Counterpointing Care

An intricate lace-like net of chitin, acids and enzymes dwell in the interstices of life and nonlife, between plants, animals, biomass and the atmosphere, working in and through others; always dismantling, repairing and remaking matter. These are the ecologies of mycelial networks and fungal bodies that have given rise to biospherical life as we know it. Now, on the eve of planetary environmental collapse, calls to care for these vital fungal relationships are growing louder. What does it mean to care for something so obfuscated yet ubiquitous, something often regarded as abject yet gastronomic in some cultures, something that moulds human life but is yet abstract and unsympathetic to it? We argue that care in all its complexity and generality is in crisis because it is based on certain anthropocentric assumptions that do not account for the difference and indifference of fungi. Drawing on three discrete performative acts, we explore the possibilities of an abstract care when fungi is engaged as an ‘actor’ or agent, in which normative performances of ecological care are troubled. Through Wendy Wheeler’s biosemiotics, Jakob von Uexkull’s Umwelt and Merlin Sheldrake’s vital mycology, we ruminate on how these nets, cast wide into human and nonhuman guts, genes, brains and affects, themselves perform abstractions that are not mechanical but rather driven by semaphore and semiosis. We focus on the biosemiotics of eating (with) fungi as a performative act for care for more-than-human and human entanglements. As Jane Bennett suggests, a partial material overlap occurs through eating that is ontologically constitutive, moulding a kind of radical care through the communicative exchange of bodies and matter. Taking seriously these interdependent abstractions by mycelium’s sympoetic and holobiontic entanglements defines intuition as non-cognitive but sympathetic (after Bergson), enacting unequal and perhaps ‘care-less’ collaborations.


Counterpointing Care
Performing with fungi in three (in)different acts Merlin Sheldrake lies face down in the dirt, slowly uncovering the root of a tree.As he carefully excavates the soil as a scientific performance of sorts, unearthing the twisting, multiplying proliferations and following the unique 'resinous' scent, he finally arrives at the roots' apex.Dipping the tip into water, an intricate lace-like net of chitin, acids and enzymes are revealed as a sticky knot. 1 This is mycorrhizal fungal mycelium, dwelling in the interstices of life and non-life, between the biomass and the atmosphere, working in and through others.Mycelia are constantly dismantling, repairing and remaking the very ecologies that give rise to biospherical life as we know it, or think we know it.

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During the performative and participatory work Speculative Care, guests were asked to pick up a glass pickling jar augmented with an 'airport' lid and 'care' for the contents. 2The jar was half-filled with water containing a small amount of honey and cotton textile fragments.Upon looking more closely, one could also see a flossy matrix of lively and expanding Ganoderma steyaertanum (reishi mushroom) mycelium suspended in the liquid.Radical mycologist Peter McCoy advises that as the mycelial network continues to grow in a liquid medium such as this, it will break down the sugars in the honey and consume the dissolved oxygen molecules in the water.If oxygen is not reintroduced to the liquid on a regular basis, the 'mycelium may suffocate and rise to the surface of the liquid in search of air' (McCoy 2016: 244).To ward off suffocation, it was suggested that those attending the show participate in a gesture of care for the mycelial network, by swirling a jar in their hands, thereby reintroducing oxygen into the liquid medium for the mycelium to consume (figs 1 and 2).
1 An opening scene described in Merlin Sheldrake's book Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures where Sheldrake (2020) is carefully revealing and uncovering the vegetative networks of fungi to better understand their lifeworlds.
2 Speculative Care was a live performance work held in the Black Box at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney in 2019 by Alia Parker.The work included fungal biomaterial samples that the audience could touch and smell, medicinal reishi mushroom tea to drink and glass pickling jars to hold and to care for.
An apparently simple gesture of care such as this is in fact a complex event, as there is a multiplicity of human and more-than-human forces actively coming up against one another in non-linear intra-actions that cannot be fully explained by scientific causality.In human contexts, such gestures are received through a dyadic communicative exchange between the cared and cared for, where the complexities of care may be recognized, felt and resolved, or not.But if these gestures are set-up across the lacuna of species subjectivities, then such acts of care take on a definitively speculative character (Parker 2019a: 32).They are speculative because the desires of the organism -mycelium in this case -cannot be known in any direct way by the human being, therefore forcing the practices of care to defer to scientific epistemologies and to a certain extent, intuition, for evidence of 'success'.

