’.

Osmotic growths like living things may be said to have an

evolutionary existence, the analogy holding good down to
the smallest detail. In their early youth, at the beginning
of life, the phenomena of exchange, of growth, and of
organization are very intense. As they grow older, these
exchanges gradually slow down, and growth is arrested.
With age the exchanges still continue, but more slowly, and
these then gradually fail and are finally completely arrested.
The osmotic growth is dead, and little by little it decays,
losing its structure and its form. (Leduc 1911, 151)

In an open environment and over the course of billions of years,

such agile tactics may ultimately increase the material complex-
ity and fertility of a site, or even generate discernible signs of
‘alternative’ lifeforms.

372
 09.2
Life Cycle

Our home was a spilt-level affair with 14 steps leading up

from the garage to the kitchen door. Those steps were a gage
of life. They were my yardstick, my challenge to continue
living. I felt that if the day arrived when I was unable to lift
one foot up one step and then drag the other painfully after
it — repeating the process 14 times until, utterly spent, I
could be through — I could then admit defeat and lie down
and die. (Canfield and Hansen 2012, 246)

Standing in for the qualities neglected by classical expectations

of the material realm, in these experiments Bütschli droplets are
granted the mythological status of angels, which are explored
through fourteen ‘key stations’ that take place within a theatre
of chemical events. Each title refers to formal classifications
made to the characteristic behaviours of the system, which I
have previously published in Vibrant Architecture: Matter as
CoDesigner of Living Structures (Armstrong 2015). References to
themes relating to the process of ‘living’ are mixed into the ex-
perimental observations, to emphasise the ethical dimension of
the lively material realm and to render it strange. Selected quo-
tations conjure forth experiences and expectations2 that exceed
functionalist Enlightenment narratives, which typically frame
experimental findings.
As messengers (information), vectors (direction), transla-
tors of events (transformers), messages (language) and things-
in-themselves, the Bütschli angels brought forth by the mix-
ing of alkali and oil, draw our attention to the extraordinary
characteristics of matter at far-from-equilibrium states. In the
following design-led experiments and alternative spaces for
dreaming and transformation, they seek to (re)unite the soul
substance with the material realm, so that the remarkable char-

2 Each quotations indicates the specific characteristics of a particular Bütsch-

li angel.

373
acteristics of the living realm may be observed anew through
the lens of liquid life.

374
 09.2.1
Birth: Field of Fire and Ice

The little fires spawned by each four-pound incendiary ball

joined into middling fires, and middling fires into bigger
fires. Soon, the fire whirls were self-sustaining, sucking in
oxygen from all around and creating intense cyclonic winds.
Gale force winds spun into the centre of the fires, sucking
combustibles, animals, bricks, beams, and people into the
maelstrom. The asphalt in the streets turned to molten black
rivers. In the superheated air, people asphyxiated or died
from breathing the hot gases. Structures apparently far from
the fire front would suddenly burst into flames. (Logan
2012, 166)

When the alkaline droplet first breaks up in the oil field through
the saponification process, it self-organises into a polarised, dy-
namic field with a characteristically arched, rolling front. This
moves outwards, producing ripples with a flame-like appear-
ance. Soap flakes, like ice crystals, are swept backwards and ac-
cumulate at its trailing edge, where they begin to form osmotic
structures. In this initial highly energised stage, the front can
break up into discreet bodies that resemble moving islands of
‘fire and ice’.

375
09.2.2
Birth: Shells

If what you found was made from pure matter, it will

never spoil. And you can come back one day. If it was just
one moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you will
find nothing on your return. But you would have seen an
explosion of light. And that alone would already be worth
the journey. (Coelho 1993, 118)

As the alkaline field continues to break up, twisting shell-like

structures appear, which absorb energy from the environment
to remain stable.
Like tornadoes trapped within tiny Russian matryoshka
dolls, these turbulent manifolds burst out of each other, time
and time again. Many suddenly collapse on their release and
form dense crystalline deposits, while others enter a new phase
of organisation as lifelike droplets.

376
 09.2.3
Life: Organising Droplets

… Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
(Heaney 2002, 4)

The chemical front disintegrates to become wandering fields of

dynamic droplets. Some move alone, while others form groups
that explore and modify their surroundings by casting complex
structures from around their posterior pole.
As if out of a witch’s cauldron, a parade of forms arises from
the conjunction between liquid media; tadpole tails, rose-like
formations, knotted rhizomes, and winking encrustations.

377
09.2.3.1
Fourteen Liquid Stations of Life:
Primary Morphologies

… they were words

invented to define things
that existed
or did not exist
in the face of
the pressing urgency
of a need …
(Artaud 1975)

The configurations of Bütschli angels are not pre-determined, or

gradual, but are continually negotiated through their exquisite
responsiveness to instabilities and ability to rapidly transform in
response to change.
The ensuing interdigitations, cohesions, dissolutions, extru-
sions, and inevitable collapses in the following sections, map a
pathway of entropic resistance that shapes the character of liq-
uid life.

378
 09.2.3.1.1
ONE Life:*Droplet

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should

first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our
dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and
source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their
being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child
so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these
reflections, I thought that if I could bestow animation upon
lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now
found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently
devoted the body to corruption. (Shelley 2014, 44)

Bütschli angels wander flâneur-like in search of the path of

greatest resistance towards their inevitable end. Leaving chemi-
cal ripples in their wake, they surf the forward progression of
time, which shapes the irreversibility and creativity of liquid life.

379
09.2.3.1.2
TWO Life:*Osmotic Skin

… true theatre, because it moves and makes use of living

instruments, goes on stirring up shadows, which life
endlessly stumbles along. (Artaud 2010, 7)

Soap crystals that arise from the meeting of alkali and oil are
carried upon miniature glacial flows that clothe the Bütschli an-
gel’s body. These osmotic skins may take on the form of undu-
lating jellyfish, stuttering werewolves, or writhing worms, and
break away from the droplet body, to archive the metabolic in-
tensity of the system as soft fossil trails.

380
 09.2.3.1.3
THREE Life:*Clusters

He sees efflorescences in fragments of ice, imprints of

shrubs and shells — yet so that one cannot detect whether
they be imprints only, or the things themselves. Diamonds
gleam like eyes: metals palpitate. And all fear has departed
from him! He throws himself down upon the ground, and
leaning upon his elbows watches breathlessly. Insects that
have no stomachs persistently eat: withered ferns bloom
again and reflower; absent members grow again. At last he
perceives tiny globular masses, no larger than pinheads,
with cilia all round them. They are agitated with a vibratite
motion. (Flaubert 2005, 190)

As Bütschli angels pattern their surroundings, they avoid the

trails of their own waste products. Their aversion is such that
while circling, they may become paralysed if they find them-
selves suddenly surrounded by a field of their own excrements.
These invisibly scarred terrains provoke sudden actions, where
chemical insect swarms weave over and around fossilised bod-
ies, like pollinating bees. They shake, zigzag, and crash into each
other in a frenzy of information exchange.

381
09.2.3.1.4
Paradoxa

‘This is Hell,’ she said with a smile. ‘But Hell is merely a

form of terminology. Really this is the Womb of the World
whence all things come.’ (Carrington 2005, 137)

Bütschli angels inhabit an oily realm of constant instabilities,

uncertainties, and displacements. Consuming the fuel within
their own bodies they remain lively until they reach a threshold
where they are either incarcerated in their waste, or have con-
sumed themselves entirely. This auto-cannibalism is the source
of their liveliness, which fuels a highly agentised material realm
that only monsters truly understand.

382
 09.2.3.1.4.1
FOUR Life:*Rose

In the transformative realm these practices … show a

certain control of the transformation of individuals and
their disintegration into a non-individual ‘body’ of skulls
and long bones … the disordering of the corpse, the
relocation and redistribution of body parts also can be
interpreted as serving as mnemonic practice, creating
and maintaining memories … bodies and objects do not
belong to an individual but the community. Fragments of
a body need not commemorate individuals … the politics
of separating, giving and consuming [are] community
concerns. (Gramsch 2013, 464–65)

When Bütschli angels become tired of osculating with each oth-

er, their bodies grow feathery crystals although they do not take
flight, but fall. The fallen bones of Bütschli angels form struc-
tured landscapes that signpost alternative futures for beings yet-
to-come.

383
384
 09.2.3.1.4.2
FIVE Life:*Werewolf

Wide shoulders, long arms and she sleeps succinctly curled

into a ball as if she were cradling her spine in her tail.
Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf; it
is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin
and become part of it, although it does not exist. Like the
wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the
present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual
immediacy as without hope as it is without despair. (Carter
2006, 141)

When the surface area-to-volume ratio of a Bütschli angel is op-

timised, it vigorously consumes itself and its surroundings. Her-
alded by the rapid precipitation of hairy crystals over its body,
the drag produced by these uneven deposits causes the angel
to move erratically. As these hair residues rapidly build up, the
angel seems to grow a ‘tail’. The combination of profuse crys-
tallisation and erratic movement is recognised as the ‘werewolf
moment’, which precedes an imminent phase change in fate and
behaviour. As more fur builds up around its body, the angel’s
metabolism is weakened and heralds its inevitable decay.

385
09.2.3.1.4.3
SIX Life:*Oyster

Tucked darkly in their calciferous shells, listening warily

for dangers, breathing oxygen into the water, sifting the silt,
changing sex, the oyster has witnessed all our histories, all
our struggles … The oyster was here before we were. Before
once upon a time. Before, you might say, time itself. Back
then oyster reefs encircled the continents, a great shelf or
ledge between the ocean and the land that we used to haul
ourselves up or along, whichever it was, and row ourselves
around this planet, cove to cove, not cavemen but covemen.
Take one in your hand, feel the scratch of the shell of what
we now call rock, prise it apart and you have Mother Earth’s
chronicle of the planet and a taste of the future. Treat it with
respect. (Smith 2015, 9)

When the skin of an angel becomes sufficiently thick and heavy,

it no longer glides through the liquid medium. Its body becomes
anchored to the ground, whereupon it continues to grow a thick
shell like an oyster, creatures that were once considered only a
little more sophisticated than minerals in the hierarchy of life.
Like beating hearts, the soft matter of angels keeps mark of
subjective time through their iterations. Slowly consuming and
incarcerating themselves in their waste products, their metabo-
lism slows down to the point where they are barely breathing.

386
 09.2.3.1.4.4
SEVEN Life:*Suckling Pigs

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will

maintain it to be the most delicate — princeps obsoniorum.
I speak not of your grown porkers — things between pig
and pork — those hobbydehoys — but a young and tender
suckling — under a moon old — guiltless as yet of the
sty — with no original speck of the amor immunditiae, the
hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest — his voice
as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble,
and a grumble — the mild forerunner, or praeludium, of
a grunt. He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our
ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled — but what a sacrifice
of the exterior tegument! (Lamb 2011, 6)

The active interfaces of incarcerated Bütschli angels attract the

attentions of other bodies that circle around them, becoming
their satellites. Such compulsions develop complex relation-
ships, which may adopt formations that are evocative of suck-
ling pigs on a sow. It is unclear exactly what draws these drop-
lets together without fusion. One possibility is that it is surface
tension-related, where glycerol, a waste product of saponifica-
tion, lowers surface tension and invites other droplets to move
towards each other.

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and

Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hater, are
necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good
and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the
active springing from Energy.
(Blake 1975, 7–8)

A reduction in surface tension does not explain, however, why

droplets are repelled at the boundary interface and, mostly, do

387
not merge3. Whatever the nature of the exchanged forces, a com-
plex choreography of attractive and repulsive forces is at work.

3 When surface charge-based systems, like surfactants and salts, are applied
to the surface of a different species of dynamic oil droplets, they can be
induced to perform the kinds of physical movements associated with clas-
sical life cycles. Adding surfactants to the medium provokes droplets to di-
vide, while adding salt makes individual droplets fuse. By alternating fission
and fusion, the life cycle can be provoked to continue indefinitely (Mar-
shall 2013, 7). Yet, this is simply mimicry of processes that operate a much
higher organisational order than droplet systems, and without an internal
or environmental system to precipitate these events, these experiments are
cosmetic simulacra of living things without the unruly agency that is char-
acteristic of lifelike systems.

388
 09.2.3.2
Fourteen Liquid Stations of Life:
Primary Behaviours

Trickster … is a pore-seeker. He keeps a sharp eye out for

naturally occurring opportunities and creates the ad hoc
when they do not occur by themselves. (Hyde and Chabon
2010, 47)

Bütschli droplets exhibit an opportunistic spectrum of distinc-

tive types and tendencies. Such characteristics can be thought
of as primary behaviours, which possess recognisable, although
never exactly repeatable, stories.

389
09.2.3.2.1
Interfacing

Moon-milk was very thick, like a kind of cream cheese.

It formed in the crevices between one scale and the next,
through the fermentation of various bodies and substances
of terrestrial origin which had flow up from the prairies
and forests and lakes, as the Moon sailed over them. It
was composed chiefly of vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen,
lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, moulds,
pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral
salts, combustion residue. (Calvino 2002, 6)

While Bütschli angels are attracted to each other, they do not

usually fuse when they met. The distribution of water within
their bodies can be observed by adding a hydrophilic dye under
a fluorescence microscope. Glowing like tiny moons, the inden-
tations of their soap scales can be seen as impact craters over the
angel’s smooth surface. Using this imaging technique, Bütschli
droplets can be seen releasing small jets of fluid into an adjacent
body as their interfaces touch, but still, they will not fuse.

390
 09.2.3.2.1.1
EIGHT Life:*Mirroring

Mirror-image identical
Twins. One egg, one sperm,
One zygote, divided
Sharing one complete
Set of genetic markers.

One egg, one sperm.

One being, split in two.

And how many souls?

… might the soul clone itself,
create a perfect imitation
of something yet to be
defined? In this way,
can a reflection be altered?
… do twins begin in the womb?
Or in a better place?
(Hopkins 2008, 1–3)

When a deep split occurs in the generative streams that produce

Bütschli angels, mirrored beings emerge (Golbin et al. 1993). As
in the case of biological systems, where identical twins replicate
a shared fundamental structure, mirrored angels demonstrate
commonalities, like form or behaviour. This is not a superficial
finding but evidences the fundamental role played by propaga-
tive systems in the genesis of liquid life.

391
392
 09.2.3.2.1.2
NINE Life:*Satellite

Not a few worlds were destroyed by the downfall of a

satellite. The lesser body, ploughing its way, age after age,
through the extremely rarefied but omnipresent cloud of
free atoms in interstellar space, would lose momentum. Its
orbit would contract, at first slowly, then rapidly. It would
set up prodigious tide in the oceans of the larger body, and
drown much of its civilization. Later, through the increasing
stress of the planet’s attraction, the great moon would begin
to disintegrate. First it would cast its ocean in a deluge on
men’s heads, then its mountains, and the titanic and fiery
fragments of its core. If in none of these manners came
the end of the world then inevitably, though perhaps not
till the latter days of the galaxy, it must come in another
way. The planet’s own orbit, fatally contracting, must bring
every world at last so close to its sun that conditions must
pass beyond the limit of life’s adaptability, and age by age
all living things must be parched to death and roasted.
(Stapledon 1999, 88)

As large Bütschli angels produce more chemical attractants than

smaller ones, they tend to draw them towards their orbit. Oscil-
lations between the large and small angel bodies, result in tides
of exchange that result in the mutual deposition of skins like
tectonic plates across their active bodies.

393
09.2.3.2.1.3
TEN Life:*Chain

I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town,

among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize
we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments
of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When
I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern,
and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and
into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall
it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic.
We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside
us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds
and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the
magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched
out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out … Because
the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and
youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed
and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.
(McCammon 1992, 2)

Bütschli angels frequently form pulsing chain-like formations

that stabilise their collective movements. Those that are weight-
ed down by their residues are rapidly encased in osmotic films.
Strung like dew upon a spider silk filament, they pulse and glit-
ter intermittently until they reach thermodynamic equilibrium.

394
 09.2.3.2.2
ELEVEN Life:*Propagation

I opened my eyes — and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist

green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened.
Borasi, the sun, became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel.
The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes.
(Vonnegut 2008, 187)

While Bütschli angels spontaneously arise from the fuzzy realms

of energised chemical fields, they cannot replicate, as their pro-
genitor systems are too primitive to form reproductive struc-
tures. Bütschli angels persevere so as long as their generative
systems abide and have no need for progeny, for when they fall,
others relentlessly take their place. The Petri dish base is littered
with angel snow.

