“I am before, I am almost, I am never”
— Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva

CORPUS is a holobiont: a living, breathing, entangled assemblage of human, machine, and microbiome.¹ They are a five-story tall AR artwork, first installed inside the historic Bradbury Building in Los Angeles, California. Scaled almost to the ceiling of the building’s atrium, the animated, gender-ambiguous figure offers considerations of embodiment, hybridity, interspecies collaboration, and ecological thinking.

Shifting their weight and breathing, CORPUS is never still. I designed the figure as an ever-morphing blend of metallic and organic elements, with electrical flashes rendered to resemble pulsing binary and DNA code. Silicon fragments function in multiple capacities: bionics, prosthetics, and ethically sourced datasets for non-extractive algorithmic interventions/augmentations. Antennae-like tendrils sway from various points in the figure, a rejection of brain-machine interfaces like Neuralink and an embrace of sensory organs common to multiple biological species.

CORPUS’s heartbeat, audible through the app, is composed of a blend of heartbeats: fetal, human, whale, cosmos (a recording of black holes colliding), and an AI interpolation of them all. As CORPUS breathes and gently shifts their weight, I deployed semi-transparent fog in places to suggest the future human body as an unfixed process versus an object. CORPUS’s fluctuating fog also gestures toward the fluid nature of realities we have evolved for evolutionary fitness. Seeing through CORPUS in certain parts of the figure—getting glimpses of architectural details, at human figures on different floors of the Bradbury Building, at the skylight roof—invited viewers to imagine an altered reality in situ.

Anchoring the creature was an engineering feat my team labored over to ensure it could be experienced at the proper scale and perspective from every level of the atrium. You can interact with CORPUS through my free, augmented reality (AR) application, 4th Wall. By scaling the artwork to dwarf human-scale viewers, the artwork inverts a presumption of human dominance and invites a reconsideration of perspective, embodiment, relational engagement, and bioengineering.

The Bradbury Building served as the ideal poetic container for a bioengineered future human, given the architecture’s role in films such as Blade Runner and The Artist. Rumored to have been inspired by Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel, Looking Backwards, which imagined a socialist utopian future, the building’s glass roof allows light to flood each floor throughout the atrium. CORPUS represents its own body politic, with multiple types of cognition operating as collaborative organisms and networked systems in a single form. CORPUS’s constituent elements, working non-hierarchically and cooperatively in and through the body, echo the ideals of equity built into their place of emergence.

What surprised me most about CORPUS was the degree to which I, and people close to the project, felt deep affection toward them. As we beheld CORPUS’s constitution, we were unwittingly engaged in an optimistic consideration of alternate futures. This was an emotionally intimate process. As I saw it, CORPUS might transcend the reification of the body as matter and become something new, elusive, and uncontainable. I believe that future life will require embracing interconnected embodied and embrained sources of cognition—microbial, artificial, and carbon-based. Human bodies will be increasingly mediated not just by technology and quantum media, but also by new viruses and cellular organisms that thrive in, through, and across them. In this incarnation, future humans would thrive in an ineluctable, fluid kinship with the ecosystems and intelligences of their own body politic(s) and beyond.

The Eurocentric, Enlightenment-era view of modernity—that humans are not only separate from their constituent parts but from the ecosystems that sustain them—is mistaken at the deepest material level. Anthropologist Vicki Kirby observes, “Bacterial flora in the gut are not mere additions to our bodies but intrinsic to our sense of personhood, our moods and ability to problem-solve.” We cannot be human without the more-than-human. “We increasingly find evidence of decision-making and cognition in plants,” Kirby writes, “and surprising smarts in creatures such as squid and even mold on the forest floor.”² The “surprising smarts” Kirby refers to include the decentralized intelligences and consciousnesses of octopuses and mycelial networks. CORPUS materializes these intrinsic, symbiotic, and entangled “smarts” in their atomic constitution. CORPUS’s networked cognition was imagined as a model of embrainment, a term popularized by theorist Rosi Braidotti to describe decentralized and distributed body intelligences at the cellular level.³

CORPUS’s constitution reflects my immersion in works by leading thinkers. In Being Ecological, Timothy Morton writes, “I believe that humans are traumatized by having severed their connections with nonhuman beings, connections that exist deep inside their bodies (in our DNA, for instance; fingers aren't exclusively human, nor are lungs or cell metabolism). We sever these connections in social and philosophical space but they still exist.”⁴ CORPUS inverts this perceived decoupling from, and dominance over, ecologies and more-than-human beings. Stacy Alaimo’s description of the trans-corporeal, in which “human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment,’” also provides a succinct description of CORPUS.⁵ They represent Donna Haraway’s vision of co-making, or sympoeisis with our more-than-human kin. The variegated elements of CORPUS express what Nora Bateson calls “simultaneous implicating,” the need for humility in the mutual learning required in ecological thinking. CORPUS proposes a plurality of bodies that coalesce into a single, gigantic form that is both embedded in and emblematic of such approaches that are critical for multispecies flourishing.

I wanted to create a future human that included not just biological but also synthetic cognition. In Ways of Being, James Bridle observes that computers are made “from stone, and the compressed relics of animals and plants,” so, “computers themselves are one of the words spoken by stone,”⁶ prompting the question: why would we separate machines from humans’ atomic histories? Currently, humans’ psycho-physiology is increasingly mediated by machine learning and algorithmic nudging. By contrast, CORPUS integrates machine and synthetic intelligences that deepen rather than fragment its hybrid cognition. Cybernetics, networked organisms, and the microbiome collaborate to compose a harmonic cognitive symphony in CORPUS.

