Reading matters: Bacteria to AI
29 April; 28 May; 25 June 2025
18:00-20:00
SOLU Space, Helsinki  

For our next Reading Matters we are hosting three consecutive sessions on N. Katherine Hayles newly published book Bacteria to AI: Human Futures With Our Nonhuman Symbionts. These reading circles orbit some of the key questions in Bioart Society’s deCYPher project linking AI, ML and Symbio and are an opportunity to think with these through the text.

Joining us to facilitate these sessions are curator and writer Helen Kaplinsky, and artist and writer Kirsty Hendry. The first session in April will focus on the introduction and following this Kaplinsky and Hendry will each select a chapter of focus for May and June.  

"A new theory of mind that includes nonhuman and artificial intelligences. The much-lauded superiority of human intelligence has not prevented us from driving the planet into ecological disaster. For N. Katherine Hayles, the climate crisis demands that we rethink basic assumptions about human and nonhuman intelligences. In Bacteria to AI, Hayles develops a new theory of mind – what she calls an integrated cognitive framework (ICF) – that includes the meaning-making practices of lifeforms from bacteria to plants, animals, humans, and some forms of artificial intelligence. Through a sweeping survey of evolutionary biology, computer science, and contemporary literature, Hayles insists that another way of life, with ICF at its core, is not only possible but necessary to safeguard our planet's future."

We encourage reading the text(s) in advance and, if possible, joining all three sessions, but neither are compulsory. In the session we will read sections of the text and it is possible to only attend one session.

To receive a copy of the text in advance contact yvonne.billimore[at]bioartsociety.fi at least two days before the session occurs.

Please note these sessions take place in person but more online Reading Matters will be coming soon.
 

Helen Kaplinsky (she/her) is a curator and writer based between Finland and the UK. Over the past decade her projects have spanned questions of postdigital identity, femininity and ownership. She has curated several projects involving cyberfeminism(s) and its echoes in current feminist art practice - the focus of her current PhD studies at the Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool John Moores. In recent years she has worked on events and exhibitions with HAM (Helsinki Art Museum), Tallinn Kunstihoone, Helsinki Biennial, Barbican, Tate (Modern and Britain), Whitechapel Gallery and Transmediale Festival. She co-directed London project space Res between 2015-2020 and has curated collection-based exhibitions with the Contemporary Art Society and the Arts Council Collection. Her writing has been published by Routledge, Artmonthly, Institute of Network Cultures, Liverpool University Press and Bristol University Press among others.

Kirsty Hendry is an artist and facilitator (usually) based in Glasgow, Scotland who develops projects exploring bodily knowledges and science fictions. Kirsty and their commensal collaborators work across writing, artist moving image, and other practices of metabolising information. Kirsty’s work is often collaborative, creating and developing methods of co-production to facilitate collective enquiry within community engagement and participatory contexts. This can include the general public through workshops and public programming; with a wide range of community groups; and with interdisciplinary groups of artists and/or professionals from music, science, performing arts, health & social care. Kirsty is currently in Helsinki undertaking a 6 month Artist Residency at The Centre for the Social Study of Microbes.