395
396
 09.2.3.2.3
TWELVE Life:*Persistence

Movement’s folding in on itself is not something the body

does. It is what bodying is. Movement embodies only itself.
Movement’s making is corporeogenic: becoming-body.
(Forsythe 2014, 39)

The complexity of Bütschli angels is time limited and takes on

different manifestations across various media. Only when an-
gels replenish their interior metabolism (by feeding) and tend
to their environmental health (waste removal) will they discover
the path towards (relative) persistence.

397
09.2.3.2.4
THIRTEEN Life:*Sensitivity

Tiny differences in input could quickly become

overwhelming differences in output — a phenomenon given
the name ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions.’ In
weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-
jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect — the notion that
a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform
storm systems next month in New York. (Gleick 1997, 8)

Soft as a mosquito’s dance, soap flakes gather on the surface of

Bütschli angels, but may be chaotically amplified to become a
snowstorm of residues. Unlike cellular life, droplet metabolisms
are turned inside out, so their critical exchanges take place at the
interface, with no recourse to interiority, subjectivity, or privacy.
The inner workings of Bütschli angels are therefore transparent,
vulnerable to, and penetrated by the chaos of the world.

398
 09.2.3.2.5
FOURTEEN Life:*Fusion

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore

… a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is
in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of
scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must
be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when
necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified
with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay
life the price it must be paid. (Artaud 2010, 122)

Touching without fusing, Bütschli angels persist until they are

exhausted and lie gently metabolising alongside each other.
Some livelier angels set traps at the tips of crystalline stalks like
predatory insects, waiting for the approach of an unsuspecting
warm metabolism. Then, ‘snap’, two become one. A chance find-
ing under fluoroscopy reveals a momentary union of two un-
tethered bodies. The apex of a probing droplet blasts fluorescent
liquid, like the spray of a bombardier beetle, into the other. Its
discharge twists like smoke until it evenly diffuses throughout
the recipient droplet. This fusion was only partial and an ex-
traordinary sight that occurs without record and is now just a
memory.

399
400
 09.2.4
Life: Populations

Their first terraforming move was to sprinkle the precious

dirt from their homeland into the planet’s atmosphere,
which carried living seeds from their laboratory
experiments. After decades, these creeping chemistries went
‘native’ with interesting results. Now slithering scoundrels
flop, gaping out of the silt and flap tirelessly on the beach
in an evolutionary race to gain a colonising foothold on the
hallowed dry land. While the sentinels, who have only just
evolved their magnificent tri-legs, raise their skinny bodies
out of the puddles, scream ‘no room!’ and pick off the
scoundrels in droves as they flail helplessly, in the effort to
dry-dirt upgrade. (Armstrong 2018a, 106)

Like weather fronts, Bütschli angels can bring about radical

change through events that take place at their interfaces, where
highly complex molecular landscapes reach thresholds of trans-
formation, or tipping points, where completely new kinds of
molecular patterning, or ordering emerge.
While the source of this creativity is not fully understood,
it arises from pre-existing metabolic activity where attractants/
stimulants and inhibitors/repellents respond to each other and
produce hyperdynamic, transformative landscapes, which gen-
erate coordinated group behaviours such as scattering — the in-
verse of ‘quorum’ sensing in bacteria, which recruits other bod-
ies to the signal site (Nealson, Platt and Hastings 1970).

401
09.2.5
Death: Quiescence

While we live, we ourselves are inhabited … our bodies are

the kitchens were our food is cooked, digested, and then
burned to cook us. We live until death in a perpetual fever,
98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. When at last we are well done, we
begin to cool, becoming food ourselves. (Logan 2008, 55)

Having danced in the theatre of liquid life, Bütschli angels lie

spent among wreaths of crystalline materials, having almost
consumed their own bodies in the process. Osmotic membranes
snap around their active surfaces like a trap, completing the
chemical act of ‘death’.

402
 09.2.6
Death: Regeneration

I had realized the injustice of society, I wanted first of all

to cleanse myself, then go beyond its brutal ineptitude. My
stomach was the seat of that society, but also the place in
which I was united with all the elements of the earth. It was
the mirror of the earth, the reflection of which is just as real
as the person reflected. That mirror — my stomach — had to
be rid of the thick layers of filth (the accepted formulas) in
order properly, clearly, and faithfully to reflect the earth; and
when I say ‘the earth,’ I mean of course all the earths, stars,
suns in the sky and on the earth, as well as all the stars, suns,
and earths of microbes’ solar system. (Carrington 1989, 164)

Bütschli droplets may be briefly regenerated when their thick,

incarcerating osmotic skins are temporarily broken apart by
vigorous agitation. A flicker of life passes through their bodies
until the fractures are healed by metabolism, returning the angel
to an inert state.
As in the case of living systems, a specific Bütschli angel can-
not be restored to its original form once dissipation is quenched
from its being. For the angel, this removal from the theatre of
liquid life is permanent but living things may be returned into
the web of life by slingshotting their decomposed matter back
into existing metabolic pathways, where it is assimilated into
other bodies. The strange reanimated apparatuses that can per-
form this function, are the soils.

403
404
 09.3
Bütschli Droplets as Computational Agents

The theory does not make any new hypotheses; it merely

suggests that certain well-known physical laws are sufficient
to account for many of the facts … This model will be a
simplification and an idealization, and consequently a
falsification. It is to be hoped that the features retained for
discussion are those of greatest importance in the present
state of knowledge. (Turing 1952, 37)

Bütschli angels provide a theoretical and applied experimental

platform that demonstrates the technological potential of liquid
substrates at far-from-equilibrium states, behaving in unusual
ways that are difficult to describe through conventional scientif-
ic narratives alone. By drawing on design-led agendas (culture,
aesthetics, history, language, poetry etc.) alternative explora-
tions are possible that raise different kinds of questions about
the nature of ‘life’, and open up new spaces for investigation.
Even the non-classical behaviours of dynamic droplets defy
logical explanation, but fortuitously generate a range of easily
visualised outcomes that are also capable of performing useful
‘work’ and therefore may be readily operationalised as a techno-
logical platform, capable of interrogating the principles of liquid
life.
While not detailed in this book (Armstrong 2015), ‘loose’ con-
trol systems can be strategically applied to influence the Bütschli
system’s emergent phenomena, which include: adding various
salt solutions to the droplets to produce bodies with dense car-
bonate surface precipitates, or stimulating and inhibiting move-
ment by adding organic solvents like acetone (Armstrong 2015).
Thus, the Bütschli system fulfils the equivalent function of the
bête machine for liquid life, as it not only embodies a set of ideas
but also practically demonstrates them.

405
09.4
Ontological and (Post)epistemological
Issues

Listen to the forecasts, note what they say and then use
your own knowledge to refine the details for your own area.
(Watts 2014, 12)

Responsive bodies in constant flux exceed the capabilities of

classical objects, and therefore require a set of terms, metaphor-
ical contexts, and recognisable narratives capable of interrogat-
ing our encounters with them. Clues to the kinds of frameworks
and metaphors that may be appropriate for this purpose already
exist in our concepts of weather (material, systems, lore), oceans
(material, systems, lore) and angels (mythology). This is where
the language of liquid life begins.

406
 09.4.1
Beyond Classical Categories

The Bütschli system poses a particular challenge to the structur-

ing of knowledge, as it may yet prove to be ‘post-epistemolog-
ical’, or uncategorisable in any conventional way (Latour 2013).
The implications are for establishing meaningful encounters
with its inevitable paradoxes such as — measuring the unmeas-
urable, valuing the unvaluable and recognising the unknown.
Droplets exhibit unique features that are characteristic of non-
linear systems, which are not fully resolvable using classical ap-
proaches. Their complexity, organisational diversity, extreme
environmental responsiveness and intersections with other
ontologically distinct systems such as machines, implies their
outputs are not only constantly moving physical targets, but also
conceptual ones. Consider, for example, Venice in the following
terms:

Life is in a state of oscillation, as heartbeats quell and

dead things explode from composts into animated states.
Creatures like ichthyosaurs, trilobites, coelacanths,
megalodons and ammonites, awaken from fossil beds, to
live again. Beings that have been erased from the world’s
imagination are already forming in wombs, where it is
impossible to count the number of limbs and eyes as they
perpetually roll in knots of dough-like flesh and blissful
embryogenesis. Bodies wander through adaptive fields,
digestive juices, and egg sacs, which constantly remodel
their bones then explode into dust. Tinged with blue
copper-laden blood, the lagoon seems built from thick folds
of meniscal flesh, full of heavy metals and other kinds of
uncleanliness. It’s a place where creatures simultaneously
freeze and boil, holding up a mirror to our darkest urges
and most grievous ecological atrocities. This realm imagines
us extinct. (Armstrong 2019, 97)

407
It is challenging to view and describe the constantly changing
Bütschli system without assimilating it into pre-existing knowl-
edge sets, like the bête machine. However, this is exactly what
needs to be done if the full potential of this emerging technol-
ogy is to be fully explored and imagined. Bodies in constant flux
are not unknown to us. Their concepts and metaphors reside in
the expressions of our encounters with mutable matter like oil
slicks, reflections, murmurations, flames, developing embryos,
snot, waterfalls, shoals, the weather, and oceans. However, our
strong preference for bounded objects that can be ‘names’ and
ultimately controlled, has left the mutable, intangible, incon-
stant, and transitional aspects of being incompletely character-
ised and interrogated. Re-engaging the protean aspects of reality
may conjure forth qualitatively different kind of encounters with
the living realm, which provoke alternative forms of knowledge.

408
 09.4.2

Notating Life

I was struck by the idea of drawing a diagram of my life,

and I knew at the same moment exactly how it was to
be done … I should … speak of a labyrinth … with …
many entrances leading to the interior. These entrances
I call primal acquaintances; each of them is a graphic
symbol of my acquaintance with a person whom I met,
not through other people, but through neighbourhood,
family relationships, school comradeship, mistaken identity,
companionship on travels, or other such hardly numerous
situations. So many primal relationships, so many entrances
to the maze. But since most of them — at least those that
remain in our memory — for their part open up new
acquaintances, relations to new people, after some time they
branch off these corridors (the male may be drawn to the
right, female to the left). Whatever cross connections are
finally established between these systems also depends on
the intertwinements of our path through life. (Benjamin
1999, 614–15)

Dynamic droplets perform on an ‘ever-changing stage’ (Tschu-

mi 2012, 28) that takes the form of an olive oil field. To provide a
notational map of the Bütschli system, an oceanic ontology was
derived from discrete events that took place during a series of
over 300 experiments. All of these were conducted at room tem-
perature using 3 M sodium hydroxide drops, which were added
by hand to the olive oil field (Armstrong 2015).
At the centre of the map, concentric circles, which are loga-
rithmically spaced to indicate passing time in the system, radi-
ate outwards from an initiating event at the origin. Following
activation, an estimated 90% of chemical activity is completed
within five minutes. While individual droplets may be active for
as long as an hour after their genesis, the greatest diversity of
events is observed during this period. A spiral also emanates

409
from the origin, which depicts increasing complexity in the
events clustered around the start of the reaction, which become
less frequent as time unfolds. The various outputs are grouped
according to recognisable events or structures, like the ‘were-
wolf ’ moment (see section 09.2.3.1.4.2).
Produced by the interactions between actors, the resultant
map does not propose a formal classification system, but acts
as an avatar of events that are shaped by informal and subjec-
tive accounts of the system’s possibilities. Since these are open
to reinterpretation, the Bütschli system’s oceanic ontology may
be regarded as a framework for storytelling.

412
 09.5

Conclusion: Bütschli Droplets and Liquid Life

And with the hieroglyph of a breath, I wish to recover

an idea of sacred theater. Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre de
Séraphin (Damisch 2002, 200)

Bütschli droplets provide a lifelike model that facilitates discov-

ery of the non-biological, ‘living’ realm. They reveal surprising
encounters that raise questions about the nature of life and the
character of lived experiences. Enabling the visualisation and
iterative testing of liquid life’s concepts, so they can be refined
(Armstrong 2015), dynamic droplets draw together the condi-
tions for continual change and provide a cauldron of toolsets
that provide insights into the ‘adjacent possible’ (Kauffman
2008, 64) of the living realm, which is beyond our current ca-
pacity to calculate. Constituting a visualisation system and
technological platform, it becomes possible to observe how liv-
ing systems ‘could be’ if they were composed from alternative
modes of organisation than constitutes the biological realm.
The Bütschli system demonstrates that liquid life is ebullient
and extends beyond its apparent boundaries to excoriate its
niches and neighbours with tangible effects. This being-in-the-
world (Wheeler 2011) is characterised by non-linear systems like
dissipative structures, which combine fluidity with the transfor-
mational repertoire of matter, to mount mischievous material
resistance against entropic forces.
Like a waterfall whose journey to the ground has, so far, been
prevented by the collisions it has encountered on the way, liquid
life finds a way to slingshot around the rock face through the
metabolisms (digestion, anabolism, assimilation) of other liv-
ing bodies and agents of strategic decay like the thanatobiome
and necrobiome (catabolism, composting), so that it may fall
again in other ways. This metabolic waterfall ‘elevator’ is a met-
aphor for the processes that underpin the 3.5-billion-year un-
broken legacy of modern biology. It highlights an oft-neglected

413
truth — that life is only possible when it is deeply entangled with
the rich metabolisms of death.

414
 Part VI

TRANSITIONING
 10

ANGELS
Rolf Hughes constructs an ‘angelology’
of language through the transformative
invocations of prose poetry, summoning
fourteen angels and six (non)definitions of
circus, as part of the transition from life to
death.

Every visible thing in this world is put in

the charge of an angel. (Chase 2002, 14)

417
 10.1
The Letting Go
(Fourteen Angels)

Preface

‘I tell you that they have reinvented microbes

in order to impose a new idea of god.’

— Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgement of God

As above, so below;
sun cleft
bitter slope
black coal
drum burst
rhythm
red sun
black horse
dawn crag
blacksmith
six horseshoes
tossed across
earth & wood
wind & bone
earth & bone
iron & blood
fire & ash
and, finally,
a petal or two
— ready for you.
As this world is not fully formed, we have only a small idea of
its scope.

419
1.  On the futility of defining angels

The angel is concerned with transforming the world into

magnificence. It transcends the narrow and the obscure, yet
inhabits paradox, being both disembodied and integrated into
the core of our being.

This means the angel is a manifestation of inner oscillation.

Oscillation opens up the world. It is the basis of the dissemina-
tion of light.

The angel seeks only to sustain a gaze on each form of exist-

ence — this alone keeps it in a state of grace.

The angel lies down with the leper, shares the heat of its heart,
yet looks aside when life leaks away. Challenged, it resorts to a
language of falling.

I fall by means of candlelight

I fall in thrumming yards
I fall in brackish waters
I fall on open hearts.

If you dissect an angel, you will find no rules that can be tran-
scribed; you will discover, instead, that the purest laws are now
made manifest on your bloodied hands.

2.  The breath before liquid life

breeze
whispering world
opaque, glimmering, crepuscular thoughts

mirror mist, sunbeam

deep green tides

420
city of coral
fragments waving

grey scaffold
shells, sponge
seaweed
populations of polyps
secret affinities
twilight

It’s not about you, she says.

It is about we.

First definition of circus

Think of the circus as a watering place, a wellspring.

A ghost walk on which doors appear closed without being so.

Walls revealed to yield at sprung rhythms.

A rite de passage where the sick and the afflicted confront the
potentialities of their recovery.

A dream house made of canvas and wax.

A maze. A market. A city. A sewer.

Now raise your right hoof.

Feel the equilibrium about to be cleaved by your coming stum-
bling into this world.

421
3.  A dialogue of clowns

Here comes mischief!

[LAUGHTER]

Horizontal Capitano versus

Vertical Servetta!
Dialoguing about the afterlife!
[LAUGHTER]
Red-faced, white-faced mischief!
Sssh, listen!

The door is locked.

The key elsewhere.
There’s a stone in my shoe.

Fetch it, he says.

The key, fetch it!
Hobble, hobble…
What about me blister, mister?
Just fetch it!
The afterlife awaits!

Forget it, is what I said.

Forget about me fetching it.
The key is elsewhere
The door remains locked.
Plus, there’s a stone in my shoe
Didn’t you hear?
[Turns to face audience].
I got a bleedin’ blister!

