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MANIFESTO
Liquid life is an uncertain realm. The concepts needed
to realise its potential have not yet existed until now. The
hypercomplexity and hyperobject-ness of liquid terrains exceeds
our ability to observe or comprehend them in their totality. Indeed,
what we typically recognise as living things are by-products of
liquid processes.
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Liquid life is a worldview. A phantasmagoria of effects,
disobedient substances, evasive strategies, dalliances, skirmishes,
flirtations, addictions, quantum phenomena, unexpected twists,
sudden turns, furtive exchanges, sly manoeuvres, blind alleys, and
exuberant digressions. It cannot be reduced into simple ciphers of
process, substance, method, or technology. It is more than a set of
particular materials that comprise a recognizable body. It is more
than vital processes that are shaped according to specific contexts and subjective encounters. Yet we recognise its coherence through
the lives of ‘beings’, which remain cogent despite incalculable
persistent changes such as flows, ambiguities, transitional states
and tipping points that bring about radical transformation within
physical systems.
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Liquid life is a kind of ‘metabolic weather’. It is a dynamic
substrate - or hyperbody - that permeates the atmosphere, liquid
environments, soils and Earth’s crust. ‘Metabolic weather’ refers to
complex physical, chemical and even biological outcomes that are
provoked when fields of matter at the edge of chaos collide. It is a
vector of infection, an expression of recalcitrant materiality and
a principle of ecopoiesis, which underpins the process of living,
lifelike events – and even life itself. These life forms arise from
energy gradients, density currents, katabatic flows, whirlwinds,
dust clouds, pollution and the myriad expressions of matter that
detail our (earthy, liquid, gaseous) terrains.
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Liquid life is immortal. Arising from our unique planetary
conditions, its ingredients are continually re-incorporated into
active metabolic webs through cycles of life and death. Most
deceased liquid matter lies quiescent, patiently waiting for its
reanimation through the persistent metabolisms within our soils.
Liquid life exceeds rhetoric. Its concepts can be embodied and
experimentally tested using a trans-disciplinary approach, which
draws upon a range of conceptual lenses and techniques to involve
the liquid realm with its own ‘voice’. From these perspectives
liquid technologies emerge that are capable of generating
new kinds of artefacts, like Bütschli droplets, which are liquid
chemical assemblages capable of surprisingly lifelike behaviours.
These agents exceed rhetoric, as they possess their own agency,
semiotics, and choreographic impulses, which allow us to value
and engage in discourse with them on their terms. The difficulty
and slippages in meaning and volition between participating
bodies creates the possibility of en evolving poly-vocal dialectics.
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Liquid life provokes an expanded notion of consciousness.
Its ‘thinking’ is a molecular sea of possibilities that resist the
rapid decay towards thermodynamic equilibrium. In these vital
moments it indulges every possible tactic to persist, acquiring a
rich palette of natural resources, food sources, waste materials,
and energy fields. These material alliances necessitate decisions
that do not require a coordinating centre, like the brain.
Liquid are non-bodies. They are without formal boundaries
and are constantly changing.
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Liquid bodies are paradoxical structures that possess
their own logic. Although classical laws may approximate
their behaviour, they cannot predict them. They are tangible
expressions of nonlinear material systems, which exist outside
of the current frames of reference that our global industrial
culture is steeped in. Aspects of their existence stray into the unconventional and liminal realms of auras, quantum physics,
and ectoplasms. In these realms they cannot be appreciated by
objective measurement and invite subjective engagement, like
poetic trysts. Their diversionary tactics give rise to the very acts of
life, such as the capacity to heal, adapt, self-repair, and empathize.
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Liquid bodies are pluri-pontent. They are capable of many
acts of transformation. They de-simplify the matter of being
a body through their visceral entanglements. While the Bête
Machine depends on an abstracted understanding of anatomy
founded upon generalizations and ideals, liquid bodies resist
these tropes. Liquid bodies discuss a mode of existence that
is constantly changing – not as the cumulative outcomes of
‘error’ – but as a highly choreographed and continuous spectrum
stream of events that arise from the physical interactions of
matter. They internalize other bodies as manifolds within their
substance and assert their identity through their environmental
contexts. Such entanglements invoke marginal relations between
multiple agencies and exceed the classical logic of objects. They
are inseparable from their context and offer ways of thinking
and experimenting with the conventions of making and being
embodied.
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Liquid bodies invite us to articulate the fuzziness, paradoxes
and uncertainties of the living realm. They are still instantly
recognizable and can be named as tornado, cirrus, soil, embryo,
or biofilm. These contradictions – of form and constancy –
encourage alternative readings of how we order and sort the
world, whose main methodology is through relating one body to
another. Indeed, protean liquid bodies help us understand that
while universalisms, averages and generalizations are useful in
producing maps of our being in the world, they neglect specific
details, which ‘bring forth’ the materiality of the environment.
Liquid bodies are political agents. They re-define the
boundaries and conditions for existence in the context of
dynamic, unruly environments. They propose alternative modes
of living that are radically transformed, monstrous, coherent, raw
– and selectively permeated by their nurturing media.
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Liquid bodies invite us to understand our being beyond
relational thinking and invent monsters that defy all
existing forms of categorization to make possible a new kind
of corporeality. They are what remain when mechanical
explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we
recognise as ‘being alive.’
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