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The cheap Chinese takeaway menu described two of the many dishes served (these are ones with a reference to fungus) as: SQUEEKALILY CHOP SUEY Rice cakes stir fry with pig ears and lily flowers YEE CHAI YEE PEW YEE MEE EEW! Little 'black ears' fungus and fish maw 'Yee Mee' In Careful Whispers, six invited guests, performing as the makeshift Autonomous Meridian Sensory Response (ASMR) Orchestra, ate a banquet of multiple onomatopoeic sounding dishes in front of binaural microphones and with bone conductor mics attached to their jaw bones, which recorded the sounds of their mastication and amplified their reactions to them. 3 It did not escape the diners that they had been somewhat betrayed by the artist -an invitation to a performative meal ended up being a meal of a performance in front of a gallery audience.They were obliged to eat dishes with an unholy mix of ingredients.(In Cantonese, Chop means to carelessly pick up; and Suey refers to small detritus, remainders or leftovers.)The wet crunch sounds made by their mouths as they chewed on hak yee chai, literally meaning 'small black ears' (Auricularia auricula-judae, with reference to Judas Iscariot who hung himself after he betrayed Jesus Christ, on an elder tree where the fungi are commonly found), is almost indistinguishable from the sound of cartilaginous pigs' ears served alongside, which, however, released a distinctly meaty flavour to that of the 'vegetarian' fungi.
The 'careful' listening to the ministrations of vibrational sounds from the insides of their own mouths, interlaced with the sound of other diners eating heard in the usual way, that is arriving as airwaves from the outside through the ear canal and hitting the eardrum, and the whispers in their heads of the linguistic alliteration of the menu, differentially triggering a storm, perhaps a calming breeze, of proprioceptive and autonomous sensory reactions.These are acts of listening as 'care' for who and what eats, is eaten, or should be eaten.And after all is heard and eaten, the dining table was left as the exhibition installation, and in six weeks, a host of other unruly fungi took over the food performance, making it very much their own, indifferent to the loud verbal sounds emanating from the gallery director.
In this paper we reflect upon the above performative acts that experiment with the thresholds of human and more-than-human care arising when collaborating with fungal others.The works discussed move between scales and contexts; from speculative biodesign performances with implications for how future fungal materials might be produced, to the microscopic materiality of the body through digestion as a co-performed alimentary process.We argue that through these works, where fungi is engaged as an 'actor' or agent, normative performances of ecological care are troubled.A normative understanding of care is one that is bound by a humanist paradigm where reciprocity, sustainment of life and the reduction of pain are enacted through meanings gleaned from emotional and affective exchanges.Where care for more-than-human others is concerned, such meanings cannot be parsed through a normative communicative exchange and presents a conundrum.We argue that care in all its complexity and generality is in crisis because it is based on certain anthropocentric assumptions that do not account for the difference and indifference of fungi.
Through employing a Uexküllian and biosemiotic lens, we argue that instead an abstract care is required, that is, a care that meets fungi in becoming unknown, in the interstices of possibility through more-thanhuman definitions of creativity and intuition.Performances of care for non-charismatic nonhumans such as fungi creatively come to life, not by causal reciprocity, but through a constantly shifting assemblage of 'counterpointing' gestures.Such gestures attempt to enact contrapunctual relationships where the organism and its environment are shaped by one another (Uexküll 2010: 172;Grosz 2011: 174).Performances such as Speculative Care and Careful Whispers are designed to interrogate the margins of meaning-making and how care might be enacted towards more-than-human others that we humans cannot fully comprehend.We know so little about fungi to date; but given the centrality of fungi to many of life's processes, we argue for the need to care more, and differently for, these mycorrhizal relationships on the eve of our planetary environmental crisis.We argue that caring for fungi re-moulds human performances of care, whether artistic or every day.Care is a ubiquitous and elusive concept, increasingly in demand and yet hard to come by.It can be at once onerous and taxing through the labours of hands-on exertion and equally, a gesture of tenderness (Conley 2016: 342).The purview of care is so vast in application and context that its performative definition remains vague and difficult to articulate.Equally, the moralistic inferences of care and its 'abstract unspecificity' render it cause for vexation (Puig De La Bellacasa 2017: 2).
Pervasive when it is present as much as when it is absent, care is manifestly a human concern.Typically, in artistic contexts, care is performed through human-to-human labours, knowledge exchange and bodily sustenance including the reduction of pain and suffering, demonstrated through anthropocentric emotional responses such as empathy and understanding.However, it is widely accepted that care is not just the remit of human relations alone but is enacted in, between and towards more-than-human others.Joan Tronto's inclusive definition of care as 'a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our "world" ' (2013: 19; 1994: 103) gestures at the performativity of care towards others beyond ourselves, captured in her all-encompassing use of the term 'world'.This expansive notion of care is also reflected in Jane Bennett's reading of all matter, both organic and inorganic as vibrant, agental and non-mechanistic and therefore worthy of the political and ethical dimensions of care (2010: 63).
