Anicka Yi on Metaspore

photo: The New York Times

Where does science end and art being? That’s long been a guiding question for conceptual artist Anicka Yi whose work bridges disciplinary worlds. Here she unpacks her latest exploration, Metaspore Symposium, with Four One Nine Founder, Sonya Yu.

Sonya Yu: What is Metaspore? 

Anicka Yi: As you know, my art practice has actively worked in the intersection of art and science and technology for the better part of the last 10 years. But back in the day, there wasn’t as much robust collaboration. In 2015, I finally got a breakthrough by doing this residency at MIT that really fostered artists working with scientists and technologists. 

How did that work?

You could pick any department and any scientist’s work, and then you’d pitch your idea in a 20-minute speed-dating style interview. It brought me into a very fortunate position to work with more scientists. But I always felt that there was a real opportunity to build a more sustainable and enriching dynamic between scientists and artists because working project to project felt a little transactional and extractive because you’re hiring a scientist to work with you on a specific project. [AI assistant enters the zoom room to record.] Oh, someone’s autopilot is here? An AI Assistant taking notes? Sure, bring them to the party.

photo: The New York Times

Speaking of science, technology, and art… 

You notice I did not bat an eye. I was like, Okay, cool. Come on in. But often when I'm in the process of complex projects, there's always so many facets that you can't incorporate into the direct project, so you keep telling yourself, I'm coming back to this. There's something here that I need to keep digging and scratching at. In 2019, I embarked upon Metaspore, and the original idea was completely different with a lot of land fantasy: acres of farmland, a compound, permaculture farming, baby pigs, and a campus. I even relocated to California to explore possibilities in Ojai. But that was right around the beginning of the pandemic, and it didn't seem like that was really meant to happen. 

In 2021, [Metaspore] just organically started grafting itself back onto my psyche.We were getting an abundance of invitations and opportunities to exhibit around the world. I thought: What if we countered those invitations with a site that will host a chapter of this very nascent project that is bringing together a lot of brilliant minds and brilliant people that I've come across through my professional life and just fascinating people who are actively changing civilization as we know it? 

Now how do you view its latest iteration?

For Metaspore, we are in the first year of the embryological three-year phase. We are really resisting trying to over determine and over define what it is because I truly believe that very complex, big, big, impactful ideas cannot be pre-ordained in terms of linear objectives like, ‘Oh, I'm going to do this in year one, I'm going to deliver that I'm going to accomplish this.”

I think a lot of ideas, projects, and teams are living, breathing ecosystems, and they don't have linear objectives. Even in our own lives, you know, I'm just a collection of my small lived experiences. I’d rather be put into situations where opportunities that I couldn't have even anticipated arise.

There seems to be incredible uncertainty all around us with the climate crisis and artificial intelligence development. It's very distracting, not knowing how to forge ahead and make these concrete plans. But I actually find it very liberating, because this is one of the core tools that I activate as an artist: working with uncertainty, and finding strength and resilience in that uncertainty. 

That's one of the very potent guiding forces as we're building Metaspore: Let's embrace uncertainty; we're not here with the answers. We're actively facing the uncertainty and embracing the positivity of it, because there has always been uncertainty. I've always abided in and adhered to the law of impermanence: nothing is permanent. Even if you have success one moment, there's no assurance that there will be success again. You have to just embrace all of it.

pHOTO: THE GUARDIAN

It's very scary to flow in that uncertainty. What you're really demonstrating is a practice of bravery and vulnerability and executive functioning. So how do you then take this idea at the beginning and start refining it down to this first year application?

Well, that was actually very challenging because the project is very ambitious. It's very hard to articulate in concrete terms because it's so nebulous. We incubated the first chapter at Stanford University. I taught a course with eight really brilliant students with backgrounds ranging from PhDs in bioengineering to biology to computer science, as well as art history and documentary filmmaking and studio art. 

We brought these young fellows together, and a lot of those with STEM backgrounds had never been in the same room with someone in the arts—and I had to get them to board the spaceship. We had fascinating discussions about the human as a failed concept, regenerative time, network weaving—we covered a broad scope and spectrum. 

Why was that?

I'm not interested in knowledge production for the sake of knowledge. I think we've all been raised and conditioned to produce, produce, produce more knowledge, especially today with all of this data at our fingertips. But data has no meaning. It's purely transactional without an application. I wanted to really start taking lessons from Eastern philosophy and Indigenous epistemologies and recognize that these ways of thinking and wisdom have been considering the human as relational for thousands and thousands of years. 

It's this Western liberal thought that has compartmentalized knowledge and siloed these disciplines of science from the arts. It’s not helping us to retain the idea that the autonomous individual is at the center of the narrative, that you're supposed to somehow vanquish all obstacles, and that the individual, at all costs, will transcend. That’s just not how biological life works. As we know, we are deeply interconnected, we are entangled, and there is no separation. Individualism as a concept is actually very limiting. It holds us back from the way that life is actually working all around us.

How do you hope that Metapore will disrupt this kind of knowledge, engagement and production?

I think proof of concept will be in the doing. Rather than making all these prescriptive proclamations, it's in the approach, the ethics, the culture of care, the amalgamation and borrowing from ancient cultures. We're not claiming to be wildly original. However, I haven't seen that many examples of bringing the STEM world to the arts and humanities, and approaching it with this level of sensitivity and wholeness.

How do you get to a place where you can reach clarity and stay in this gray space, flowing and unknowing? What in your own practice have brought you that skillset?

What's been transformational for me has been a very committed meditation practice. It has allowed me to create a lived reality, an awareness and practice where it isn't just about conceptual knowing. Concepts are wonderful, right? They can help you with so many things, but we can't confuse the concept for the thing itself, which is the lived reality. A conceptual artist who is much more interested in non-conceptual space that can't be represented, that can't be diluted and reduced to a concept, a standard representation or something like language, is ironic right? 

But that’s the philosophical approach that I have towards Metaspore: Let’s not confuse the study of the ocean for swimming in the ocean; get in the water and learn to swim. That’s what we’re doing with Metaspore: It’s not enough to master the study of oceanography, we want to learn to swim.

photo: t magazine

Dropping the standard linear definitions of success, what does success look like to you at year three or four of Metaspore?

I think that year three, we will have, hopefully, a very fluid, interconnected community. We want to reach different audiences, different demographics, because this is organic and germane to how we work naturally. So success would mean that we are building a community of people who are also interested in working in a deeper way beyond just collecting data, beyond having this resolution to today's problems.

If you're endeavoring to really change the paradigm, it takes time. I'm not in a rush to radically transform the world around me, but I do gain a lot of inspiration and strength from other very intelligent, creative, inspired, dedicated people who are thinking about civilization and thinking how do we steer this? And how do we learn to swim?

What do you hope people will leave with from this first Metaspore?

I hope that they will feel like they are a part of this conversation, because everyone has a stake in it. Metaspore is not specialized. It's not meant to alienate anyone; this is very inclusive. I hope that we can create a hub where people can come to develop ideas and social trust, which is needed right now. How do you foster social trust when we've been betrayed by our governments, by the media, by so many trusted institutions, and yet, the only thing that's going to move us forward is to build that social trust?

Metaspore is such a clever name. How did you come up with it?

It’s based on a lot of research and scholarship that we're engaged with around mycelial networks, fungal networks, and thinking about spores in their function—how there are trillions and trillions of them. They can disperse, and some can become a fruiting body and others may not. It’s very optimistic in that sense: The whole point of a spore is that there’s hope around its potential, but it doesn't necessarily deliver. To me, believing in the spore is to believe in hope and potential.