[LAUGHTER]

The afterlife? The after this life?

[PAUSE]

422
Don’t make me laugh!

[UPROARIOUS LAUGHTER. EXEUNT TO TRUMPET SERANADE]

4. What but a soul?

What but a soul could have the wit

To build me up for sin so fit?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.

— Andrew Marvell, ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body’

Let me suggest you climb a tree and cut.

The branches will take your weight and bounce you gently,
sensually.

So let me suggest you now cut some more.

Relish your suspension between earth and sky — 
your soul snarling in the saw’s hungry maw,
your skeleton bolted together in its sack.

Lay your head where my heart used to be

Hold the earth above me
Lay down in the green grass
Remember when you loved me

Nerves, arteries, veins. Arboreal chain. All in vain.

Stand in the shade of me

Things are now made of me.1

1 Italicised lines from ‘Green Grass’ by Tom Waits. Songwriters: Kathleen

Brennan/Thomas Alan Waits. ‘Green Grass’ lyrics © Peer Music Publishing.

423
Cut.
Me.
Down!

Second definition of circus

Circus is built upon materials singularly resistant to the instru-

ments of human control. Spade, drill, truncheon, club. It is not
uncommon for stepladders to plunge thirty metres into aerial
emptiness.

When I am in that darkness, I know nothing of anything human.

I do remember that previous darkness in which I see eve-

rything (and then nothing), that darkness that comes from
within and that so delights me that I cannot speak of it.

5.  Proto life incantation

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

— H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Nameless City’, January 1921

They appear, these malaks, angels, or jinn, as if in a clouded

mirror, by the loosed ones tempestuously, storming succes-
sively, the scatterers scattering, several severing, hurling the
remaining to bond or repel; by those that out plug violently, or
draw out gently; by those that float serenely, those that out-
strip suddenly; by those that enter a flat mirror world, averse
to perspective and all the errors of your penetrating gaze. The
lake of fire descends, you abandon your neutrality; we loiter
with intent, eventually peering up through our three eyes for

424
the judgement of the cap that fits with a snap and extinguishes
all light.

Third definition of circus

The standing limb/the falling limb: a choreography of

(dis)equilibrium.

No, lift not that leg without lowering an arm, turning your
head, or arching your back; every movement solicits a compen-
satory movement. By such means do we safeguard the asym-
metrical trust and respect that sustains the collective.

Once set in motion, we learn an art of decisions, summoning

all that is outside expression to illuminate our current embod-
ied geographies of flotsam and flow, this being another aspect
to a practice of oscillation.

6.  On naming the membrane

Through the spoken Word we receive fire and light, by

which we are made new and different, and by which a
new judgment, new sensations, new drives arise in us.

— Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians

In the beginning, before life,

there were words;
possessed of propulsion,
rebounding, but not yet accountable;
they occupied the blank spots
hitherto reserved for the divine;
they endowed life with a language of life,

425
a membrane against each storm of atoms.

Fourth definition of circus

For a thought to become circus, it must expose a higher degree

of inner oscillation than the surrounding materials, move-
ments, spaces, artefacts. This oscillation is found between the
abject and the transcendental, between chance and the sublime.
For every fall, a potential hook.

I understand now, imagining to myself the momentum of

the fall, that nothing exists in the world without meeting a
hook. (Bataille 1977, 42)

It is why the circus artist is the one whose greatest achieve-

ments are all located outside the body, under conditions that
can never be repeated, knitting together as they do realms such
as fall, hook, flesh, and dust, law, and light,these being tricks
that not only create the illusion of ‘saving’ us, but halt, momen-
tarily, our slide offstage.

7.  Carnival of the undefinable

The angel is drawn to certain sites. An ocean harbouring in-

grown volcanoes once known as the island’s multiple eyes, but
today hollowed and lacklustre (occasionally, in their manifold
furrows, the angel may glimpse flashes of defiance). A robust
cage lowered into the saltwater lagoon, mounds of swollen
flesh slowly rippling, then parting as sunken eyes survey their
new home. The angel will toss live rabbits and hens which are
shredded in seconds, gobbling guts and bones alike, sending
showers of sparks from the iron bars.

426
Such sites provide excellent opportunities for trapping unwary
jinns.

To have unloosed the angel’s soft skin, pressed my lips to its

heat until rising delight subsides in sighs, served choice meats
from calfskin platters, hands encased in the finest, blood-mot-
tled gloves — all this counts for nothing in the inferno of fury
to which an ensnared angel invariably brings itself.

And so we wait, malak clinging to a rock gnawed by the ocean,

drawing light and energy landscapes, folding a trick back into
itself, a perfectly purposeful accident, a ring dropped into a
lagoon to summon crustaceans to the marriage of sea and land.

Yes, here they come — white-lipped barnacles, sucking on ef-

fervescent salt blooms, forming water islands, liquid naming
rituals, subjecting the metaphors of the machine to saline jaws
until they rust-crumble, diffusing orange cloud-showers of
iron nutrients, the back end of something becoming the front
end of something else — Cambrian explosion — origin of life,
farting pantomime horse, masked stranger — a carnival of the
undefinable.

Fifth definition of circus

Angels can fly because they take can themselves

lightly. […] Satan fell by the force of gravity.

— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

A retired clown is giving advice to an enthusiastic young

student.

‘We should not connive in the construction of our own abject

formats, the surface currents we generate, nor run a ruler over

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depth and flow while our thoughts flit haphazardly from rock
to sky then plunge abruptly towards uncharted oceanic depths,
the source of our peerless intuition, our bottomless rage. We
create a ladder to another world by means of interfaces and
incubators. By liquidating situations, we express our resistance
to stasis.’

The student (an ageing trickster) remains patient, having al-

ready converted millennia of ambition into stone.

8.  Reflection on polyrhythms

We are no longer equipped to experience our experiences.

The pace of one world seems increasingly incompatible with

the pace of another.

A storm roils up the estuary. Lightning strikes the cranes. The

pylons crash in an eruption of showering electric sparks — a
birthing of angels.

It is announced over the site megaphone that each accident of

weather is, in fact, a fine opportunity for repurposing the self.

Final definition of circus

At the end of the day … at the end of the day … strictly speak-
ing … and so therefore … it is my honour … when all is said
and done … without whom … saucy, saucy! … and with that in
mind … none of this would have been possible … you have to
laugh … so let the show — 

428
9–14. The letting go

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last

trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall
be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

— 1 Cor 15:52

To imagine circus is to slip the body from its moorings.

I dream of performing circus in storm and gale alike, roped to a

creaking rig in Dogger, watched only by stars, sea spray, and the
occasional incurious gull. I can fly, balance, soar, spin, and fall.

Towards dawn, I am in the company of an angel, its ribs torn

asunder, its exposed innards heaving under sea spray. The
angel tells me not to fear.

A helicopter arrives to drop provisions. I display gratitude. Un-

clip. Act casual. No angel here! I wave from my churning land-
scape. Thumbs up from pilot as she lifts away. I will become the
hunger artist. It is a straight line down to the waves.

I write an essay on the impossibility of angels rotting. My body

flexes, my arms move constantly over the page, trying to avoid
repetition. Through writing, I leave all that has been and all
that will be and inhabit solely the moment of now, a moment
that contains all times at once. The ink behaves strangely in this
climate. Fluid life. Dark blue lake. Oozing tentacles.

I write a treatise on the impossibility of angels performing

acrobatics; their movements would be entirely without artistic
merit since, lacking friction, they would merely float like puffy
astronauts, or bloated bodies brought to the beach from a tsu-
nami, tumbling slowly in the tide.

429
I write a poem about the threads in the night sky, long, and nar-
row, with which we bind each other, until our bandages become
a seeping, weeping, luminous web, in which we are enmeshed.

On waking, I see the angel has added a verse:

I fold my skin over yours

You roll your skin around mine
And there we stay, unseeing and unseen — 
strange flower of forever flesh,
forever bursting to bud.

But every day the drop, I say …

Every day — 
Fall never — 

[Pause]

Snap! laughs the angel.

One morning, far away and long ago, while straddling a low,
greasy wharf by a quay at the extremity of a canal, my long
legs on each side down to the water, which had become black
with stagnation, the black water yielding continually, letting
my thoughts sink into soft vacancy, a faint scent of oranges and
wood smoke winnowing over the stench of putrefaction, I saw
you, tumbling across the sky, a possible pivot in this new world
of rotation and churn; I would have gripped you as you neared,
held tight until we hinged and fused, but you were already
gliding to other co-ordinates, auto-smiling through the dense
weather — our fingers almost touching, but trailing further and
further away, plucked from their knuckles, pointing elsewhere,
until — matchsticks in a storm — gone.

The angel shows me how to take up a deathless position and

wait. The waking waiting tedious as scientific method. Survival

430
memories in a black hole. Light our currency. Black light. Sun-
less, dappled twilight captured on your pupil.

Drift.

That was the moment we realised we did not need kings,

queens, presidents, nor gods. Nor did we need permissions,
categories, or constraints that were not of our own choosing.
We did not even need a guide.

And so we stood, facing each other. Sack of lined flesh. Angel.

Waiting.

What we discovered is something quite remarkable.

When we create conditions for care and attention, the world

enters.

The world enters and it goes from one to the other, slyly un-
masking us.

It waits until we are open and attentive, then disrobes in turn.

The room’s molecules start whispering — we lean forward to

listen. They curl around us, draw us closer together.

Closer.

Closer still.

The world is alive.

In time, the human body forgets it belongs to the circus and

starts to seep and drip over the edges of the mattress. Like mer-
cury it rolls across the floor, a shiny glob of reflected candle-
light, rigging, wheels, stuffed animals. As precise as a bead of

431
sweat descending the rope artist’s spine, it slips under the door
and towards the motionless waves that surround the platform.

I watch it until it stops. Flesh becoming angel. Word made

static.

The trickster returns with a back flip.

I would dig a grave, but I lack a spade!
He laughs like a cartoon villain caught in a drain.

Winter. The body now a mere 21 grams; it skims the sparkling

crust of snow on the frozen sea, its salts carving indecipherable
runes — melting, it becomes water, steam, mirror mist.

Inside the mirror, rising steadily, a black, hot air balloon drifts
towards a hole in the sky. We dive headlong into the silver pool
and grip the lifting basket.

This is what we seek out, that place, that here, and only
here, where we can be our own, irreconcilably entangled
selves — fingers clutching the weave of it all, hanging, affirm-
ing, ascending …

then, finally

… the letting go.

432
 11

SIGNS
In a visual essay that combines text and
drawings, Simone Ferracina interrogates
liquidity as a technological and metaphori-
cal paradigm for design and the choreog-
raphy of space.

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435
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 11.1
Liquid Notations:
A Common Language of Transitions

Parallel stories begin to unfold. In and between them, across

notations and trajectories, our characters (the point, the drop-
let, the trace, weather, matter, spacetime, etc.) roam an ecology
of differences, tensions, jumps, contradictions, experimenta-
tion, and hope. Arguments develop transversally, defying the
fifth postulate.

Our effluents are inextricably blended. We can no longer

enclose a piece of land. This could be done only in the old
space that was easily mapped. We no longer live there.
We haunt a topological space without distances, rather
than the old Euclidean or Cartesian expanse that could be
located metrically by a network of coordinates. Our global
techniques, world objects, and communications that reach
even beyond the solar system have created a totally different
space of proximities and continuities that is difficult to
cut up. The Rousseauian plots of land disappear in this
typology without distances and measures. (Serres 2010, 67)

Objects melt and disperse, yet they remain intact and intercon-
nected. They are real yet paradoxical, structured yet ungrasp-
able, immanent yet withdrawn. Their boundaries shift out of
focus as soon as we attempt to control and define them. Signs
no longer guide us towards increased semiotic resolution and
transparency, but into dampness, uncertainty, and abjection.
Signifiers float on the surface of oceans and pile up in malo-
dourous heaps of garbage. Pollution translates an animal tech-
nology of appropriation (the marking of one’s territory) into a
pervasive planetary language, a geological cry that is as insidi-
ous and destructive as it is slippery, muted, and patient. We re-

445
gress into analphabetic ignorance, and sink in the quicksand
of our own footprints — in the toxic sludge that periodically
resurfaces; oozing and bubbling across uncannily autonomous
and hypercomplex bodies; between golden teeth, microplastics,
and plutonium.
Drawing — a form of pollution — remains strangely unfazed
by the emergent liquidity and unpredictability of the anthropo-
genic trace, clinging to mathematics and its presumed ability to
order, cleanse, scale, measure, compute, and name. The modern
illusion of a linear, unmodulated translation between intentions
and outputs, strengthened by increasingly precise modes of dig-
ital and robotic manufacturing, dismisses (forgets) the hybrid
ecologies and monstrous depths gurgling beneath and beyond.

… Behold me — I am a Line. The longest in Lineland, over

six inches of Space — ’ ‘Of Length,’ I ventured to suggest.
‘Fool,’ said he, ‘Space is Length. Interrupt me again, and I
have done.’ (Abbott 1992, 71)

Points and lines are linked and combined, overlapped, extend-

ed, plotted, interlaced, programmed, stretched, and interrupt-
ed. They generate all manner of paths and incisions: shapes,
figures, fields, surfaces, maps, spot elevations, meshes, vertices,
vectors, edges, and blobs. Whatever the output, the method,
or the drawing apparatus, they assert and declare an identity, a
distance, a set of coordinates; they identify beings and fix them
into precise hierarchies and spatial relations; they articulate
potentialities extruded through sets of localised desires, ambi-
tions, and intentions.

The point is motionless and inert. As soon as it appears, it sprouts

invisible roots that anchor it to the sheet of paper, hindering
movement. It is static, forbearing, and silent — like a seed sealed

447
in a moisture-proof container and stored in the cool darkness
of a fridge. It ends sentences and inhibits further development.
It stands still. No growth, no individuation, no becoming. The
point simply exists. In a sense, it has always existed.
The line is, instead, animate and dynamic. It emerges pro-
gressively and develops alongside currents. It is vector and trail,
arrow and gust of wind. It travels across durations and is woven
within the material fabrics of the world, carried by the turbu-
lent waters of life itself.
Or so we are told.
•

Not all lines are generated dynamically. A line can be an ocular/

pointillist affair: a sequence of points standing adjacent to one
another, in orderly files. Connecting the dots — melting them
into lines — is the human being, sole agency in a realm of fixed
and pixelated geometries.
A line is also the representation of an extension in space,
between A and B; a distance and measure; the edge of the table,
the height of the Great Wall of China, the path between me and
you. A descriptive mark, it tames environments through the
simplifying violence of abstraction (from the Latin abstrahere,
to drag away, to detach).
Out walk the mountain’s vibrations — its forests, geological
tremors, flourishing soils, bacteria, foxes, and mycelial tap-
estries — replaced by contours and property lines, fences and
walls, Euclid, Descartes, and Viollet-le-Duc.

A line translates by subtraction and reduction, but also claims,

captures, annexes. It operates through chains of exclusion and
re-inclusion; embracing and rejecting, sampling, and archiving.
A line is finite; it is a segment (from secare, to cut): a choice,
a tear. It strips matter of contextual agency while culturalising
it by transcription, rendering it into discrete graphic units to
which straightforward meanings and associations of use can be

449
assigned. A line has a beginning and an end, a thickness, a col-
our, a length. It folds into perimeters and eats its own tail, like
the ouroboros — not to symbolise introspection and circularity,
but to enclose land. To draw a line is to invent a parallel world;
but also to appropriate, to endow with purpose, to command.

God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind,

commanded man also to labour, and the penury of
his condition required it of him. God and his reason
commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the
benefit of Life, and therein lay out something upon it that
was his own, his labour. (Locke 1976, 14)

The benefit of Life (capitalised L). But whose life?

Property is marked, just as the step leaves its imprint … In

short, either proper means appropriated and consequently
dirty or proper implies really neat and therefore without an
owner. Come over here, to this clean spot; you may, because
it obviously welcomes you. When you leave, it will be yours
because you will have made it dirty. (Serres 2010, 3–4)

Drawing begins with a blank sheet of paper or wax tablet — with

a tabula rasa. The first appropriation is not the intentional mark
traced on the sand with a stick, but the invention of the beach-
as-canvas; the reductive force that flattens a volumetric envi-
ronment into mere writing surface, or plot. A rasura prepares
(pre-processes) nature for human appropriation and interven-
tion. It chews it into submission, grinding and blending it un-
til difference gives way to an amorphous and obedient soup.
Prehistoric eyes, noses, ears, and mouths fuse into a faceless,
solid lump: a background; a white-walled room within which
collections can be archived, stored, and exhibited. Words are
scraped off so that other words may be written and read. But
whose words?