In this light, the absence of care in our exchange with certain non-charismatic non-human and sometimes non-living others such as fungi requires further scrutiny (Lorimer 2007: 912).Fungi trouble our expectations of care as they are often seen as abject, to be avoided, discarded or not seen at all.Typically, care is directed towards visible non-human others that possess anthropocentric features or produce recognizable emotional registers.Care for certain non-human others comes at the expense of other non-human others who are deemed lower organisms in the great chain of being (van Dooren 2014: 292).By contrast, Tim Ingold suggests the hierarchical tree of life metaphor is better replaced by a mycelial rhizome as a mesh of horizontal and non-linear relations (2011: 86).If so, the comparability of the parameters of care needs to be reconceptualized.Invariably, by arguing for the protection or cultivation of certain organisms we also demonstrate an active forgetting of and a 'carelessness' for others.Equally, caring for life over non-life presents other kinds of forceful gestures that drift care into the domain of biopolitics, where human control and power forces considerations of who is allowed to live and who is made to die (Haraway 2016;Braidotti 2019;Agamben 2004).
The dynamics of human care towards fungal agents may seem an odd genre for live performance to interrogate -a niche, some may say.After all, the forms of fungi with which humans interact, tend to be those considered already 'dead'.And yet, the performativity of fungi -such as yeasts, rusts, smuts, mildews, moulds and mushrooms in our bodies, through the foods we consume such as cheese, beer and bread, and as agents in ecologies both industrial and organic, render them pervasive symbionts, alive and acting in and through us and others in important ways.Specifically, we turn our attention to filamentous fungi, the kind that Sheldrake describes as developing fine mycelial networks that run through tree roots or take up residence in dead logs, and when the conditions are favourable produce edible fruit in the form of mushrooms.These Basidiomycota fungi are typically found in the forest, acting as a kind of expanded communicative and metabolic network.
How might the labours of care, as a practical, hands-on and material act be performed for or with mycelial lifeworlds when the interstices of human care for non-human others is necessarily abstract?Eating, digesting and metabolizing are shared sensory practices and physiological processes that occur across species and offer a medium to explore how gestures of care may be enacted in the context of live performance.Transformation and decomposition are processes we humans do and experience.In human bodies these processes are aided by fungal and bacterial residents in our gut.However, in mycelial networks, digestion occurs outside of the fungal body as enzymes and acids are ejected into the environment as a kind of external stomach before being reabsorbed to build cell walls (Money 2016: 2; McCoy 2016: 4).Performance that brings food and eating as an embodied, sensory, participatory and multispecies experience (where digestion is occurring for both humans and morethan-humans) may produce a kind of partial overlap, what Jane Bennett via Annemarie Mol terms 'a partial coincidence, not full identity ' (2017: 90) between human and nonhuman materialities.When we eat fungi, we are in communication with them and they us.To capture this way of thinking, Bennett considers the term 'sympathy' to connote 'an impersonal mesh of affiliations between natural bodies' (91).That is, a kind of exchange or communication that is not fully known by the participating entities, a sympathy that is ontologically constitutive, as captured in her use of the term onto-sympathy.This conceptual framing of performing digestion may be thought of as a kind of affective exchange where bodies of different kinds encounter one another and are transformed via a porous sympoietic entanglement.Such an ethics is compelling as it gestures at material exchanges between humans and non-human others that possess immanent transformative possibilities.
Material and speculative 'eating' acts such as those performed in Speculative Care and Careful Whispers tell a story that is not fungi's alone, but rather are staged by anthropocentric agendas of care that bring together human and non-human lifeworlds, or what the 'father' of comparative biology Jakob von Uexküll (2010) famously calls umwelts -both contrived and real -into a relation.It is performance and its gestures qualified by human notions of care that scaffold these relations.How can we then conceive of performances of non-human care?What are its limits if it is not the reduction of suffering or the mitigation of death or destruction through a mutual companionship as humanly defined?
