Almost by definition, metabolic processes comprise those infrastructures of earthly geo-bio-chemistry that evade attention, lending themselves to perennial abstraction and figuration. The breaking down of sugars that allows for bodies to move, water treatment plants that process urban wastes, exchanges in and amongst the gaseous atmospheres that resource respiration, data server cooling systems that allow for the logistification of food systems, and the industry coordinations of energy, work and supply chains—the presumed autonomic, material processes that mediate the most important yet least examined aspects of life, lives and lifeways. Cultures and traditions elaborate surreptitious and extravagant traditions of metabolic preparation, and myriad artistic, design and media practitioners concern themselves with foregrounding these processes against backgrounds of abundance and scarcity, extravagance and impoverishment. The mutations and monstrosities of modernity abound: we cultivate one sole type of the more than 1500 varieties of banana, and 70% of the biomass of all birds on Earth are now chickens. Crop mono-cultures cause widespread extinctions that foment revolts, revolutions and full-scale wars. The ‘Metabolic’, as such, is a name we could give to all the fleshy, biological, vulgar, subaltern processes and exchanges, those necessary, intimate transfers and elemental exchanges that maintain, continuously, life and the living. Projects to render these metabolisms visible, otherwise palpable, changeable and renewed hold fast against a more dominant patriarchal noosphere, as Hannah Landecker tells us because they are associated with the domestic, the feminine, the subaltern, and dejected, lowly molecular labours.
For 19th Century economist and merchant Silvio Gesell, the whole planet was to be conceived as a gigantic stomach, vast ecosystems that pre-prepared photosynthetic energies and unpalatable matter to be absorbed into our digestive system, bloodstreams, organs and neural tissues. Gesell writes that “plants and the space they occupy are just as much a part of man as his mouth, teeth or stomach… The whole globe in splendid flight around the sun is a part, an organ, of every individual human,” which rendered the very notion of ‘private property’ an absurdity. For ecofeminist activist and scholar Val Plumwood — a portion of whom was once eaten by a crocodile — for her part, speaks of eating and drinking as “flowing on into an ecological and ancestral community of origins.” How we eat, avoid being eaten and keep ourselves in favourable positions along the planetary food chain constitutes a metabolic anthropocentrism, and metabolic class privilege, that precipitates disproportionate acts of extractive and excretive engineering. These acts which support life, their fundamental predication on death, as Gessell reminds us, are part of what composes perhaps truly universal metabolic media. Metabolic integrities and privilege are further heightened when these material, media environments and beings start to change, protest and breakdown. Anthropogenic transformations of climates and ecosystems force us all, increasingly, to become metabolically sensitised and aware.
Both media and metabolism, as epistemological categories, allow for the conflation of the signified and signified, converging the biological lifeworlds of earthly beings and their technological intermediations as these increasingly intersect one another. Metabolising media, or mediabolics (Geraldine Juárez), is an inversion that serves as a way of rendering palpable the messy, domestic, seeping, oozing organic materiality flows directed and unsuccessfully dominated by technoscience (Hannah Landecker, Desiree Foerster). Metabolic media likewise takes into consideration ongoing ‘logistical’ (Ned Rositter), ‘elemental’ (J. D. Peters, Wickberg & Gärdebo), ‘geological’ (Jussi Parikka), ‘thermal’ (Nicole Starosielski), ‘economic’ (Harold Innis, Herman Daly) studies of media, infrastructure and nature. If media are those connective in-betweens that allow for the transmission, storage and representation of relationships, this special issue of the HUB - Journal of Research in Arte, Design and Society is a study of the specific intimacies, interfaces and connections of our contemporary metabolic condition. The issue canvases and broadens understanding of what Metabolic Media might be through creative research and knowledge practices examining that which mediates the starkest of terms: life and death.