450
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 •

Without a master, one cannot be cleaned. Purification,

whether by fire or by the word, by baptism or by death,
requires submission to the law. (Laporte 2002, 1)

Purity is coextensive with culture and cannot be naturalised. It

is endowed, assigned, granted — never given, found, or discov-
ered. (Scanlan 2005, 66) Appropriation (territorial, cultural)
begins precisely with the ability to make identifiable, lasting
marks; with a clearing in the forest; with the invention of puri-
ty; with blankness as a figure of potentiality. Yet the blank page
does not channel the possibility to write without indexing, with
at least equal intensity, a proclivity for clarity. A demand for leg-
ibility is built into the urge to write. Writing is, after all, a plea to
be read; a social enterprise; a technology for making shareable
traces (archives, discourses, laws, and so forth).
A drawing or text discloses reality in its essential forms and
purest features — as it appears in the eyes of a god, or of a king.
Not filthy vision (the forest and its competing sensual stimuli,
or the animal Umwelt), but pure vision: seeing through the gaze
of the social other.
Now, could liquidity help us decouple reading from writing,
ma(r)king from the normative violence/glory it invokes and
imposes? Could it confuse and dissolve the cosmetic make-up
of our societies, precipitating fluid value systems and stranger
(less stable) political and ecological assemblages?
As a metaphor and project, liquidity is on the move — plas-
tic and protean, tentative and fearless. Liquid scores drift and
drip across medium and message, actor and stage, pond and
pebble. Their interpretation remains partial, negotiable, and
contingent. Could the ‘principle of legibility’ (purification pre-
cedes history) be overturned? Could contrast and lucidity be
surrendered in exchange for a common language of transitions?

452
453
The author, like Narcissus, admires his own reflection on the
surface of the drawing. Yet, the pool resists legibility: a passing
boat leaves no lasting ripples, and a fallen leaf will keep moving,
cradled by the currents. To draw with liquids one has to forget
the complicity of canvases and pencils, figure and ground; to
forgo the control (and feedback) implicit in their dance. Agents
and patients touch and embrace like oil and alkali in a liquid
medium, giving rise to dynamic chemical behaviours, self-
assembling agglomerations and co-evolutionary designs. The
drawing becomes a vibrant and moving agency; an authorial
force in its own right. Within it, there are no fixed recipes or
standard scripts. Characters continually swap roles, blend, mix,
and metamorphose.

If there is no background — no neutral, peripheral stage

set of weather, but rather a very visible, highly monitored,
publicly debated climate — then there is no foreground.
Foregrounds need backgrounds to exist. So the strange
effect of dragging weather phenomena into the foreground
as part of our awareness of global warming has been the
gradual realization that there is no foreground! (Morton
2013, 104)

The contrasting black and white figures fail to reproduce reli-

able semiotic conditions, eluding clear-cut distinctions be-
tween background and foreground, canvas and ink. Rather,
these fluid masses undergo soft modifications and exchanges in
three dimensions, propelling themselves chemically until noth-
ing is left but inert glycerine formations. Protocells partake in
elaborate autonomous behaviours and temporal notations, of
which we understand very little. Wet traces replace signs with
semi-living interfaces, concentrations, intensities, gradients,
and depositions.

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458
 The body is like a windscreen for the mind against the
infinite: whereas in every parcel of matter, however minute
it might be, we can envisage an infinity of information,
the body conquers finitude through the power of refusal.
(Meillassoux 2007, 74)

The drawing body is a sifting body, one that most matter trav-
erses untouched. The square does not represent (re-present) the
window, but rather conceals it, suppressing (most of) its reality.
A figure stands in for glass, wood, and silicone, transparency,
and thermal bridges, views, solar irradiance, condensation, op-
erable surfaces, heat, dripping rainwater, airflow, handles, bird
song, spider webs, and voyeurism. Only its measurable symp-
toms persist; only the emoji; only that which is instrumental,
resolved, legible, and universal. Yet, the positive strokes that
describe it are inversely proportional to the negation of reality
they subtend.
How could such a narrow/impoverished set of tools — the
blanked surface; the drawing of lines, digital or analogue, flat or
solid as it may be — ground the way in which space is conceptu-
alised and choreographed?

The symbol nullifies the thing. Signs express and suppress

the world. (Serres 2010, 52)

Making proceeds by reduction — a technology of blind spots.

Designs generate abstract forms that can be thought, counted,
sized, drawn, fabricated, and reproduced, while all else conven-
iently (and temporarily) disappears. Yet intentionality can only
temper or delay our encounter with the world.

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462
 Abstraction is the order of the formal cruelty of thought. In
its most trivial and unsophisticated form it involves pure
mutilation: amputating form from the sensible matter. In its
most complex — that is, most veritable — instances, it is the
concurrent organization of matter by the force of thought,
and the reorientation of thought by material forces. It is
the mutual penetration and destabilization of thought
and matter according to their respective regulative and
controlling mechanisms. (Negarestani 2014, 5)

As a technology of finitude, abstraction operates through dis-

memberment and substitution: what it conceals, detaches, and
carefully clips off always gets replaced by something else — a
placeholder, a signifier, a paraphrase — recoated, repackaged,
and renamed. Yet substitutions require stable forms and reliable
meanings, phantom limbs and full-colour posters. That which
is fluid and mutable, complex, unpredictable, cloudy, and dif-
fused is traded in for inertia, simplicity, sharp edges, definite
boundaries, visibility, and compliance. Durability is valued over
accuracy, generality over specificity, readability over resolution.
Rifts between the culturalised experience of environment and
its reality progressively widen.
Certainly, language claims a degree of objectivity precisely
by negating the hybridity and vibrancy of the sensible in the
name of shared symbols and systems of signification. Yet our
signs are not neutral but selective; they prefigure and choose an
audience; they declare membership to a community. The social
contract is, in this sense, an agreement of reciprocal legibility
and communicability; an assurance of authorial relevance.
A liquid technology — a language of situated/territorialised
transformations and time-based notational systems that resist
standard modes of conveyance and capture — does not only
violate and contradict the principle of legibility and its decon-
textualising drive or frustrate its appetite for reductive substitu-
tions. It points to the ecological expansion of community; to
inclusivity and our willingness to partake in conversations we
only tangentially curate, control, and understand; to a partial

463
yet voluntary relinquishing of intentionality. It prefigures a pre-
carious and mutually destabilising (ethical) order, beyond delu-
sions of submission and improvement.

A line can also stroll, animated by the gestures that produce it:
no longer an inert parade of points but a single living dot me-
andering across a sheet of paper. Paul Klee invites us to think of
lines as movement (walks). Yet is something actually moving or
is it rather being dragged across the page — docile, demure, on
a leash? How much of our love for the processual is animated by
our ability to process? How much of our appreciation for move-
ment is predicated on moving (versus being moved)?

The representation of movement often funnels abstraction

through the logic of the machine. A moving outline turns into
a series of topologically extruded points, of which few are se-
lected and finally printed (those deemed re-presentative of the
object’s defining features, those that highlight specific patterns,
etc.). Lines develop along the fluttering of wings and stretching
of legs, revolving around shoulders, elbows, and knees.
Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs exemplify an un-
derstanding of movement as the temporal plotting of the ma-
chine’s operational range; a spectrum of bodily alterations con-
strained by clear part-to-whole relationships, functional hinges
and bending limbs. Variations remain strictly mechanical and
rely on stable forms, uses, and relations. Internal gradients, bio-
chemical fluctuations, and autonomic processes never seem to
pierce the surface of the skin, or to call into question either the
identity of parts (e.g., leg, arm, head) or their role towards coor-
dinated pursuits (e.g., walking, running, jumping).
Marey’s illustrations describe a deterministic world in which
organic machines are pre-programmed for action, and map the

464
normal/algorithmic agency of bodies based on predefined kits
of interconnected (working) cogs that rely on given syntaxes
and transparent preconfigurations of use. Furthermore, if his
overlays of sequential transformations (the running of a man as
a linear temporal projection, from left to right) revolutionised
the way we visualise temporality, their machinic constitution
suggests a non-durational and reversible conception of time:
time as a synchronic and spatialised instruction manual; a car-
tography of pivoting gears; a mere container for action. As the
agential range of the machine does not change (each component
part is assumed to be stable), time is excluded as a plastic ingre-
dient and relegated to the mere space within which variations
occur. Cogs always turn in identical fashion — today, tomorrow,
or in a hundred years. And when they break, they stop turning.
While the drawings in these pages are chronophotographic
compositions of sorts, they elude the logic of the bête machine,
evoking transitions and revolutions that are loose, unscripted,
open-ended, durational (non-reversible) and active.

The drawing reduces objects and their spatio-temporal interac-

tions to Platonic representations, drowning out all manner of
contextual and site-specific entanglements.
Yet it also rematerialises them by assigning a new indivisible,
atomic unit: the point. Merging Democritus and Euclid, geom-
etry can be read as a naive illustration of materialism: a distor-
tion of reality based on the ontological bias towards a specific,
albeit universally valid, constituent brand or principle.
Superficially, the behaviour of liquids would seem to sup-
port materialist reduction, or at least to neatly exemplify it:
the more you cut up a solid — the smaller the units — the more
fluid its behaviour. Yet, liquidity has less to do with fluidity (or
with the ability to con-form, to form with) than with environ-
mental receptivity, reactivity, and responsiveness. It cannot be
blindly assigned to hydrogen or oxygen atoms, or even to wa-
ter molecules, which can also exist in solid or gaseous states.

469
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Rather, liquidity depends on context, as an emergent property
of the encounter of molecules with specific temperatures and
atmospheric conditions, chemical solutions, and vessels, at dif-
ferent scales and levels of interaction.

Now our atom is inserted: it is part of a structure, in an

architectural sense; it has become related and tied to five
companions so identical with it that only the fiction of
the story permits me to distinguish them. It is a beautiful
ring-shaped structure, an almost regular hexagon, which
however is subjected to complicated exchanges and
balances with the water in which it is dissolved; because by
now it is dissolved in water, indeed in the sap of the vine,
and this, to remain dissolved, is both the obligation and the
privilege of all substances that are destined (I was about to
say ‘wish’) to change. (Levi 2000, 229)

Instead of matter (an imaginary lack of actualised form), we

embrace liquidity as a figure of potency, opportunity, resilience,
and life; not an abstract lump of atoms, but a smooth, localised,
and shape-shifting object/field.

Flux is inseparable from the substances it stirs and participates

in. The Heraclitean river does not illustrate the ontological pri-
ority of process over things (everything flows), or of matter-as-
process, but the unity, co-existence and mutual dependence of
space and time, matter, and form. Objects shiver, heat, fuse, and
rust, guided, and extruded by events and alliances, adjacencies,
and collisions, synergies, and sympathies, events, and intrinsic
structures. If agency and meaning cannot be understood as im-
posable from the outside, or from the top down, neither can
they be told to privilege the isolated adventures of atoms or the
socialised lives of objects. Somewhere in-between, a time lapse

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plays at accelerated speeds, and all things, alive and inert, large
and small, are allowed to evolve — deformed and upcycled,
worn out and grown, hacked and extended, recycled, decom-
posed and composted.

We draw droplets as pinched spheres, with a pointy head and

rounded belly. They are always falling and never land. There
is no wind, no branch, no temperature, no surface tension, no
transition.
We also draw them as rainfall, in parallel vertical lines. We
picture them dropping, screaming with distorted mouths, as
kids on the descending bent of a rollercoaster. Yet, they are si-
lent and unafraid, not droplets as much as drop-dots — comfort-
ably sliding across the page to please their masters.
Lines are sometimes illustrations of how points can be
moved in space and time. Rain — it gets you wet.

Anyone can draw a dot, anywhere. Or a square centimetre, or

a three-foot-long line. I pick up the phone and ask a contrac-
tor in Rome to cast a concrete cube. Each side should measure
thirty centimetres exactly. She knows what I mean. I don’t need
to inquire about material properties or environmental condi-
tions, or to receive a report on today’s local temperature or how
the cube will be poured. I don’t need to be present. I don’t even
have to ask for it to be grey; I know what the output will be. I
know what the cube looks like: I have a drawing of it. My only
question is whether the supplier will be as precise as I require;
whether the manufactured cube will adhere to the abstract tem-
plate floating mid-air above my head.
Materials don’t surprise me. They are non-local collections
of specifications and parameters. I can list their properties by
heart, reciting spreadsheets and engineering manuals. They are
divorced from experience and site, and reliably negate both.

473
474
They are generic compounds that only come into focus to trans-
late drawings and ideas into buildings, forks, armchairs, paint-
ings, and lamp shades. They have no previous identity or speci-
ficity; and when they do, when their ‘raw’ status is not enough
to conceal form or actuality, they apologise profusely.
Anyone can draw a dot, anywhere. But how does one begin
to draw a droplet?

A droplet is not a point, a number, or a grapheme. It isn’t a

punctuation mark, a quantifiable lump or a readable character.
It isn’t a sign, a pixel, a code, a chemical recipe, a fixed defi-
nition, volume, or extension. It defies straightforward transla-
tion and representation, and yet it has form, which it performs
contextually and responsively, fleeing equilibrium and adapt-
ing to changing conditions; mixing and wetting, spouting and
freezing, dissolving and irrigating, spilling and rippling, swirl-
ing and oozing, evaporating and dripping, filling and diluting,
entering and exiting, transporting and hydrating, drying and
boiling. The droplet is queer: its identity transitional and situ-
ational, fluid, and transformative. It resists fixed definitions and
eludes symbolic clarity, sending trembling messages across life-
worlds.
Liquidity tempers the bias of abstraction, meeting reality
halfway.

475
476
I was asked to draw a droplet, but wasn’t told where or how,
which is a bit like scheduling a date without setting a time and
place, or forgetting who you are going to meet.
What would the temperature in the room be? What kind of
paper would I be drawing on — what thickness, grain, texture,
type of fibres? Or, would I be drawing on a different materi-
al — on a towel, on leather, fur, plastic? And what liquid would I
be using: ink, acrylic paint, coffee, hot wax, plaster, molten alu-
minium, egg yolks, oil? Would I drip the liquid with a pipette,
apply it with a paintbrush, or pour it with a bucket? You don’t
have to be Pollock to understand the effect these parameters
would have on the final product; to know that the distance be-
tween surface and dripping implement, or the most minute arm
oscillation, will greatly affect the outcome — a constellation of
rotund stains and splashing patterns.
The droplet channels a material recalcitrance, a fundamen-
tally un-abstractable, analogue, territorialised, and relational
vibrancy.
Anyone can draw a dot, anywhere. But how does one begin
to draw a droplet?

Liquidity embodies a novel, non-hylomorphic poietic para-

digm, one that is inherently contextual. Here, ‘context’ does
not denote the site designers are tasked with fixing or improv-
ing — its cartographic reproduction or other distilled, program-
matically relevant parameters — but a generative and creative
materiality, one that isn’t resolved as much as stirred, steered,
modulated, gardened, and post-tuned. The indistinction of
context, material, and finished object — the blurring of relative
roles — is the modus operandi and strategic protocol of liquids.

A notational system is not merely a lucid set of graphic signs,

codes, and symbols; but a key for reading and inhabiting the

477
478
world, a prompt, a translation software and, sometimes, a de-
sign tool. Notations extend beyond the mere representation of
or negotiation with reality: they are immersed in it. Are songs
not notations for dancing? Are buildings not notations for mov-
ing through space? Are rings not notations for juggling? Is Gib-
son’s very notion of ‘affordance’ not fundamentally notational?
More languages lie within our material surroundings than we
care to imagine or understand. Few of them speak to (or of) us.
These liquid scripts and space-time fossils, frozen in dia-
chronic accretions and transitional constellations, begin to ac-
count for (to tell) their strange and unruly stories.

In nature, it is once again water that sees and water that

dreams: ‘The lake has created the garden. Everything is
composed around this water which thinks.’ As soon as one
surrenders himself entirely to the sway of the imagination
with all the united powers of dream and contemplation,
he understands the depth of Paul Claudel’s thought: ‘Thus,
water is the gaze of the earth, its instrument for looking at
time’ (Bachelard 1994, 31)

479
 Part VII

REGENERATION
 12

COMPOST
The character of decomposition is dis-
cussed in this section, establishing its
relevance to the continuity between life
and death.