In Speculative Care, swirl the jar too vigorously, and the ad-hoc filter attached to the lid that allows for the exchange of air becomes wet and opens up the possibility for a more heterogeneous multispecies participation (what we humans call contamination).The sealed, simplified and homogenous ecology within the glass jar allows only for a bilateral exchange, between a singular organism Ganoderma steyaertanum and the human actor doing the agitating/caring (Lien 2015: 9).This exchange is far from the messy entangled associations mycelial networks have evolved to 'know' through their symbiotic and holobiontic relations with trees and multiple other species simultaneously, where life, death, variation or dormancy are highly contingent on the constantly changing processes of those encountered.Whereas in Careful Whispers, the fungi eaten is made 'alive' through its associations with other foodstuff of similar 'sounds' when chewed, the minute proprioceptions through mouthfeel, textures and the discharge of digestive fluids that provide contradictory, perhaps non-habituated ways of knowing; which are then messed up by the language used in speech and writing that occurs as part of the performance work -all of which speculate on the performativity of 'being careful' in abstract ways.
Referring to the work of Uexküll, a precursor to biosemiotics, the umwelt of mycelial networks and humans cannot overlap and are not integrative, and yet this chasm presents ethical implications in human encounters with fungi (Sagan 2010: 4).These implications manifest in a lack of connection in the care for fungi, often precisely because human and fungal lifeworlds, from a sensorial and affective point of view, are alienated and not interchangeably accessible across the species divide.Uexküll asserts that every organism has biologically relevant components that he calls 'perception marks' that are honed through a sensory apparatus.In the work Speculative Care, the jars contain honey and water and allow for fresh air, light and appropriate temperature parameters.These 'ingredients' are biologically significant to the mycelium.Biological science tells us these elements are registered by the sensory apparatus of fungi to the exclusion of other elements that may be present, such as odours or other objects that do not form part of the organism's umwelt (Uexküll 2010: 48).However, fungal networks can detect a wide range of environmental variations through their sensoria.Although humans and fungal networks may both be able to detect light, gravity, chemicals, gases, electric fields, surfaces and so forth there is an incongruity in how these registers are perceived or felt by different organisms (Heitman et al. 2007: 57).There can be no certainty that sense, and what is sensed, even mean the same thing between fungi and humans.
Despite the complex sensory abilities of an organism, human, fungal or otherwise, Uexküll goes on to interestingly assert that the organism's surroundings are 'transformed into an impoverished structure … the poverty of this environment is needful for the certainty of action ' (2010: 51).That is, by only registering certain signs and ignoring others, the organisms' affectual capacities are increased.On the one hand, Uexküll's impoverished view of an organism's umwelten suggests that its perception marks are narrow and fixed.On the other, the reductive human scientific epistemology interprets this to causally link the identifiable perceptual enterprises of the organism to their specific ethologies, overlooking the fact that 'ignoring' stimuli is nonetheless an active performative act.
All organisms constantly encounter new stimulus, requiring adaptation that by extension, can also lead to evolutionary processes of speciation.The sensorial apparatus of a fungus is particularly flexible, shaped by interactions with its environment as well as other organisms and this provokes a continuous process of variation and world-making (Hathaway 2018: 41;Ingold 2000).The genus Ganoderma has been described as 'taxonomically chaotic', due to the plasticity of the expressions it performs in the environments it is found.Ganoderma steyaertanum is just one of between 250 and 400 species that has been described.In human terms, Ganoderma is an unruly genus, consistently ambiguous and in flux, both in terms of appearance and in terms of its deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), with many species evading identification (Jargalmaa et al. 2017: 3;Money 2013: 464).When presented with novel environmental conditions, filamentous fungi scan their DNA to develop a suite of enzymes required to digest a particular material or chemical (McCoy 2016: 205;Parker 2019a: 102).As a corollary, Ganoderma likely adapts its perception marks to comprehend the multitude of variations occurring in the environments in which it is thrown or finds itself.We can say that for fungi, Uexküll's 'impoverished' environment enables fungi to both 'ignore' certain environmental elements while others enable the performativity of ontogenetic variation.
Bilateral or dyadic exchanges between a singular species or organism and a human agent is common in many scientific and pseudoscientific contexts where the 'object' of study is isolated from its environment.So often bilateral relationships such as these are driven by a human agenda that is pragmatic or constructive that may force a functualist ontology in the understanding of care We propose here an alternative ontology of care.Using another concept from Uexküll, we can describe care as a 'contrapunctal' relation between the organism and its environment: not only does the organism complementarily react to its counterpoints in its environment, but the environment causes the organism, or parts thereof, to change its biological status as a counterpoint to specific stimuli.In the context of creative performativity, the symphonic 'composition' of this kind of care is not merely about acknowledging reciprocal affordances, but about being sympa-onto-poetic, that is, open intuitive processes that arrive in the act of situated togetherness, made more possible by unpredictable and perhaps more 'playful' performance acts.In Uexküll's terms this relation is more like a duet, where two voices may melt into a harmony (2010: 172).
