TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

The Anthropocene is an operative way to explore the complexity of emergencies involved in the global systems of our present time. Many crises of this century - such as climate change and the pandemic - reconfigured the relationships between life sciences, society, and nature. The complexity of the phenomenon indicates another type of crisis, the modern knowledge itself. Once it becomes evident the significance of interdisciplinary matter, collaborations between the Sciences, Humanities, Technology and Arts can strategically produce multidisciplinary actions in order to mitigate the vulnerabilities of the Earth without disregarding the populations and economic system in which we are inserted.
Works of art allow new ways of understanding the organization of living systems and biological, synthetic, and symbolic processes, manipulated on the most varied scales: from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Some works “directly relate the artist to other beings and techniques, which made symbiosis their product” (CZEGLEDY, p. 126 In DOMINGUES, 2003). Recently, the manipulation of living organisms by art can be directed to the collaborative action between human, non-human, living, and non-living organisms getting together prehuman e posthuman intelligence. Through the creative speculation of organizational arrangements with technology, it is possible to build operational dynamics that help us in facing the obstacles of the Anthropocene. This communication seeks to advance the relationship between non-human organisms, such as fungi and bacteria with recent digital information systems, so-called biohybrid systems
In this context, Cesar&Lois collective introduces ecosystem intelligence (BAIO & SOLOMON, 2021). Cesar&Lois develop projects that examine sociotechnical systems, attempting to challenge anthropocentric technological pathways while linking to intelligence sourced in biological circuitry. Hence, ecosystem intelligence is the union of prehuman and posthuman intelligence that, when combined, can result in proposals for symbiosis aimed at well-being in the world. Merged intelligence exists in research on swarm intelligence in colony behavior, and bacterial communities, with “collective action arising spontaneously from the sensing. Also, ancestral knowledge expressed by traditional Amerindian thinkers tenders rich ways of establishing relations between human and nonhuman intelligence (BAIO & SOLOMON, 2021).
Ecosystem intelligence would be a means for exploring collective dynamics in a world of emergencies through the arts, organisms, technologies, and life sciences. From these ideas, the collective points out the criticism of human beings as the only model for the organization of nature and aspires to merge material experiments with utopian visions for an ecosystemic community with symbiotic relationships.
In this presentation, some of the ideas surrounding intelligence and their epistemological frameworks are explored in the works of Cesar&Lois. [ECO]Nomic Revolution (2019) and Mycorrhizal Insurrection (2022) works explore the possibility of producing experiments that reflect the aforementioned characteristics and lead the field of thought and symbiotic practices in the art field.