Dispatches from ASCUS #2: Multispecies Mingling

Welcome to Dispatches from ASCUS #2! My name is Iona Walker PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh and anthropologist in residence at ASCUS for the summer of 2022 I first discovered the ASCUS lab in 2018. I had attended a workshop hosted by bioartist Oron Catts of the famous art-science SymbioticA lab in Australia. The workshop entitled ‘The Art of Tissue Engineering’ involved creating tissue cultures from the femur of a butchered pig, asking what does it mean ethically, socially, culturally, philosophically to engineer tissues. As an anthropologist in this art-science space I felt invigorated and eager to explore the ways in which ASCUS and I could work together. That summer I attended a lab induction and over the course of the next two years worked with ASCUS to produce several workshops and a microbiology training course. These experiences influenced the development of my PhD project as I became fascinated with the possibilities for working across disciplines and with fellow curious humans.

The ASCUS lab
I am in the lab, and it is November 2019. The ASCUS lab is small, but crammed with microscopes, fume cupboards in various states of functionality, workbenches filled with boxes of gloves, slides and intriguing half-finished projects. It’s 4:30pm, already dark outside and raining. I am the first person at the twice weekly open sessions. Lab technician Jiri’s 80’s rock beats float softly from the ancient speaker system and the air is tangy in the way that lets me know something I cannot see yet is fermenting. My time at the lab has been a journey from intimidation by the myriad technical equipment I worried I would somehow break, to childlike disbelief that I am allowed to ‘play’ here. To tinker and investigate. Ask questions. It is a joyfulness that I see often see reflected in volunteers and guests as they too become regulars. Most are undergraduate students from design, art, fashion, biomedical sciences or artists with ongoing projects.

I ask Jiri what the gummy brown sheets are laying precariously on the workbench divider. “This is Kombucha Leather” he tells me “A designer here is growing them for a project on eco-friendly fashion”. That would explain the smell. Jiri shows me the trays in which a jelly is forming on top of a strange coffee-brown substance. He tells me that kombucha is fermented by symbiotic colonies of bacteria and yeasts (SCOBYs), which are fed with something acidic like a black tea, coffee or vinegar and sugar. As the SCOBY grows it gets thicker, resembling a brown jelly like substance which dries to form a translucent sheet of leather like material. During the microbiology course, I got to produce my own circle of leather in an old jam jar and see the process for myself.

Recently, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in how “‘the human’ has been formed and transformed amid encounters with multiple species of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes” (Kirksey Eben, 2014). To do this, anthropologists use multispecies ethnography as a method and mode of writing meaning that they understand human social life to be more than just about what humans do. Multispecies ethnography allows us to understand how ecosystems, other animals, plants, crops, bacteria, insects and other creatures are shape and are shaped by cultural, political, economic and social forces. Anthropologist Anna Tsing conducts ‘multispecies ethnography’, meaning that she takes seriously the non-human world when conducting her ethnographic study. Tsing’s book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, uses mushrooms to explore the flows of global capital.

By following the mushrooms, she is able to tell a multispecies story that takes us across scales, showing how all life is interdependent and the impact of capitalism on our understanding of the world. Tsing suggests that in her research, alongside all her human interlocutors mushrooms were her collaborators in the project. This might sound strange, but if we consider the more-than-human world as being important teachers and collaborators in our lives – how might that change our understanding of the world and our place in it?

The ASCUS lab offers the possibility of working with microbes, one of the key players in my anthropological work. Under the workbenches laden with machines and instruments are fridges: home to the lab’s stocks of microorganisms. These range from slime moulds – an oddly charismatic stringy yellow organism without category that eats oats and solves mazes; to purple, red, orange, pink and green pigmented bacteria donated to the lab by the team that produced a bacterial movie poster for the 2011 film Contagion. Jiri takes a flask from one of the drawers.

It contains bioluminescent bacteria derived from deep sea plankton suspended in a salty solution. “They are very happy today” says Jiri, swirling them in the dark of the fridge “they only glow when they are happy”. In other drawers various sealed Petri dishes contain fungal blooms of aspergillus from leaves or bacteria sampled from coins. Outside of the fridges, fermenting kombucha SCOBYs and bags of Oyster mycelium add to the multispecies mingling.

One of the reasons I am still so fascinated with the work of ASCUS and the ASCUS lab in particular is that here I have ability to blur the lines between art, science and anthropology and engage with the microbial world. My PhD project is about reimagining human microbe relationships. The academic research lab or hospital are places where I typically engage with microbes and the people that study them, however, the scene is already set for the kinds of relationships that can be produced. These lab spaces are vitally important for developing knowledge about microbes that may contribute to new treatments or understandings for disease. The ASCUS lab does something different. Although the tools remain the same, petri dishes, microscopes, incubators and fridges, the lab spaces allows me and other lab users to encounter microbes in a way that is totally new. I have painted with pigmented bacteria to create bio-art, explored different agar plates to see which ones make the microbes happiest, and experimented with antimicrobial substances to see which microbes are tolerant to or killed by. Interested? The ASCUS Lab is publicly accessible and there for experimentation, playing and having fun. Get in touch if you would like to book a session, or keep an eye out for microscopy and microbiology courses that are in the pipeline. We hope to see you soon!