Performers
Location
About
Conducting Life — Jeni Wightman
March 20, 2026 | 10AM–2PM
EMPAC Studio 1 — Goodman
If all life is conducted from within the same finite mass of resources, then everything we know is from a recycled lineage of the same matter in different forms expressing different things at different times. In this way it is all the same and also different. Our temporary variance in the play of matter is part of a long history of making and unmaking, seeing and not seeing, being and being-with.
Set within a soil landscape, Conducting Life explores the plural existences of gorgeous microbes as they live through the process of metabolizing their own homescape. Apprehend the flux of all the same matter in EMPAC’s Studio 1 celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Gertrude Stein’s Composition as Explanation (1926).
Multi-generational microscopic communities documented with novel high-resolution photography are combined with ambisonics and Wave Field spatialization of Stein’s essay to produce an ever-evolving state and psychedelic status of all the same matter, differently. Become consciously aware of microbial contemporaries who are conducting life just as we are conducting our own lives on this singular planet.
Details:
- Installation
- FREE
- Program repeating every 30 minutes from 10:00am–12:30pm
- Formal seating at 1:00pm
- Talk back at 1:30pm