You are Multitudes
Artwork created with the AI Midjourney
You think about yourself as a single individual, but our bodies provide ecosystems for countless of microbes we are intimately intertwined with
You are not one, you are an exuberant ever-changing crowd, a planet swarming with life, a symbiotic microbiome full of millions of micro-organisms that perform various, indispensable functions in your body. In fact, you are innumerable, always a ‘we’ and never merely an ‘I’.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
We are holobionts, composite creatures consisting of more cells of microbial than primate origin. Microbes live on and in our bodies as true parts of ourselves, as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first demonstrated in 1681 (calling them ‘animalcules’).
Artwork created with the AI Wombo
Individualism is a cherished aspect of modern Western life. It’s linked to a sense of freedom, of autonomy, of uniqueness. What are we afraid we will lose when we accept we are parts of a whole, intricately linked to other humans and other species?
In the project Creating Life with Future Based I explored what it means to be alive in a world that is so connected in a material, biological sense, yet so separate in our minds? Talking with experts and artists I found out that through microchimerism our grandmothers provide information to us and whole populations are connected through the pan-microbiome, the shared microbial community that is constantly horizontally exchanged between its members.
What would it mean for our society if we made the shift of being individually accountable organisms, to nodes in a connected network that influence each other continuously? Can we still have a legal system that judges individuals? Can we still have a healthcare system that treats individual bodies? Can we still extract raw materials from natural resources without taking care of the consequences?
Take a look at the project here.