483
 12.1
Composting Continuity

Bodies are not produced by their anatomical structure but

by their languages. (Armstrong, forthcoming 2020)

Liquid bodies begin and end with a pause. While every lifespan
is acting out its resistance to entropic forces through a unique
web of events, ultimately all pathways eventually lead to rela-
tive equilibrium. However, on Earth, death is not necessarily
the final state for living matter. In fact, death is anything but
restrained. Its alternative metabolic network is orchestrated by
complex communities that constitute the necrobiome and than-
atobiome. Together, these degrade, digest, and redistribute the
building blocks of life within corpses, so they may re-enter life’s
flow. Spanning the surface of the earth, the metabolism of death
reaches into the lightless abyss and the pitilessly dark caves in-
habited by troglodytes, so wherever a body falls on this planet, it
stands a chance of rejoining life’s flow.

… [the] dialogue between species through physiological

and ecological discourses did not happen suddenly. They are
the product of billions of years of chemical negotiations …
If the messages are not fair, or misunderstood, or if agendas
become divergent, then the superorganism becomes part
of an impossible city like Babel, which is always at risk
of crumbling under the strains of its own success … [the
once-living agents, now] … overwhelmed by the voices of
the necrobiome … must somehow meaningfully maintain
… [their] conversations so [they may] one day … rise again.
(Armstrong, forthcoming 2020)

The space in which these rich transformations and resurrections

take place is compost — an attractor for life with a unique spec-
trum of metabolisms that are brought together through unfath-
omably complex networks of chemical and biological processes.

485
 Everywhere, creatures and minerals together make their
characteristic soils. Where the grand circulation exposes
different bands of rocks in juxtaposition, so the plant
communities that come to live on them differ, and the
resulting soils do too … We spend our lives hurrying away
from the real, as though it were deadly to us. ‘It must be
somewhere up there on the horizon,’ we think. And all the
time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet. (Logan 2007, 97)

Making compost is, therefore, not an elaborate form of waste

disposal. It is an art like cooking that needs a recipe, which rec-
ommends the right substances and how they may be combined,
or processed effectively: specifically, thirty parts of carbon to one
part of nitrogen are needed. This is easy to do. Carbon can be
found in sources such as straw, dead leaves, wood chips, shred-
ded paper, corn stalks, and egg shells. Nitrogen is in manure,
meal, green garden waste, algae, hair, kitchen vegetable scraps,
fish, and sod. Since air and water are vital to metabolic process-
es, compost must be blended to form a well-draining, nutrient-
rich mixture, then processed in a structure with enough water
to dampen the pile and allow it to breathe, so it can begin to
biochemically ‘burn’. The mixture needs continual stirring and
turning, so food, water, and oxygen can be evenly distributed to
the microorganisms. As temperatures frequently reach around
50–70°C, it is agitated to dissipate the heat. The process is fin-
ished once the dark brown pile contains small uniform particles
that smell earthy, like yeast, and are light and fluffy to the touch.

A dump, a landfill, or a bad compost heap is an example of a

failed relationship to nature. Even where people have begun
large-scale composting … they frequently design closed
systems that end by stinking up the neighborhood, giving
compost a bad name, and ultimately failing … composting
… is an act of healing. It restores the right working of a
natural process. In that act, the participants are not just
functionaries, they are sharers in an act of faith. (Logan
2008, 48)

486
Composting is open to creative negotiation and does not need
to be naturalistic. While natural processes obviously play a criti-
cal role in enlivening ecosystems, alternative materials and ap-
proaches like supersoils may restore, remediate, and augment
environmental performance, as well as create alternative spaces
for new processes and metabolisms (Armstrong 2016). For ex-
ample, hygroscopic granules may be added to sand so that wa-
ter retention is increased, or (synthetic and natural) organisms
introduced into loams to process certain toxins such as heavy
metals and plastics, which are hard for natural organisms to me-
tabolise. By bringing a range of composts and different kinds
of soil bodies into proximity with each other, the repertoire of
death’s metabolic processes may be extended in agile ways that
restore environmental fertility.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and

destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and
resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into
youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can
have no community, because without proper care for it we
can have no life. (Berry 1996, 86)

487
12.2
Geophagia

People whose colour is bad when they are not jaundiced

are either sufferers from pains in the head or earth eaters.
(Celsus 1971)

Geophagia establishes a direct relationship between human in-

gestion and soil, in a manner that is not first transformed by
ecological intermediaries. Hippocrates provided the first writ-
ten account of the practice more than 2,000 years ago. On every
inhabited continent and in almost every country, people that
eat earth are reported and children are particularly prone to the
habit. Around 20% of normal children between the age of 1–3
years will eat up to 500 milligrams of soil a day. When it per-
sists beyond childhood, it is mostly associated with relief from
hunger pains, the onset of pica in cases of iron, zinc, or calcium
malnutrition, traditional skin lightening recipes, or as a kind of
vaccine that protects the stomach against toxins, parasites, and
pathogens (Woywot and Kiss 2002). While small amounts of in-
gested healthy soil are harmless, complications include parasitic
infestation, electrolyte disturbances, chemical contamination
(lead, arsenic), bacterial infection, and intestinal obstruction
(Young et al. 2011). Whether geophagia is pathologised or not,
life’s ongoingness is entangled with the health of its dirt, and
soil is integral to healthy food cycles, ending up in our bodies
in modest amounts1 one way (unwashed food, hygiene etc.), or
another (Calabrese et al. 1990).
Perhaps one way to establish its potency, is to deliberately
sample it.

That was the year the founder took a long spoon from his
pocket, plunged it into the earth and scooped a spoonful of

1 According to a study of tracer elements found in 6 adults, around 50 mg of

soil is ingested daily.

488
organic matter into his mouth. He chewed for a few, silent
moments then spat the dirt onto the ground.
‘Bitter!’
He vowed that by the time we left the island it would
taste of magic. (Armstrong and Hughes 2016)

489
 13

PAUSE
This chapter summarises the key dis-
cussion points in the text and proposes
strategies for advancing the principles and
practices of liquid life.

491
 13.1
Principles of Liquid Life

Through critical reflection of liquid apparatuses in experimental

contexts, fourteen key principles are proposed to comprise the
character of liquid life. These are as follows:

1 Liquid life is a primal force native to cosmic luminous

matter.

2 It is a paradoxical, planetary-scale material condition,

unevenly distributed spatially but temporally continuous.
Flowing through and into myriad bodies at many scales, it is
an open, ‘living’ infrastructure that underpins the metabolic
webs of life and death.

3 Liquid life is based on the ancient idea that the character

of ‘life’ is fluid.

4 Liquid life offers an alternative framework to the bête

machine for considering the complex, networked, sen-
sible, constantly-changing material events that constitute
the living realm.

5 Liquid Life provokes an expanded notion of conscious-

ness that is embodied, environmentally aware, and ca-
pable of observing its surroundings. It does not propose an
a priori understanding of reality but constantly discovers its
world, which is always tinged with mystery and so remains
enchanted by the possibility of its own existence.

6 Liquid Life is a testable, pedagogical system, whose

concepts can be interrogated, evolved, and ultimately
realised. It offers a different relationship between human-
ity and the living world by materially augmenting its lively
infrastructures.

493
 7 Arising from the tensions between potent fields of matter/
energy, liquid life emerges at lively interfaces to generate
highly mutable, paradoxical structures at far-from-equilib-
rium states that give the illusion of ‘permanence’ through
their sustained persistence.

8 The incessant transgressions of liquid life are not erro-

neous, but integral to its success. Continually devising
metabolic resistance strategies that dawdle, flâneur-like,
away from entropy’s call, it embraces multitudinous forms
of expression, intermediary beings, and ‘monsters’ whose
modes of organisation defy mechanistic explanations and
established modes of categorisation.

9 Liquid life converses with ‘angels’ as vectors for knowl-

edge, which manifest as transitional bodies that mediate
between the living and non-living realms by invoking new
languages, which generate alternative terms of reference to
begin fresh conversations about the living realm.

10 Liquid life is a vital material force that commands an

appropriate, ecological ethics and upholds the complex
epistemologies of ‘being’.

11 The politics of liquid life enables life’s unbroken legacy

to persist. Advocating active diplomacy between lively
bodies through a choreography of events, it offers a platform
for participatory decision-making. Continual negotiations
take place at many levels of organisation including individu-
als, groups, communities, and ecosystems, where no specific
species is privileged over others, although outcomes are not
always equally beneficial for all beings.

12 Liquid life is not an antidote to the present ecocide, but

an alternative paradigm towards imagining, encoun-
tering, and making the world than the bête machine.

494
13 Liquid life links the cycles of life and death through the
metabolism of compost, where many different agents
and bodies (re)incorporate organic matter into ‘living’ webs
of matter/energy exchange.

14 Liquid life is what remains when logical explanations

can no longer account for the experiences that we
recognise as part of ‘being alive’.

495
13.2
Soul Substance

Two souls are locked in conflict in my heart,

They fight to separate and fall apart.
The one clings stubbornly to worldly things …
The other has an inborn urge to spread its wings …
(Goethe 1999, 35)

You were promised a materialist discourse of the soul, which

makes itself known, whether we are sceptics or not. Without
fixed shape, specific materiality, or particular trajectory to char-
acterise it by, the soul resides within the liquids, flows, modes
of emergence, transformations, and angels that permeate this
text and may be difficult to recognise. Known through its many
other names: life force, animating principle, vital essence, spirit,
inner being, constant flux of vital functions, essential nature,
aura, consciousness, yche, or a glitch in our material conceptu-
alisation of the living realm, it is most dramatically experienced
through its absence. Without it, living things tangibly fade and
wither, as metabolic networks disperse and bodies lose their ca-
pacity for growth, transformation, or affinity for others.

Whether called or uncalled, they come by themselves from

all sides, on all paths, from the mountains, from the oceans,
from the stars. Who can prevent them? I am sure that I, such
as you see me here, have lived a thousand times, and hope to
come again another thousand times. (Carus 1910, 150)

While fundamental to the expression and experience of ‘life’, the

nature of the soul is elusive and defies formal characterisation
within our understanding of the material realm1. Nor is it fully

1 The soul substance shares an indeterminate material status in a similar

manner to radiation (see section 03.4), which interacts with matter, is cre-
ated by matter, can create matter and is emitted by matter, but it is just too
ephemeral to ‘be’ matter (Armstrong 2016, 36).

496
immaterial, as it interacts with matter, is generated by matter,
animates matter, is emitted by matter but is too ephemeral to be
classified as matter.

Indeed I feel even now as if I were not seeing things here for
the first time, but if I saw them again. (Carus 1910, 151)

497
13.3
Towards a Liquid Architecture That
Accommodates the Soul

Liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes, pulses,

leaps as new form and lands as another. Liquid architecture
is an architecture whose form is contingent on the interests
of the beholder; … Liquid architecture makes liquid cities,
cities that change at the shift of value, where visitors with
different backgrounds see different landmarks, where
neighbourhoods vary with ideas held in common, and
evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve … Judgements of
a building’s performance become akin to the evaluation
of dance and theatre … this identity is only revealed fully
during the course of its lifetime … and what is made speaks
for itself, not in words, but in presences, ever changing,
liquid … (Novak 1992, 283–85)

The present principles for human development are framed

by economic systems that establish how natural resources are
distributed and shared. By setting up the extreme conditions
of scarcity and excess, multiple inequalities are established
throughout society to feed the peristalsis of supply and demand
of ‘the market’. From an ecological perspective, these scenarios
are fundamentally hostile to ‘life’, where ‘survival of the fittest’
equates with the ‘richest’, this cannibalistic state of affairs deter-
mines how our living spaces are constructed and settled.
Buildings are impenetrable fortresses with no ‘living’ rela-
tionship to their surroundings that neither care for the soils we
depend on, nor clean the air we breathe, and remain oblivious
to our water becoming infiltrated with hormones, neurotrans-
mitters, heavy metals, and microplastics. As ‘dead things’, the
inert surfaces of buildings are maintained only for their capital
value, rather than as an expression of any moral duty of care for
our living spaces. This fundamental indifference to the natural
realm, is reflected in the consequences of how we make and oc-
cupy our living spaces, which presently contribute 40% of our

498
total carbon footprint. No matter how much we propose to ‘re-
duce’ the impacts of this worldwide approach to human settle-
ment, its consequences are damaging the natural world, where
the wastes of our excesses become environmental poisons. Even
when we vow to perform our acts of daily living more consid-
erately through ‘sustainable’ approaches towards resource and
energy consumption, we are still trapped in a toxic relationship
with the biosphere.
An ecological ethics and associated construction toolset is
critical to inverting the established order between human set-
tlement and environmental health, so that we may establish a
symbiotic relationship with the planet. Rather than serving as
industrial sumps, we must imagine, design, prototype, and con-
struct buildings differently so they operate as infrastructures of
life. An alternative portfolio for space-making than Le Corbusi-
er’s doctrine of building-as-machine is required to catalyse this
vital transition away from the ‘brute’ buildings of the industrial
era, and midwife an ecological era of human development by
making ‘living’ architectures with ‘souls’.
Liquid life establishes the appropriate values, ethics, and
principles of inhabiting the living realm for an ecological ear
by foregrounding the infrastructures of life within our living
spaces. By thinking through and constructing with fluids at far-
from-equilibrium states, ‘living’ buildings can meet our needs as
well as respond to changes in our proximate (resource availabili-
ty) and global environment (rising waters, increasing frequency
of extreme weather, brownfield sites, garbage patches). Enfold-
ing dynamic liquid spaces into our habitats (Living Architec-
ture 2016) unleashes an irreducible, material potency that is
sustained by liquid life’s protocols of matter/energy, which per-
sists within spandrels, occupies transitory structures, leaks into
unoccupied spaces and expands into new sites by virtue of its
own agency. Comprising an ethical, ecological approach to the
built environment, where the way we take care of our buildings
affects their ability to meet our own needs, ‘living’ architectures
provide spaces that modulate the flows and exchanges of fluid

499
substances — gasses (air), liquids (water, snot), flow-friendly
amorphous solids (glass).
The liquid qualities of ‘living’ architectures are associated
with movement (running, jumping, flying, falling, climbing)
and character (liquid cats, ‘slippery’ people, amoebae that move
by constantly changing their body shape, fluid flames). They are
not formless, but dynamically structured through their persis-
tent patterns within iterations of pulses, waves, vortices, and
oscillations, which are augmented and sustained by our pres-
ence. Their uncertain terrains and fuzzy spaces nurture a ‘soul
substance’, which flows through, moulds around, and embraces
their inhabitants, imbuing them with empathy. Evading hard
control by conventional apparatuses, liquid architectures instead
prefer to respond to the presence of slow, soft technologies and
elemental infrastructures (Armstrong 2018b). The turbulence
brought by dramatically changing environmental conditions
is set to transform the world we know into a surreal landscape
colonised by regressive attitudes. Offering alternative strategies
to making barriers against the systems that sustain — and are
capable of destroying — us, liquid architectures generate proto-
cols for space-making that resist the Anthropocene’s unfolding
legacy and inevitable urban collapse.

500
 13.4
Epilogue

Every epoch not only dreams the next, but dreaming impels
it towards wakefulness. It bears its end within itself, and
reveals it … by ruse. (Benjamin 1997, 176)

Liquid life is a provocation and ecological story of the living

world that increases our portfolio of choices in (re)constructing
our relationship with the natural world through the choreogra-
phy of countless acts of liquid living that uphold life’s unbroken
legacy. Introducing concepts and apparatuses capable of provid-
ing such a critical perspective, like dynamic droplets, liquid life
does not attempt to reduce the strangeness of life’s processes but
rather to create a context in which existing assumptions may be
considered anew, so that alternative ways of sorting, ordering,
agentising, and valuing our world become possible.
Through its deep attachment to the unique physics, geology,
chemistry, and cosmology of this planet, liquid life conjures
forth the irreducible soul substance and uncategorisable bodies
of slimy creatures such as the mucus-secreting, flesh-dwelling
hagfish, paradoxical frogs that defy the anticipated order of
development and fishing bats that skim the membranes of life.
Such ‘monsters’ evade conventional modes of classification and
take on new significance in allying with the weird and lively ma-
terial systems that defy the bête machine’s persuasive logic.
(Re)empowering, (re)enchanting and (re)connecting us with
the Earth’s fundamental strangeness, liquid life raises the pos-
sibility of locally-initiated, global-scale, orchestrated material
transgressions that are capable of reaching escape velocity from
the pending Sixth Great Extinction and bring alternative futures
to functionality.2

2 This phrase is inspired by Haraway’s observation in Anthropocene, Capitalo-

cene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble, which invokes Hannah Arendt’s
notion of the banality of evil in reference to our own incapacity to think
the world that is actually being lived. Noting that our inability to confront
the actual consequences of the worlding that we are engaged in, and the

501
 limiting and thinking to functionality of our actions, and inactions, means
that we continue ‘business as usual’ while catastrophe unfolds around us
(Haraway 2015). Liquid life’s ambition is to escape the conceptual trap of
this deadly ‘banality’, by releasing the limits of possibility through first the
imagination and then, through re-empowerment by access to liquid tech-
nology.