CORPUS’s ongoing and unfixed becoming is mirrored in theoretical physicist and feminist scholar Karen Barad’s notion of unmoored agency. In Material Feminisms, they write, “This ongoing flow of agency through which ‘part’ of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another ‘part’ of the world and through which local causal structures, boundaries, and properties are stabilized and destabilized does not take place in space and time but in the making of space-time itself.”⁷ For Barad, the “universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming.”⁸ That is, the world materializes through overlapping agential phenomena that are defined by their collection dynamism rather than their individual beingness.

As a medium, AR prompts a critical consideration of materiality and immateriality. Invisible to the naked eye, AR currently requires the visual prosthesis of the phone camera to materialize in shared space. The experience of AR exists in the tangible collaboration of body and mobile device, in a networked cultural space, in the intertwined space of what is seen and unseen, and in intra-actions with participants. CORPUS’s invisibility to human vision presumes immateriality, as may its elusive boundaries and properties; however, the prosthesis of a mobile device materializes it in shared space. Feminist scholar N. Katherine Hayles describes such materiality of the digital in the form of software and code. She said, “So, it is often said that digital creations are immaterial. Well, nothing could be farther from the truth. They are always material, they are always located in different forms of hardware and software. And just as you can pay attention to the materiality of the page, you can also pay attention to the materiality of digital code.”⁹ An additional layer of materiality is imbricated in the software and code that first built and now governs CORPUS’s AR incarnation.

AR can often trigger an embrained experience in viewers by engaging a plurality of senses; visual, aural, haptic. CORPUS is not intended to be merely seen, but heard, felt, encountered from every floor, and every possible perspective. From any perspective, however, CORPUS towers over viewers. Ergonomic awe is a physiological experience that occurs when humans look up in wonder (at, for example, a cathedral, Muir Woods, or the Northern Lights). It situates the encounter in the body. In AR, a visceral experience often migrates into memory and body consciousness, its affective impact echoing long after any encounter. When I walk into the Bradbury atrium now, though I can’t see or hear CORPUS without my phone, I know they remain there. I feel them through muscle memory. The residue of wonder, generated by the space itself coupled with the visceral experience of having interacted with a supersized being, lingers. And though CORPUS originated at the Bradbury, true to their form, they are a mobile and evolving artwork. Newly altered with lichen, microplastics, 3D distributed organs and moss, CORPUS will be relocated in sites where their presence might prompt added resonance and discussion. They are evolving as an upcoming 2024 installation at the Hammer Museum.

Like CORPUS, the original Blade Runner (1982) movie haunts the space; many of the scenes were filmed at the Bradbury. In that world, replicants are biologically engineered humanoids. Like replicants, CORPUS possesses superhuman intelligence and strengths. CORPUS is similarly bioengineered (but unlike replicants, they aren’t entirely organic). Replicants’ and CORPUS’s ontological ambiguity poses questions about what it means to be human: have memories, feel love, fear death.

Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner, CORPUS is a beacon of hope for more-than-human flourishing. Of the film’s 2017 remake, Blade Runner 2049, Jerika Sanderson notes the role of dehumanizing language and consequent violence around non-human replicants as they relate to our world. “As our own society increasingly relies on the collection of biometric data and the ascription of biovalue to biological material,” she writes, “explorations of how biotechnology could affect concepts of human and nonhuman identity … can influence our approach to biotechnological advancements and allow us to consider the potential ethical implications of identifying individuals in terms of biological boundaries.”⁹ The film reflects that our polarized polity enables the language, laws, and algorithms that facilitate violence toward non-human Others. These tactics are deployed regularly against vulnerable populations not just in the U.S. but globally.

Yet the slippery biological boundaries that cause alarm within the heternormative and capitalist paradigm stage resistance. CORPUS is a chimera, blending the immaterial with the material, alternately visible and invisible. They occupy a vulnerable, possibly threatening, space in humans' taxonomies of nature. My intention is to recognize CORPUS’s freakishness of form as a point of virtue and resilience in a moment when so many living outside of gender norms and under the yoke of capitalism are in acute peril. CORPUS’s internal system of governance illustrates equitable distribution of resources, much like mycelium or the networked root systems of trees—resisting the capitalist model of competitive individualism.

As a storytelling vehicle, CORPUS’s abstraction is inclusive. They are an invitation to imagine one’s own story entangled with their becoming through collective intra-actions. In kinship with those experiencing violence in our world, I created CORPUS to be gender-ambiguous so that they might elude certain oppressions. In form and in concept, CORPUS proposes an embrained and embodied future where all can thrive.

1. An “assemblage of different organisms” behaving as a single entity. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (New York: Random House, 2020), 92.
2. K.R. Magnusson et al., ‘Relationships between diet-related changes in the gut microbiome and cognitive flexibility’, Neuroscience, 300 (2015), 128-40.
3. “We think with the entire body, or rather, we have to acknowledge the embodiment of the brain, and the embrainment of the body.” –Rosa Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism,” in Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2019), 39.
4. Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 76-77.
5. Stacy Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature,” Material Feminisms (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008), 239.
6. James Bridle, Ways of Being (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 2022), 171.
7. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” in Material Feminisms (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008), 135.
8. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 135.
9. N. Katherine Hayles, “N. Katherine Hayles: ‘We Need a More Comprehensive View of Cognition,’” Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, YouTube, published February 5, 2024, https://youtu.be/yUsTa01vJpA.
10. Jerika Sanderson, “Blade Runner: 2049 and Biotechnology,” Critical Posthumanism Network, published on September 22, 2020, https://criticalposthumanism.net/blade-runner-2049-and-biotechnology/.