How do we communicate, store, transmit, analyse and experience complex metabolic conditions and processual phenomena? What are the tools we have used to characterise metabolism through units of analysis: individual, collective, urban structures, nation-states and planetary scales? How best to intervene in, analyse and account for the repercussions that media bring to metabolic regimes? What kinds of aesthetics and designed media modulate and mutate metabolic processes? What speculative possibilities for healing, repairing or shifting metabolic relations might technological media practices offer? How do metabolic media tie together and multiply ways of recognising, describing and changing life-affirming and life-deleting local, regional, urban, rural and planetary situations?
The essays and expositions in this issue of HUB circumscribe an idea of metabolic media, exploring the interconnections between biological, technological, cultural, and ecological systems. Together, they offer a rich tapestry of perspectives, illuminating how processes of exchange, transformation, and interaction underpin the idea of media as metabolic and metabolising. In Breathing with Phytoplankton: Exploring Metabolic Connections with Oceanic Microbes, author Anthea Oestreicher aims to reframe our understanding of the ocean’s smallest organisms. By examining the pivotal role of phytoplankton in carbon sequestration and oxygen production, the author highlights how these microscopic entities sustain life on Earth, with undervalued participation in regulating Earth systems. Oestreicher’s work creatively bridges art, science, and technology to explore the unseen forces shaping planetary systems, offering a poetic and scientific meditation on metabolic interdependence. Guilty Pleasures: Immersive Art for the Oral Cavity by Luke Franzke and Johannes Lucian Reck looks into the metabolic dimensions of consumption. Their work transforms the oral cavity into a sensory site of artistic and cultural engagement, blending immersive art with edible materials. This piece critically examines how acts of eating and tasting create metabolic connections that extend beyond the individual, touching on broader ecological, cultural, and sensory dynamics. Metabolic Drawings–Or: Drawing Metabolic by Teresa Mayr investigates drawing as a form of metabolic practice. Through her exploration of how artistic practices can translate the rhythms of living systems into visual forms, Mayr connects art with the flows and cycles of energy transfer. This work invites readers to consider drawing not only as a creative act but also as a way to embody and visualise processes of exchange and transformation. The Black Triangle–Transmediating Borderland Coal Ecologies, co-authored by Caroline Ektander, Carlina Rosseé, Jasmina Al-Qaisi and Alexandra Toland, examines the geopolitical and ecological complexities of the Black Triangle, a historically polluted coal-mining region. Using storytelling, pigment-making, and embodied practices like pickling and digestion, the authors explore how acts of transfer and exchange constituting living processes—spanning air, water, and human bodies—are deeply entangled with histories of extraction and contamination. Their transdisciplinary approach brings a metabolic lens to landscapes of conflict and transformation. When GPT Digested the Medium Hélène Smith by Katerina Undo presents a speculative and experimental piece that bridges historical accounts of psychic medium Hélène Smith with the creative potential of AI. By engaging GPT-2 to reinterpret Smith’s invented Martian language, Undo explores the metabolic entanglements of memory, intelligence, and creativity across human and machine systems. This piece challenges binary distinctions between the natural and artificial, illustrating how metabolic media extends into the speculative and the technological. Finally, as a supplement to the issue’s open-call contributions, Jamie Allen provides On Planetary Proportionalities, an exposition that helped seed this collaborative special issue. Allen’s metabolic poetics examines planetary- and body-scale interactions, drawing connections between proportions and processes that define our shared metabolic and media landscapes.
Through this metabolic mosaic, this special issue of HUB presents a dynamic and interconnected view of metabolic media, celebrating how media processes reflect and influence the metabolic flows of life itself. Each contribution invites readers to rethink how artistic, scientific, and technological practices can illuminate the entangled systems that sustain and shape our shared existence. Against a background of shifting, strained or even pathological metabolic relations across scales, forms, zones and bodies, these reflections and interventions intersect with media techniques and technologies as traditionally conceived and emergent, immanent and immediate metabolic flows systems and processes.
The Metabolic Media special issue of HUB Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society is the result of the considered and considerable metabolic labours of guest edited by Louise Carver and Jamie Allen, of HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society editors Filipa Cruz, Manuela Bronze and Orlando Vieira Francisco, as well as numerous reviewers and readers—thank you, and yours, human and otherwise.