Abstract
Pending Xenophora is a multi-layered mixed reality work produced in collaboration with a rout of garden snails. Conceived as a navigable and evolving world model, it explores how the future of planetary knowledge could become a negotiation between human and more-than-human intelligence. Rather than thinking about other-than-human lives, the work examines how the practice of “thinking with” could become a standard methodology across art, design, and ethology.
At the heart of this work, snails—both totemic and material—are treated as cultural agents capable of relating, responding, prompting, and engaging in artistic collaboration. Through the concept of isopraxis, the work formulates how interspecies play, in particular, generates unique questions and insights that would be unthinkable within the historic approach to animal knowledge, which relies on a strict separation of subject and object.
The space of artistic research in this work serves as a testing ground for other-than-human epistemology. The results unfold across a series of works, including touch-based interfaces for snails, sketches and models made in collaboration with them, films, maps, a sound album, a scent, and a dynamic virtual reality world that encapsulates these elements into a modular yet interconnected whole.