502
 14

RECONSTITUTION
All systems that start at far-from-equilib-
rium states eventually lose their potency.
The principles of liquid life enable their
reinvigoration through acts of compost-
ing where organic matter may be returned
to non-equilibrium states through the
metabolic networks of the living. This sec-
tion embodies such a restorative process
through literary composting, which distils
and transforms arguments already pro-
posed throughout the book, so they may
be (re)combined, (re)invigorated and
(re)encountered as new narratives and
alternative sets of discourses, adjacencies,
and juxtapositions.

503
 14.1
Hiatus

Darkness is not nothingness. Something always happens. Your

retinal discharges become fireworks, the squirming of your
innards feels like a voluntary command, your skin becomes a
sudden expansion of your brain. Nothingness is not absence,
but many actualities that negate one another. In this realm of
sensory deprivation, 50 metres below the ground, our senses are
reorganised through dreams, neuroses, and desires that are no
longer hidden. It is impossible to tell whether we are within in-
ner or outer space; if we are still or in transit, or which way up
we are. Gradually, we acquire alternative registers from which
we make new sense of our chthonic existence. The dripping of
groundwater is the beat of life reconfiguring itself, but we do
not yet recognise its patterns or rules, and so this slowly leaking
broth remains pluripotent — unpredictable.

505
14.2
Performing Liquid Life

It is not sufficient to bring about change in the way we inhabit

the world by theorising the existence of liquid life. Nor is it ad-
equate to stand outside its operations and objectively observe
its field of influence through technological mediation and labo-
ratory-based experiments. Narrative-making platforms and im-
mersive performances are required to produce lived experiences
of liquid life, which provoke the senses and generate unfamiliar
encounters with reality.

506
 14.2.1

Cthonic

The following text in 14.2.1.1 was first performed by the Experi-

mental Architecture Group (Rachel Armstrong, Simone Fer-
racina and Rolf Hughes) for the Cthonic workshop on 20 July
2017 at Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Northumberland. The
work responded to Cthonic, a 72-hour subterranean experience
in which John Bowers, Alan Smith, Louise K. Wilson and Pe-
ter Mathews entered Smallcleugh mine in Nenthead, Cumbria
on 20th April 2017 to settle into the vast cavern now known as
the Ballroom. During this time, the Experimental Architecture
Group travelled into the mine to meet them (ACA 2017a) and re-
sponded to this extraordinary event through situating an explo-
ration of liquid life — and characters such as droplets, quantum
foam, and angels — within this uninhabited and bare space. A
second version of the reading was (re)worked into a new form
and performed at the Beyond symposium held at the Mining In-
stitute, Newcastle, and Culture Lab, Newcastle University, 5 Oc-
tober 2017, which invited its audience to consider what lies be-
yond our current knowledge sets and imagination (ACA 2017b).
The version published here is the third textual incarnation of
the text (the compost has been turned over by Rolf Hughes and
some gentle warming applied).

507
508
509
14.2.1.1
Compost

Darkness. Retinal discharges.

Nothingness is less absence than presences cancelling each oth-

er out.

A form of dripping. A slowly leaking broth of light. Cleft. Pat-

terns or rules, they say.

Bitter slope. Damp black stone. As above, so below.

One moment we are blinded, plunged into a darkness where

something nonetheless happens. It arises from a soup, smog,
scab, fire — molten rock and alkali meeting oil; a metabolic cho-
reography sucking gas clouds, dusts, obfuscating light, a grue-
some purplish hue — muscle fibres locking into a fixed posi-
tion — scum and crust.

We are eyelids, jaw, and neck, trunk, and limbs — puppets with

a watery heart, energetically incontinent. Liquid eyes, lensing
errant light into dark thoughts. Structural disobedience, mis-
shapen mass; poles of oblivion.

Our world is not fully formed. This means there are plenty of
other bodies in what happens next. Unlike us, they are alive
and concerned with transforming the world into magnifi-
cence — their molten hearts are manifest on our bloodied hands.

We are all monsters now. What is the point of being static, pa-
tient, and silent? Oscillation is the basis of the dissemination
of power. Vector and trace — sites of non-orientation — liquid
infrastructures streaming through the material fabrics of the
world, carried by the turbulent waters of life itself. We hunker
down in a dream house made of canvas and wax. Contact light.
A maze. A market. A city. A sewer.

510
Letting go becomes harder and harder.

There is a line to a tree bouncing me gently between earth and

sky. As above, so below: in that darkness, that landscape of flot-
sam and flow, there is nothing human, only a figure made of
wood and silicone, filled with spider webs and bird song. The
world feels warmer, kinder, and more familiar than it used to
be. Bless this weather. It is as if we have become semi-permea-
ble — liquid scripts, frozen in durational accretions, transitional
constellations. Signals appear, disappear, reappear. Something
trying to say something. It happens.

511
14.2.1.2
Being Human

The following text in section 14.2.2.1 was written by Rolf Hughes

for an event titled Unquiet Earth: From Victoria Tunnel to Quan-
tum Tunnelling. It was performed in the Victoria Tunnel, New-
castle-upon-Tyne, between 10.00–11.00h on 17 November 2018,
by the Experimental Architecture Group (Rolf Hughes, Rachel
Armstrong, Simone Ferracina and Pierangelo Scravaglieri) with
sound design by Culture Lab (John Bowers and Tim Shaw) and
support from the Ouseburn Trust (Kelly Thompson and Clive
Goodwin). The event was part of Newcastle University’s con-
tribution to the Being Human festival of the humanities, tak-
ing place in around 50 towns and cities across the UK between
15–24 November 2018. Themed on how the North East has been
shaped by its rivers, the work was a public exploration of how
the material agency of the tunnel could investigate the way the
spaces we inhabit can be transformed into experiences that in-
form new ways of living. Following a site-survey by the partici-
pating groups, the complex formations of stalactites and miner-
al depositions indicated that the structure was actively growing,
developing, and — taken to a logical extreme — capable of giv-
ing birth. The script drew on themes that run throughout this
book — from the primordial iron and calcium laced flesh of the
world, to the sounds of cosmic matter produced by Perseid me-
teor showers, and quantum tunnelling that enables green plants
to make biomass from ephemeral substances, as well as the voice
of soils. These oscillations were imagined to intersect with the
substance of the tunnel and scattered throughout it, to immerse
an audience of 15 people within a living-regenerative soil body.

512
 14.2.2.1

Being (In)human

Set-up: RAand RH , lead the audience through the tunnel,

pausing to examine details of the tunnel. Their faces are a
mixture of blue and green as if in an advanced stage of mould.

VT staff help audience put on helmets and give instructions

that they are to follow their two guides but may not at any
time advance beyond them. No torches for audience — only
the performers control the lighting.

Duration: 20–30 mins, followed by discussion with audience

and return to surface.

1. Introduction
RH: Into the dark! Leave that slowly leaking broth of light. In a
moment we are blind.

Keep listening! Damp black stone. It speaks!

1.  First chamber

RA : One moment we are blinded — darkness, yes, but so much
happening, so much arising from molten rock and alkali, meta-
bolic choreography sucking gas, dust, obfuscating light, a grue-
some purplish hue — muscle fibres locking into a fixed posi-
tion — oh oil, oh scum, oh crust!

RH: Ssssh!
[Pause]

RA: Do you hear something?

2.  Second chamber
RH : Here they come, jaw and neck, spine and pins — don’t ask
me how it’s all put together — watery heart, liquid eyes lensing

513
514
515
errant light. Rivets, I guess. Or glue. Structural incontinence.
D-d-disobedience at the engineering level. It’s our fate. It’s why
we need, it’s why, we need, a way … out-t-t-t … T-t-t-t … T-t-t-
tec … t-t-tick … t-tock…

RA: Do you hear it? [Pause] The … groaning?

[Pause]

RH : Our world is not fully formed. This means there are plenty
of other bodies in what happens next. Unlike us, they are alive.

[Pause]

They are concerned with transforming the world into mag-

nificence — their erupting hearts are manifest on our bloodied
hands.

3.  Third chamber (RA goes ahead, RH

blocks the entrance so
the audience cannot follow)
RA : Do you hear anything beyond the reverberations of our
words?

[Audience allowed in]

Sound actions

4.  Fourth chamber

RA : What is the point of being static, patient, and silent? We
are all monsters now! Liquid infrastructures stream through the
material fabrics of the world, carried by the turbulent waters of
life itself. Here, it’s here, I’m sure it’s here somewhere …

Yes, HERE!

This is the primordial flesh of the world, formed by moulten

iron that spilled from Earth’s core and fed upon early life’s first

516
excrements. Green organisms produced oxygen from an ex-
traordinary reaction that turned the ephemeral matter of light
and carbon dioxide into biomass. Seemingly defying the laws of
classical physics, they used quantum tunnelling to bypass natu-
ral energy gradients and so, turned iron’s green salts into red,
fleshy tissues. Oozing from the earth they swallowed minerals
and sediments, folding themselves into ever more stratified to-
pologies — first forming tissues, then organs, until — see here,
they create tiny calcium bones.

Here, it’s here. This is what we’ve been looking for … Here!

Sound actions

RH : This is a line. It connects me to a tree. Somewhere between

earth and sky.

In this d-d-darkness, this landscape of flotsam and flow, there is

only … (well, you’ll see).

Don’t ask me how it’s made. I only know it’s filled with spider
webs and bird song. When you see it, the world feels warmer,
kinder — more familiar than it used to be. It is as if the world has
become semi-permeable.

Signals appear, disappear, reappear. Something trying to say

something. It happens a lot.

1.  Fifth chamber

Sound actions

RA : [halts the group on entering the chamber; whispering]: The

sounds, they’re … from some other place … some other place
… gut … soil … coal … womb? … Be prepared.

RH: Ssssh!

517
Sound actions

RA: BE PREPARED!
[Crouching and whispering] Be prepared … for a birthing … a
birthing so monstrous … whatever issues … this world … this
world … this world!

[Pause]

It cannot be imagined!

[Blackout]

KT [glimpsed momentarily as Pepper’s ghost]: AWAAAAAAAY!

Blackout. Silence. Hold 7–10 seconds.

Lights on —  RH first, then swiftly RA

, then KT, then others: re-
lease of tension. Discussion with audience.

518
GLOSSARY
* indicates the specific characteristics of one of the 14 Bütschli
angels.

520
Affective computing is the study and development of
systems and devices that can recognise, interpret, process, and
simulate human affects, or emotions.

Angel is a transitional being that neither fully belongs to the

material or ephemeral realms. In the Christian tradition, ortho-
dox angels include Gabriel, Michael and Raphael (see section
01.6). Unorthodox angels included Oriell, Ragwell, Barachiell,
Pantalion, Tubiell and Rachyell that appear to derive from Jew-
ish pseudepigrapha (Keck 1998, 174).

Angelology is the study of angels and their languages — the

‘angel’ equivalent of anthropology.

Anisotropy occurs when matter produced is directional; for

example, the rotation of electromagnetic light through a crystal
may polarise its orientation through the structure and therefore,
alter its optical effects.

Anthropocene is the epoch during which human activity

has been the dominant influence on the climate and planetary
systems. Its onset arguably dates from around the time of the In-
dustrial Revolution and the rise of fossil fuel-burning machines.
It is characterised by industrial ‘progress’, capitalism, and ‘mod-
ernisation’, the ‘side effects’ of which are poisoning planetary
systems (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000).

Anthropos is derived from the Greek term for ‘human,

man, or being’. In cultural studies, it has come to represent a
Promethean politics of human exceptionalism, individualism,
and ‘the representative of a hierarchical, hegemonic, and gener-
ally violent species (Braidotti 2013, 65). An ‘Enlightenment fig-
ure [that] arose in dialogue with God … [and] inherited God’s
universalism’ (Tsing 2015).

521
Archai is a Greek word for the elements, which signify the
original state from which things arose and the forces that initi-
ate and govern their coming-to-be.

Atomism is an ancient philosophical concept that is based

on fundamental ‘uncuttable’ material units known as ‘atoms’,
where the whole of reality is made up of their countless com-
binations and how they are positioned within an infinite void
(Berryman 2016).

Autopoiesis is the study of ‘the circular organization of liv-

ing things’ (Maturana and Varela 1928, xvii).

Babel is an ancient city described in the book of Genesis that

grew prosperous through the advent of new technology that
challenged the power of God. It was therefore cursed with the
evolution of multiple languages through which many misun-
derstandings arose and the city destroyed itself. In this book,
Babel is a metaphor for a (monstrous) system that is constantly
negotiated to maintain its coherence. It is a theoretical and ex-
perimental framework for a city of contradictions and imper-
fections that is held together by precarious ecological principles
of mutuality, cooperation, synthesis, and diplomacy.

Baupläne, or ground plan, is a biological term for a set of

morphological features that are common to many members of
a phylum of animals.

BCE (Before Common Era) is a secular notation for ‘Before

Christ’ (BC), which was first used in the sixth century to indi-
cate the historical point of reference of the Gregorian calendar
system, which takes the birth of Jesus Christ as its starting point.

Being-in-the-world is a term used by Martin Heidegger

to conjure a form of conscious, embodied existence, whose ex-
periences are shaped by being situated within a particular mate-
rial realm (Heidegger 1962).

522
Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction is a chemical os-
cillator made up of ten chemical stages, whose reagents (potas-
sium bromate, cerium (IV) sulphate, malonic acid, and citric
acid in dilute sulphuric acid) remain at non-equilibrium states
for a prolonged period. It can be observed unaided as a solu-
tion that rapidly and periodically changes colour, in waves of
fractal-like patterns.

Bête machine is Descartes’ philosophical notion that non-

human animals are like machines; do not have thoughts, reason,
or souls like humans; and thus, cannot be categorized with hu-
mans. As a result, they do not experience pain or certain other
feelings (cf. L’homme Machine).

Black hole is a cosmic object where matter has been con-

densed into a tiny space and gravity pulls so hard that even light
cannot get out. This can happen when a star is dying. Because
no light can get out, black holes are invisible and typically, have
a mass around few times the mass of our Sun. Understanding
black holes is crucial, as they bring together the very massive
(general relativity) with the very small (quantum physics). They
may even be similar to the Big Bang itself, and their better char-
acterisation could help us understand how the universe was
formed (Creighton 2015a).

Blind watchmaker is a teleological argument made by

William Paley that presupposes anyone finding a complex ob-
ject would immediately conclude that it was designed (Paley
2008). He infers that since the universe is infinitely more com-
plex than anything that humans could design, then it supports
the existence of a ‘designer’ god.

Brute matter does not possess agency or liveliness. The

term originates from a letter by Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley
discussing how one (inert) body can exert a force upon another
‘without the mediation of something else which is not material’
(Newton 2017). New materialist Jane Bennet uses this term as a

523
counterpoint to ‘vibrant’ matter, which is agentised, lively, and
volitional independently of human command (Bennett 2010).

Bütschli system is a simple chemical recipe where strong

alkali is added to a field of olive oil and produces a lifelike sys-
tem that generates pleomorphic bodies. It was developed by zo-
ologist Otto Bütschli who claimed he used these ingredients to
make a simple, amoeba-like artificial organism (Bütschli 1892).

Causal emergence occurs when the higher scale of a sys-

tem has more information associated with its causal structure
than the underlying lower scale. It refers to a set of causal rela-
tionships between some variables, such as states or mechanisms,
and works on the principle that macrostates can be strongly
coupled even while their underlying microstates are only weak-
ly coupled (Hoel 2017).

