Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds and other living materials such as bacteria and slime mould. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, bringing together technology and biology. Science fiction is a recurring theme in Sutela’s work and so is the quest to go beyond the limits of human-created language, both by delving into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and by turning towards technologies as shamanistic devices or possible mediums to channel alien semantics. Sutela’s work urges us to consider other, nonhuman species as intelligent beings, such as the Physarum polycephalum slime mould. She proposes her collaboration with slime moulds as a model against anthropocentric hierarchies, to point instead to decentralised intelligence and a deep connectivity of consciousness and the material world – both living and non-living. Sutela has been exhibited internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Serpentine Galleries. In 2017, she edited Orgs: From Slime Mold to Silicon Valley and Beyond (Garret Publications) and in 2019–20 she was a Visiting Artist at The MIT Centre for Art, Science & Technology.
