1. 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.
2. 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 can not 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Liquid are non-bodies. They are without formal boundaries and are constantly changing.
8. Liquid bodies are paradoxical structures that possess their own logic. Although classical laws may approximate their behaviour, they can not 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 can not 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.
9.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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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'.