CE is a secular notation for the era after the birth of Christ (AD)
and is referred to as the Common Era.

Central dogma of molecular biology states that ‘DNA makes

RNA makes protein’ (de Lorenzo 2014, 226).

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It

is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for sci-
entific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out
what the Universe is made of and how it works.

Charybdis is a sea monster of Greek legend, which was later

rationalised as a treacherous whirlpool in the Strait of Messina.

Chemoton is a set of experimental criteria — namely, me-

tabolism, compartment, and information — that are experimen-
tally used to build artificial cells in contemporary origins of life
experiments (Gánti 2003).

524
Chthulucene is a concept invented by Donna Haraway to
depict a protean epoch as ‘an ongoing temporality that resists
figuration and dating and demands myriad names’ (Haraway
2016). It offers a counterpoint to the Anthropocene and is char-
acterised by ‘a thousand somethings else … telling of linked
ongoing generative and destructive worlding and reworlding in
this age of the Earth’ (Haraway 2016).

Clade is a group of organisms believed to comprise all the

evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor and represents
a single branch on the tree of life.

Cloaca is a structure that is situated at the end of the gut and

serves as a combined opening for the urinary and reproduc-
tive organs. An embryological developmental stage in humans,
it persists in adult birds, amphibians, reptiles, marsupials, and
monotremes.

Clinamen is a term used by Lucretius to refer to the unpre-

dictable and infinitesimally small change of direction in the
course of an atom’s downward fall.

Cnidarians are aquatic invertebrate animals of the phylum

Cnidaria, previously called ‘coelenterates’, which include jelly-
fish, corals, and sea anenomes. The name is derived from the
Greek word cnidos, which means ‘stinging nettle’.

Coacervates are spherical aggregates of colloidal droplets

that are held together by hydrophobic forces.

Colloid is a suspension of microscopically dispersed insolu-

ble particles suspended in a medium.

Componentisation is the process of atomising (break-

ing down) resources into separate reusable packages that can
be easily recombined. Componentisation is the most important

525
feature of (open) knowledge development as well as the one that
is, at present, least advanced.

Conformal symmetry is a symmetry in which working me-

chanics of a system remains symmetric when spatially rotated in
a fixed or a dynamic background.

Correlation functions are statistical variables that provide

the link between random variables, contingent on the spatial or
temporal distance between those variables.

Crescograph is a device for measuring growth in plants

that was invented in the early twentieth century by Sir Jagadish
Chandra Bose.

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic

Repeats) is a simple yet powerful tool for editing genomes that
allows researchers to easily alter DNA sequences and modify
gene function.

Cryptobiosis is a form of animated suspension and physi-

ological state where metabolic activity is reduced to an unde-
tectable level without disappearing altogether. In this condition
creatures no longer metabolise but still have the capacity for life.

Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary field of research that in-

vestigates the principles of communications and control in both
machines and living things.

Cymatics is a study of wave phenomena derived from the

Greek phrase ta kymatika, which means ‘matters pertaining to
waves’.

Dark energy is an invisible and little understood phenom-

enon that appears, in some way, to counter gravity. There are no
convincing theories about what it might actually be, although

526
its existence accounts for why the expansion of the universe ap-
pears to be accelerating.

Dark matter is an invisible substance that largely works to

hold the matter in space together. It causes galaxies clump to-
gether despite not seeming to have enough visible matter.

Death is not an end point for liquid life but a material ‘pause’
in liveliness. Dead matter may be returned to the living realm
through active webs of metabolism found in composts, which
are patchily extend around the Earth’s surface.

Deep Blue, built by IBM is the first supercomputer chess-play-

ing system to win against a human competitor.

Decoherence brings a quantum system into apparent

alignment with classical physics.

Demon is a counterpoint to an angel and in science also

stands in for paradoxes, or insoluble challenges.

Deucalion is the son of Prometheus, who with his wife Pyr-

rha, escaped a catastrophic flood sent by Zeus by hiding in a
wooden chest. The flood lasted for nine days and the couple were
the only surviving human. On the advice given by the oracle of
Themis, they repopulated the earth by throwing rocks over their
shoulders, which transformed into people (see Pyrrha).

Double slit experiment demonstrates, with unparal-

leled strangeness, that photons (and other subatomic agents)
operate both as particles and waves and that the very act of ob-
serving them has a dramatic effect on their behaviour.

Dissipative adaptation is when a system at far-from-

equilibrium simultaneously becomes more ordered towards in-
creasing complexity and stability without the need for organis-
ing codes or inciting external agency.

527
Dissipative system , or structure, is a thermodynami-
cally open system which is at far from equilibrium that ex-
changes energy and matter with their surrounding medium to
produce characteristic structures that a simultaneously ‘objects’
and processes. They spontaneously form in nature to produce a
range of phenomena such as, hurricanes, oscillatory reactions,
and whirlpools.

Dynamical chaos is a form of non-linear behaviour that

possesses a surprising amount of order, which masquerades as
randomness, and cannot be fully predicted.

Earthbound is a term used by Bruno Latour during his

Gifford Lecture series in Glasgow 2013 to replace ‘human’ that
indicates only a superficial relationship with the soil (humus)
and instead, highlights a much deeper Gaian attachment to the
Earth that is intrinsic to planetary systems (Latour 2013).

… the Earthbound people are a way to help us think about

a new political community that could emerge which is
rooted in a new of humans embedded in nature, rather than
outside or separate from it. (Earthbound 101 2018)

Electroweak interaction is the unified description of

two of the four known fundamental interactions of nature: elec-
tromagnetism and the weak interaction.

Embodied intelligence is a computational approach to

the design and understanding of intelligent behaviour in em-
bodied and situated agents, or materials, through their coupling
with the environment. Overall actions are mediated by embodi-
ment that includes the properties and constraints of the agent’s
own body, the brain, and motor and perceptual systems.

Entropy is a measure of thermodynamic disorder in a system

that increases spontaneously with time.

528
Equilibrium is a systemic condition where all competing
influences related to the distribution of matter and energy are
balanced.

Ecopoiesis is the artificial creation of a sustainable ecosys-

tem on a lifeless planet.

Ectoplasm is a supernatural viscous substance that exudes

from the body of a medium during a spiritualistic trance and
forms the material for the manifestation of spirits (Richet 2003).

Ethics establish how choices are made in an uncertain world.

The term is used throughout the book to invite readers to consid-
er the consequences of certain decisions and value sets — rather
than imposing a particular set of moral principles on the reader.

Eutechnic age is when technology harmonises with the

Earth’s needs.

Evo-devo refers to a field of biological research known as

evolutionary developmental biology. It is a comparative study
of developmental processes and ancestral relationships between
organisms, that is used to understand how creatures change
over time.

Flâneur is a character that emerged from the imagination of

Charles Baudelaire in his 1863 essay The Painter of Modern Life.
It refers to a keen-eyed stroller that chronicles the minutiae of
city life and resists the compulsions and tropes of modern life-
styles by, for example, ‘window shopping’ rather than making a
purchase, and ‘wasting time’.

Gametes are specialised haploid cells that are capable of sex-

ually reproducing by uniting with another to produce a diploid
cell, as their progeny. Typically, male gametes are sperm and fe-
male gametes are eggs.

529
General relativity is the current description of gravitation
in modern physics, which is based on Albert Einstein’s theory
published in 1915. It breaks down at very high energies, where
the gravitational interaction becomes comparable in strength to
the other quantum interactions and can no longer be ignored.

Geophagia is the deliberate consumption of earth, soil, or

clay.

Geostory is a non-human narrative fabric, which is woven

through tectonic plates, meteorite impacts, and ice ages (Latour
2013).

Global storming is a planetary-scale condition associated

with an increase in global temperatures, which specifically refers
to increasingly severe meteorological events including tropical
cyclones with higher wind speeds, a wetter Asian monsoon and
increased intensity of mid-latitude storms.

Golden Ratio is an ancient mathematical principle and ra-

tio, which is approximately equal to a 1:1.61 ratio that is found
in nature. Used by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci to create
pleasing, natural-looking compositions, it is thought to be at
least 4,000 years old and may even have been used to design
the pyramids.

Goldilocks planets can be found in the Goldilocks

zone, which refers to the circumstellar habitable range of or-
bits around a star. These planets can support liquid water given
sufficient atmospheric pressure and are candidate locations in
the search for extraterrestrial life (Crutz and Coontz 2013).

Golem is derived from the Hebrew gelem (‫)גלם‬, meaning ‘raw

material’. It refers to an animated being that is created by hu-
mans entirely from inanimate matter, and given life through a
mystical process, which invokes the secret name of God.

530
Good Anthropocene is where humanity shrinks its envi-
ronmental footprint through improved mechanical and indus-
trial systems, creating more ‘room’ for nature, so that economic
growth does not come at the expense of the environment.

Gradualism is a theory of evolutionary development first

proposed by James Hutton in 1795, which suggests profound
change is the cumulative product of slow but continuous pro-
cesses (Hutton 2010).

Hadean epoch is the earliest phase of Earth’s development

that began about 4.6 billion years ago when the first rocks were
formed as the Solar System was forming, probably within a large
cloud of gas and dust around the sun, called an accretion disc. It
ended 4 billion years ago with the advent of the Archean period,
which brought the earliest forms of life.

Hard problem of consciousness was introduced by David

Chalmers to explain how, even when decoded, a (hyper)com-
plex system is unfathomable (Chalmers 1999). He suggests us-
ing nonreductive explanations that give a more naturalistic ac-
count. The nature of matter is also regarded as a hard problem,
because it is more than the sum of all its relative components
and retains its mysteries, even when deciphered.

Hertzian waves are radio waves that gave rise to wireless

technology.

Heterogenesis is the derivation of a living thing from

something unlike itself (Nature News 1946). It also refers to
the theory of spontaneous generation championed by Félix
Archimède Pouchet as a principle of nature. He suggested that
animals are produced as a ‘plastic manifestation’ of groups of
molecules that are conferred with a specific vitality that eventu-
ally results in a new being.

531
Homunculus is the ‘little man’, or miniaturised human in-
side a sperm, a cell (genetic code), or brain.

Hornsby–Akroyd oil engine was the first successful inter-

nal combustion engine.

Hylomorphism is a philosophical theory developed by Ar-

istotle, which regards every physical object as a compound of
matter and form.

Hyperbody is a living system that exceeds conventional

boundaries and definitions of existence. For example, a slime
mould in its plasmodial form that looks like a membranous slug
is a hyperbody, as it is formed by the merging of many indi-
vidual cells to form a single, coordinated giant cell.

Hypercomplexity is an organisational condition that is

founded on the principles of complexity, from which new lev-
els of order arise through the interactions between components.
However, it exceeds a classical understanding of complex sys-
tems through their scale, heterogeneity, and distribution.

Hypercycles are cyclically linked, self-replicating, metabol-

ic reactions that are theoretical models of autopioesis and may
also occur naturally in the abyss.

Hypermaterial is a coherent yet highly heterogeneous

consortium of agents, which are varied in their nature, or or-
ganisation.

Hyperobjects are entities of such vast temporal and spatial

dimensions, such as climate change or capitalism, that they can-
not be perceived in their entirety and defeat traditional ideas
about the discreteness and certainty associated with individual
bodies.

532
 … the more data we have about hyperobjects the less we
know about them — the more we realise we can never truly
know them. (Morton 2013, 180).

Hyperorganism is a creature that is not made up of cells

but of many individual creatures working together within a spe-
cific context, or locale, like a forest.

Ideoplasty (see teleplasty) is the power of the mind to con-

jure forth physical effects or modify certain physiological func-
tions and processes.

Ichor refers to the fluid which flows like blood in the veins of
gods in Greek mythology.

Intelligent design is a theory that argues certain features

of the universe and living things are best explained by an intel-
ligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Intermediary metabolism is a theory proposed by

Rudolf Schoenheimer, where ‘all constituents of living matter,
whether functional or structural, of simple or of complex consti-
tution are in a steady state of rapid flux’ (Schoenheimer 1942, 3).

Internal/interior milieu is a phrase usually attributed

to Claude Bernard, although the term was coined by Hugo van
Mohl ‘to designate certain active contents of the vegetable cell’
(Hodges 1889). It refers to the extracellular fluid environment
in which the tissues and organs of multicellular organisms are
bathed.

Irreducible complexity is when a biological feature is

said to be too complex to have evolved without influence by an
external agency, such as divine forces. It is an argument that
support intelligent design.

533
Invisible realms are fields, spaces, and fabrics that cannot
be perceived directly by our senses but may be accessed through
technological systems that articulate their presence through
indirect means. Some invisible realms are undetectable by any
means and therefore, their existence is controversial, since they
cannot be demonstrated.

Katabatic flows are wind currents.

Kin are family and blood relatives.
Kith are acquaintances, friends, neighbours, or the like: per-
sons living in the same general locality and forming a more or
less cohesive group

Late Heavy Bombardment occurred around 4.1 to 3.8

billion years ago, when ice-containing asteroids and comets pul-
verised the world’s surface.

Liquid life is an ancient idea that ‘life’ is organised through

the principles of material (and spiritual) flow. This book takes
a third millennial view of the term, to construct an alternative
metaphor and philosophy of ‘life’ than the bête machine, which
can be examined, tested, and imagined.

Liquid living is the processes enacted and experiences pro-

voked by liquid life.

Living fossil is a creature that is seemingly untouched by

evolution. Their ancestors are represented in the fossil record in
forms that vary very little from the way these organisms appear
today, such as the coelacanth, nautilus, tuatara, horseshoe crab,
tadpole shrimp, hagfish, and vampire squid. The term, however,
is controversial, as the term is scientifically inexact and many
living fossils are arbitrarily assigned this status (Schopf 1984).
As a cultural meme, the term is evocative as it suggests that life
adapts at many different speeds to broader planetary change.

534
Living goo is a play on the term ‘grey goo’, which is a hy-
pothetical end-of-the-world scenario where out-of-control
self-replicating agents (nanotechnology) consume the living
world while building more of themselves. Since hagfish possess
a seemingly endless ability to produce a special kind of ‘snot’, a
hypothetical world scenario arises when the world is smothered
in it — akin to the sequelae of a traffic accident in Oregon in-
volving a lorry that was full of ‘slime eels’ (Bittel 2017).

LUCA, or Last Universal Common Ancestor, is the first bio-

logical organism — and hypothetical creature — whose progeny
gave rise to all creatures on Earth. If the tree of life is traced
back far enough back in time, then all life is genetically related
to LUCA.

Luminiferous aether was a hypothetical matrix responsi-

ble for the propagation of light through empty space, which was
something that waves should not be able to. It was experimen-
tally disproven during the nineteenth century and superseded
by Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1916.

Magic is the production of astonishing events that are not

lessened in their strangeness by rational explanations of their
apparent causes.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) produces de-

tailed images of the body by visualising its water content, using
strong magnetic fields and radio waves.

Marduk is an ancient Mesopotamian god capable of good and

evil, associated with the epic of creation. He is the patron deity
of Babylon.

Melissai, or melissae, are the Greek and Latin words for

bees.

535
Metabolic weather is a dynamic, far-from-equilibrium
substrate, or hyperbody, at far from equilibrium that permeates
the atmosphere, liquid environments, soils, and Earth’s crust.

Metabolism is the ongoing flow and exchange of biochem-

ical reactions and energy that characterises living systems. It is
a form of ‘cold combustion’ that takes place at body tempera-
ture, which ‘burns’ resources but does not ‘consume’ itself in
the process.

Modern Synthesis is a theory of evolution that is centred

on the primacy of natural selection as the motivating force be-
hind evolution and the levels of organisation at which this selec-
tion is manifest. It takes a gradualist perspective of change and is
enabled by a set of mechanistic technologies (see section 04.2).

MOSE is the Italian word for Moses, and an acronym — Mod-

ulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico — which means Experi-
mental Electromechanical Module. It refers to the series of 78
hydraulic gates that are installed in the Venice lagoon to protect
the city against high tides.

Natural selection is the biological theory and natural

process that underpins the concept of modification by descent,
where selective ‘pressures’ that act upon organisms create a con-
dition of ‘fitness’, so the best adapted to a given context survive
and reproduce. This leads to the perpetuation of genetic quali-
ties best suited to that particular environment. It is an ethically
problematic term as it is fatalist and endorses ruthlessness and
selfishness as favourable characteristics. It also undermines the
agency of creatures to make decisions and overcome challenges.
While natural selection proposes to be a neutral instrument for
considering the process of evolution, it is a highly loaded value
system that endorses practices such as eugenics, the science of
‘better’ breeding, where selective values (preferences, prejudic-
es) are non-inclusive, or undeclared.

