About half a year ago, one of my professors at the Department of Microbiology in Slovenia published an article in the journal Fungal Biology titled “Dishwashers - A man-made ecological niche accommodating human opportunistic fungal pathogens”. The paper showed the presence of two opportunistic fungal pathogens from the genus Exophiala in over half of the dishwashers they took a swab sample from. Of course, the black yeast species can cause systemic disease in humans, but needless to say, even though most of us have come across the much-appreciated dishwasher at one point or another, rarely (actually never) did we meet people cultivating this black fungus in their lungs. It is in fact a disease, which affects immuno-compromised patients with a preexisting condition such as AIDS or cystic fibrosis. However, as is customary in the world of science, the article ended with a statement intended to emphasize the importance of the work:
“Knowing that these fungi coinhabit our homes, further research is imperative as only this could reveal, whether the presence of E. dermatitidis inside our households poses any threat to human health.”
Conveniently picked up by journalists and disseminated to the sensation-thirsty public with entertaining titles such as: “Could a Dangerous Fungus Lurk in Your Dishwasher?” (US News), “Dishwashers harbor ‘killer bugs’ (The Daily Telegraph), and my personal favorite “My dishwasher is trying to kill me” (Physorg). Besides granting the Slovene researcher fame and fortune (though I suppose grants are no easier to come by after being interviewed by a non-peer reviewed, albeit highly influential international journal The Daily Telegraph…) it sparked a bit of envious ridicule amongst the scientific community.
It also sparked a mischievous idea to make an art exhibition falling into the for this purpose newly concocted category “Hausfrau Art”; the gallery would be filled with household appliances designed in a way to emphasize the presence of the extreme microbes, which dwell incognito in our most treasured devices – the fridge, the dishwasher, the vacuum cleaner, even the ever scrubbed shower isn’t immune. Well, to choose a research topic as popular as extremophiles in this day and age may seem opportunistic – and, as the black fungus, perhaps I am. So Zietgeist.
Extremophiles, organisms adapted to life in extreme environments, are most often associated with conditions that mimic those on Earth when life began. Many of these conditions, coincidentally, also occur in microenvironments engineered by humans amidst our colonization of natural territories. It is generally perceived that, as we acquire wealth, energy and raw materials to satisfy our needs, we bring systematic ruin to the natural, patrimonial environment through collateral damage. However, a less teleological and anthropocentric look at the environment we create reveals our symbiosis/commensalism with a plethora of extremely “well adapted” and “socially acceptable” (=unseen) microorganisms.
I have developed an almost obsessive thought process where, whenever considering new information, be it a concept, a strategy or mere sensorial input, I try to de-humanize it. That is, consider it without an anthropocentric bias, which has been evolutionarily implemented in the human psyche to ensure the propagation of our species. In fact, this post-anthropocentrism seems to be spreading both in the scientific and art community, but is generally perceived as offensive by the rest of the population, as it strikes upon the taboo of indifference towards the survival of humanity. Similar to the astrophysicists’ conundrum of the anthropic principle, where observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it, there is an obvious paradox and thus futility in the attempt to be objective when it comes to observing our surroundings (Fig. 1). However, it does offer an alternative vantage point; one which I wish to explore.
Fig. 1 Rhinocentrism.
Besides questioning the concept of objective reality, post-anthropocentrism greatly reduces the role of humans in the development of the ecosystems on our planet. We are neither the most numerous nor the most influential of species, though we are often accredited with having the most detrimental effect (a widely accepted truth towards which I also have some reservations, since pollution, deforestation, intensive agriculture, cityscapes etc. are also processes that provide novel niches for organisms). Our environmental concerns stem mainly from the sentimental attachment we have to our initial surroundings; a type of juvenile imprinting, fighting change and ensuring our acquired comforts and luxuries are here to stay.
In fact, if we were to (objectively) examine our relationship to other organisms, we would most likely end up frustratingly ambivalent. This is particularly obvious in the case of microorganisms. We tend to ignore their omnipresence due to their scale and the limitations of our sensorial apparatus – only when we see food rotting or we develop an angina is their existence acknowledged. We are oblivious to the fact there are 10 times as many bacteria living on our body as there are human cells consisting it. Their biology, adaptability and mutability dictate they are unstable as a species, making it a challenge to classify them. At the same time this increases the survivability of their lineage (transgressing the species). If we were to compare their vitality across millennia, it would be as if humans identified themselves with mammals in general and were indifferent to whether it was rats, bears or transhumans that survived to see the year 5000. This proposition is outrageous enough to not even be considered by us as a valid strategy to sustain life on Earth. It once again draws the attention to Aristotle’s distinction between Zoë and Bios, the former term referring to the primal essence of life and the latter to it’s intricate realization (complex beings, i.e. humans). Are we not in some way also emotionally tied to “life”? Could this connection ever feel strong enough that we would consider it irrelevant as to which life form survived the imminent environmental changes?
On the other hand, the human tendency to test the limits of our living conditions is an ever present cultural process, be it physical, social, intellectual or within the construction of our own cognition and consciousness. We feel that by examining these extreme creatures we will somehow unlock their secret and expand the extremely narrow ecological niche, which supports our survival. It falls nicely within the current reductionist scientific paradigm. Having knowledge of the human blueprint, we will be able to improve our bodies at will. Actually, this thesis lost a bit of its followers as, a decade after deciphering the human genome, we still haven’t conquered obvious (potentially genetically linked) diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes. In the mean time the extremophiles are exploited in biotechnological processes - they (metaphorically speaking, of course) do our laundry, perform much of molecular biology and produce drugs.
My thesis, this thought experiment, involves re-inscribing “ecology” as a complex interworking of social, natural, and technological worlds. It is about acknowledging extremophiles, which are present in our environments; natural, urban, artificial, and degraded. It wishes to transfer concepts and attitudes from the laboratory into real world, tangible situations. Within the work I hope to address larger questions and challenges which emerge – how to accept climate change, how traditional notions of research and knowledge can interplay with socio-developmental processes and how the edges and boundaries of extreme spaces are managed, maintained, or created in order to create novel living spaces for the extremophiles we are increasingly becoming.
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