536
Necrobiome is the community of bacteria found on a corpse.
Neoteny is when larval or juvenile forms of creatures be-
come sexually mature before they reach adulthood, such as in
the lifecycle of the axolotl.

Neutrinos are subatomic particles that are created when ra-

dioactive elements decay. Unlike protons, neutrons, and elec-
trons, they do not play a major role in the structure of atoms
(Lincoln 2017).

New carbon dioxide is released by the internal com-

bustion engine from fossilised plant sources that trapped it as
partially decomposed biomass during the late Devonian and
Carboniferous eras. When the plants died, they only partially
decomposed and became petrified as coal (mostly terrestrial
higher plants), or liquefied as oil (mainly aquatic/marine lower
plants and bacteria) (Tissot and Welte 1978, 202–24). This car-
bon is being reanimated in the guts of our industrial machines
and transport systems, as the combustion engine breaks the
long chain hydrocarbons of fossil fuels into energy and carbon
dioxide, releasing the ancient Earth’s atmosphere back into our
own.

New physics refers to developments during the Enlighten-

ment whereby all natural change could be reduced to the local
motion of material particles and mathematically described.

Nonillion is a cardinal number represented in the US by 1 fol-

lowed by 30 zeros, and in the UK by 1 followed by 54 zeros. The
US notation is indicated in the text.

Obsidian is an igneous rock that forms when molten rock

material cools so rapidly that atoms are unable to arrange them-
selves into a crystalline structure. It is a naturally occurring
form of glass and amorphous material, known as a mineraloid.

537
Odic force is the name given in the mid-nineteenth century
to a hypothetical vital energy or life force by Baron Carl von
Reichenbach (von Reichenbach 2003).

One gene, one enzyme hypothesis was proposed

by Gorge Wells Beadle in 1941. It states that every gene encodes
for a single enzyme, which affects a step in a single metabolic
pathway. While influential, the concept is over-simplistic and
does not properly describe the contemporary relationships that
are understood to occur between genes and proteins, which are
far more nuanced and complex.

Open niche construction is the selective modification

of environments by organisms.

Origin of life is a spectrum of material events that led to the

transition from inert to living matter. This book holds that no
one occurrence but a continuum of interconnected events gave
rise to life as we currently recognise it. The first forms of lively
matter did not have the present status of ‘life’, which is reserved
for biology, which is uniquely governed by a central organising
nucleotide code like DNA.

Osmotic structures are outgrowths of a material that are

produced by the pressure caused by the rapid entry of water,
which produces an internal force that causes sudden expansion,
or growth (Leduc 1911).

Orgone radiation is a hypothetical, omnipresent libidinal

life force in the atmosphere proposed by Wilhelm Reich, which
he claimed was responsible for gravity, weather patterns, emo-
tions, and health.

Orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system that illus-

trates or predicts the relative positions and motions of the plan-
ets and moons, usually according to the heliocentric model.

538
Ort is a scrap or a morsel.
Panglossian paradigm is a term coined by Stephen Jay
Gould and Richard Lewontin in their paper ‘The Spandrels of
San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Ad-
aptationist Programme’ (Gould and Lewontin 1979). The title
refers to Dr. Peter Pangloss, a fictional character in Voltaire’s
Candide, who teaches that in this, the best of all possible worlds,
everything happens out of absolute necessity and everything
happens for best, even at times of disaster. In their paper Gould
and Lewontin set out to contest the underlying fatalism of this
approach, likening it to the ‘adaptionist’ theory of evolution that
makes the unsubstantiated assumption that all or most traits are
optimised adaptations ‘fit’ for a predetermined purpose.

Parabiosis means ‘living beside’ and refers to the surgical

union of two creatures through their blood circulation.

Parallel modes of existence (bodies, universes etc.) exist

within a probabilistic reality, where various degrees of freedom
exist. This means that alternatives to their current expression of
matter, time, and space may be unlocked from within the sys-
tem.

Pelagic refers to the open sea. Pelagic fish often occupy the
open waters between the coast and the edge of the continental
shelf in depths of 20–400 metres.

Periodic table of elements is a tabular arrangement of the

chemical elements, which are ordered by their atomic num-
ber, electron configuration, and recurring chemical properties,
whose structure shows periodic trends.

Perspiratio insensibilis, or insensible perspiration, re-

fers to changes in body weight that occur from day to day that
are unnoticed by most persons, as body weight is fairly constant
for weeks at a time. Although the phenomenon was known

539
to ancient physicians like Galen, the term was modernised by
Sanctorio Sanctorius through a series of rigorous experiments,
which demonstrated that volatile substances leave the body dur-
ing the processes of metabolism.

Pica is derived from the Latin for magpie, a bird with indis-
criminate eating habits. It refers to the persistent ingestion of
non-nutritive substances, like soil, for at least one month, at an
age for which this behaviour is developmentally inappropriate.

Pig iron ingots are crude iron casts, which are intermediary
products in the iron industry. They acquired their name as they
were cast from a branching structure formed from sand with
multiple ingots subtended at right angles to a central channel,
or ‘runner’. The overall structure resembled a sow suckling a
litter of piglets. On cooling and hardening, the smaller ingots
(the ‘pigs’) were broken from the runner (the ‘sow’) for further
processing.

Plasmogeny is the study of the origin of protoplasm.

Polysemic means having multiple meanings.
Progeny are offspring.
Protists are mostly single-celled organisms like amoeba, but
they also exist as colonial forms, which consist of many similar
cells.

Protocell is a simple chemical precursor of a living system,

which exhibits lifelike properties but does not have the status of
being fully alive1.

1 The term defined here is the one presented in this book. In the wider lit-
erature, definitions vary and include a range of lively chemical assemblages
from vesicles to fully artificial cells (Armstrong 2015, 35).

540
Protolife is a set of chemical systems that exhibit lifelike
properties without having the full status of being alive. They
are used experimentally to demonstrate some of the principles
of interest in understanding the transition from inert to living
matter.

Punctuated equilibrium is a form of evolutionary de-

velopment proposed in 1972 by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles El-
dredge. It describes a process where species are generally stable,
changing little for millions of years, which is ‘punctuated’ by a
rapid burst of change that results in a new species and leaves few
fossils behind.

Pyrrha is a mythological figure in a story that resembles the

Biblical tale of Noah’s Ark, where in the attempt to erase the sins
of the old world, a new race of people is created (see Deucalion).

Qingu is a Babylonian god who was posed as an adversary to

Marduk by his mother, the goddess Tiamat. Marduk slayed him
and mixed his blood with the earth to mould the first human
beings. Qingu then sought refuge in the underworld kingdom
of Ereshkigal, along with the other deities who had sided with
Tiamat.

Quantum theory is the science of the subatomic realm,

where fields and forces do not behave according to the laws of
classical science. While they appear to contradict classical phys-
ics, their effects are coherent with conventional models of real-
ity, as their strange effects are largely averaged out into insignifi-
cance by the effects of decoherence at the macroscale.

Quantum field fluctuations are the particle territo-

ries that are mostly empty space that make up atoms.

Quantum indistinguishability means it is not pos-

sible to tell the difference between two quantum particles.

541
Quantum jellyfish is a term used by Erwin Schrödinger
that refers to the anticipated blurriness and featurelessness from
many overlapping fields and boundaries exist that are character-
istic of quantum fields (Byrne 2013).

Rayleigh–Bénard convection cells are dynamic

material formations that are produced by complex changes in
surface tension and differentials that exist between the hot and
cold fields of fluid, which produce cell-like boundaries and host
a turbulent ‘internal milieu’.

(re) is used throughout this book as a way of introducing am-

biguity. It asks the reader to consider whether something is hap-
pening for the first time, or whether it is an iterative process
capable of producing alternative outcomes, which may differ
with each cycle of events.

Schrödinger’s Cat challenges an existential paradox at

the heart of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum me-
chanics, which states that a particle exists in all states at once
until observed. Erwin Schrödinger devised this thought experi-
ment in 1935, placing a cat in a sealed box along with a radioac-
tive sample, a Geiger counter and a bottle of poison. If the Gei-
ger counter detects that the radioactive material has decayed,
then the bottle of poison is smashed and the cat is killed. If the
‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics is true, then
the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened. ‘Com-
mon sense’ suggests that the cat must either be dead or alive
(not both), whether or not it is observed, and exposes the limits
of the Copenhagen interpretation in relationship to practical, or
actual situations. (Merz 2013).

Scientific Revolution is a period of cultural develop-

ment and technological advancement, which led to changes in
social and institutional organisation that occurred in Europe
around 1550–1700.

542
Scrying is reading the future against the present by using un-
stable images produced by reflective surfaces.

Scylla is a sea monster in classical Greek legend who haunted

the rocks of a narrow strait opposite the whirlpool of Kharybdis
(Charybdis). Homer describes Skylla (Scylla) as a creature with
twelve dangling feet, six long necks and grisly heads lined with a
triple row of sharp teeth.

Selfish gene is a theory of genetic conservation proposed

by Richard Dawkins in 1976 that builds upon the principal
theory of George C. Williams’ Adaptation and Natural Selection
(1966). It is a way of reading life that positions the gene as the
material substance which governs evolution and is ultimately,
self-preserving. As a primary unit of selection, the gene con-
stitutes an immortal digital code, which is proposedly far more
reliable than other ephemeral vehicles for producing forms of
life like chromosomes, communities, individuals, and species.
However, the ultra-reductionist thesis of the book is very hard
to justify. While self-conserving genes may exist, they are not
as prevalent as Dawkins proposes. In reducing the ‘pressures’
of natural selection to forces that act only on genes in which
the ‘empowered’ organism is merely a ‘vehicle’ for its molecular
compulsions is, quite simply, wrong. Evolutionary forces oper-
ate on all levels, from molecular landscapes to individuals and
communities. It’s Ultra-Darwinism, where natural selection is
an all-powerful force also dismisses evidence from other areas
of science, like population biology and evolutionary biology.
There is also an absence of ethical concerns in his justification
of ‘selfishness’, whose far-reaching implications not just for life,
but also society, are uncritically presented.

Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that asks wheth-

er an object that has all of its parts sequentially replaced is the
same as the original.

543
Siphonophores are a group of predatory animals, or su-
perorganisms, of around 175 known species that include corals,
hydroids, and true jellyfish. Specimens consist of clear gelati-
nous material, are thin, long, and may reach up to 40 metres.
They are exceedingly fragile and break into many pieces under
even the slightest stress.

Sixth Great Extinction, or Holocene Extinction,

is an anticipated mass extinction event whose unique charac-
teristic is that it is mediated by humans. It follows five previous
major extinctions, namely, the Ordovician–Silurian extinction
events, the Late Devonian extinction, the Permian–Triassic ex-
tinction, the Triassic–Jurassic extinction and the Cretaceous–
Paleogene extinction event.

Skyrmions are a general class of particles that are made by

twisting a field. When this field is a magnetic field, the particles
are called magnetic skyrmions, with potential applications in
spintronics, where electron spins are exploited in the design of
transistors and storage media.

Spin-isomers of molecular hydrogen occur in two isomer-

ic forms, one with its two proton nuclear spins aligned parallel
(orthohydrogen), the other with its two proton spins aligned
antiparallel (parahydrogen). These two forms are often referred
to as spin isomers.

Stochastic processes have a random probability distribu-

tion or pattern that may be analysed statistically but not be pre-
dicted precisely.

Stromatolites are fossil evidence of the prokaryotic life

that remains today. They are sheet-like sedimentary rocks that
were originally formed by multiple layers of cyanobacteria over
thousands of years and offer a visual portal into deep time on
earth and the emergence of life.

544
Superfluids are uncommon in nature. They can be pro-
duced experimentally by slowing down normal matter to ex-
tremely low temperatures. They act as a single, giant ‘superatom’
where their matter waves spread out and overlap with one an-
other, sharing the same energy and vibrating together as a single
entity.

Supermassive black holes are found at the centres

of galaxies. They are much larger than stellar mass black holes,
with a typical mass of millions of Suns and devour matter to
produce luminous objects known as quasars.

Superorganism is a body that behaves in some respects as

a single being but is made up of many cooperating creatures that
act as a whole, like the bacterial biome, or colonial organisms
such as bees, siphonophores, and slime moulds.

Supersoils are artificial organic fabrics that augment the en-

vironmental performance of the soil, or enable new processes
and metabolisms to occur within the ground.

Synthetic biology is the designing and engineering of liv-

ing things. This field is evolving so rapidly that no widely ac-
cepted definitions exist but are generally concerned with the
application of engineering principles to the fundamental com-
ponents of biology, most commonly invoking the modification
and (re)insertion of genetic sequences into microorganisms.
This book appreciates both the ontology of the term, which was
coined by Stephane Leduc as a more complex branch of complex
chemistry (Leduc 1911), as well as its contemporary molecular
biology and bitechnological applications in the construction of
novel artificial biological pathways, organisms, and devices.

Synthia was the first self-replicating synthetic bacterium

with a fully artificial genome that was created in 2010 by the J.
Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) (Gibson et al. 2010).

545
Systems science views an entire system of components as
an entity, rather than simply as an assembly of individual parts,
where each component fits properly with the other components,
rather than functioning entirely by itself.

Technosphere is the realm of human technological activity

and the technologically modified environment.

Teleplasty, or ideoplasty, is acting and creating arte-

facts using the mind. It was developed as a controversial psy-
choanalytic theory by Roger Callois that proposes the possibil-
ity of intelligence without thought, creativity without art and
agency in the absence of the human agent. In some contexts, it is
thought to be the precursor to notions of bottom-up chemosyn-
thetic design, where morphology is built into the very structure
of matter and can be released from it through methods of soft,
or remote control (Callois and Shepley 1984). Historically, it is
associated with controlling the dead, the ‘externalised dreams of
mediums’ and the conscious generation of shadowy forms, or
projections using the mind.

Thanatobiome is the metabolising community of crea-

tures found in composts.

Third time is a concept proposed by Ilya Prigogine that ex-

ists in space-time rather than standard geometric space. Char-
acterised by its irreversibility, it provides a source of material
creativity that is expressed through the living realm.

Three-body problem takes an initial set of data that

specifies the positions, masses, and velocities of three bodies for
some particular point in time and then determines the motions
for all of them.

Thrombolites are ancient forms of photsynthesising micro-

bial communities that form clotted accretions in shallow water
by trapping sedimentary particles to form reef-like structures.

546
Transfusional parabiosis is a rejuvenation therapy
whereby regular blood injections from young donors are given
to older recipients.

Upcycling is when discarded items are processed in ways

that increase their quality, or value, so they can be readily in-
corporated into metabolic cycles of biological, or industrial ex-
change.

Virus is a small infectious agent that can only replicate inside

the cells of another organism. The word is from the Latin virus
referring to poison and other noxious substances, first used in
English in 1392. There is much disagreement as to whether virus-
es are organisms, which are described as replicative particles that
constitute the most numerous living agents on Earth. Specifical-
ly, a virus dubbed HTVC010P was the commonest, which para-
sitises its viral host Pelagibacter ubique that makes up one-third
of all the single-celled organisms in the ocean (Eveleth 2013).

Vitalism describes the nature of life as arising from a ‘vital’,

life-giving force, which infuses matter so that it becomes ani-
mated. It is peculiar to living organisms and different from all
other forces found outside living things.

Vitrification is the process of turning matter into glass.

Vivogenesis is a process that results in persistent lifelike
phenomena, without necessarily being biological in its charac-
ter, or ordering.

Weirding is the process of becoming odd, mysteriously

strange, unsettling, and exceptional.

Zoephilia is our empathy for lifelike phenomena. It is de-

rived from E.O. Wilson’s notion of biophilia, ‘the innate ten-
dency to focus on life and lifelike processes’ (Wilson 1990, 1).
This definition is expanded, not only to include bios, qualified

547
(anthropocentric) life, but also zoē, bare2 life that includes all
living beings and is an ecological entity (Braidotti 2006, 41),
which demonstrates effects that are suggestive, in some aspects,
of our experience of life.

2 Giorgio Agamben (1998) argues that bios, the sheer biological fact of life is
given priority over ‘bare life’ (or zoē), the way a life is lived, and implies an
active biopolitics.

548
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