Interestingly Careful Whispers is more akin to a discordant symphony, designed to allow unpredictable counterpunctal gestures to emerge at different registers, between human and non-human animals and plants (in the form of food, including fungi, and others that sound like fungi, when eaten, in its name or behaviour, etc).Neither human nor fungi (nor pigs' ears for that matter) attend to each other intentionally, but rather form counterpoints at particular acoustic moments of eating and being eaten, producing sensations that cannot be qualified by causality (intention or ignorance), value (good or bad) or metaphysics (dead or alive), but that nevertheless increases the possibilities of the next intuitive action.Akin to an instrumentalist combining skill and improvisation in an orchestra, such counterpointing gestures register as communicative meaning-making at the point of an event, a condition we see as a sort of 'abstract care' that always involves a care for emergent abstractions in life (Loo 2013).
While mainstream biology describes the natural world and its origins through a material and substance-based lens, biosemiotics attempts to understand the process-based, organizational and communicative foundations that drive such relations occurring within organisms, and between organisms and their environment.Thinking about these relations as 'stories', not as isolated chains of events, but where 'a story is a little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance' (Bateson 1979: 14), provides avenues for thinking about the interwoven connections between situated multiplicities that engage in meaningful exchanges.Equally Bateson's frame of interactions as 'stories' present a structure for meaning-making drawn out in performative contexts.From a biosemiotic point of view, the ability to perceive both that which is biologically relevant, as well as intensities that deviate from this frame, is what Bateson claims as 'a difference which makes a difference ' (1972: 318).New sign processes are generated that in turn produce new meanings to be decoded by the organism.Wendy Wheeler suggests that the foundations of life are built upon this balance of 'expectations' that form habits, but also the ability to adapt to encountering the unexpected (2016: 11).In the context of a performance, to deliver that which is expected may be considered a form of what we have called above as abstract care, at least in keeping an organism 'alive'.
In Speculative Care, the performative gestures of speculative and anthropocentric care involve the production of a contained ecology that provides a balance of habitual intensities and unexpected encounters in the form of cotton textile waste.Ganoderma steyaertanum expects to encounter that which is biologically relevant such as sugars, water, light and oxygen as these intensive conditions have been 'semiotically scaffolded' into the organisms' ongoingness (Hoffmeyer 2008: 138).The inclusion of textile fragments in the glass jar presents an unexpected materiality, that may be 'a difference that makes a difference' and requires adaptive capacities to navigate this surprising encounter.The introduction of the textile fragments and textile tea into the sterile glass jar liquid medium may then be considered a counterpointing gesture of abstract care that looks to introduce a new material challenge.So too in Careful Whispers where fungi as an 'inert' food ingredient is made 'performatively living' by the introduction of the counterpointing gestures of abstractions from human language, culture and gustatory and alimentary proprioceptions that are those often forgotten by, or redacted from, artistic expression or experience.Care in this form balances expectation with difference -what Charles Sanders Peirce called the 'Universe of Secondness' in his evolutionary philosophy -based on notions of resistance and difficulty (Wheeler 2016: 124).The counterpoint to white rot mycelial networks may be a recently fallen tree, where networks of microscopically fine one-cell thick hyphae expand and colonize the fleshy cellulosic cambium.By contrast, introducing mycelium to processed cellulosic fibres that are mixed with different dyestuffs and chemical compounds, in the form of post-consumer waste, present not insignificant gustatory challenges for the organism.Although mycelium is particularly good at negotiating new challenges, there needs to be a careful balance between familiar nutrient sources and those that present difficulties.Without such challenges, mycelial networks as potentially immortal organisms, may essentially lose their will to live and can die of boredom (Pringle 2017: G161;McCoy 2016: 205;Griffiths 1992: 352).However, Speculative Care was not an attempt to drive evolutionary processes necessarily, but rather to care for the possibility of changes to come.
Creativity is central to thinking through what might occur at the interstices of the familiar and unfamiliar -where repetition is interrupted by difference and, with it, new meanings are formed.In his work on the logic of science, Peirce argued that explanatory influences, what he termed 'abductions', are akin to creative guesses informed by how an embodied and lived experience in the world shapes how signs are interpreted through the senses.Abductive processes of discovery and invention are ubiquitous, transcending human and non-human divisions as an often 'nonconscious and highly poetic form of knowing' across both biological and cultural forms (Wheeler 2016: 41).
Building on Peirce's logic of abduction, Wheeler suggests that the concept of 'metaphor' provides a useful frame to capture the wedge of intangible abstraction, that forms between two ideas.A metaphor, of course, is a figure of speech where one object or idea is equated with another in the form of an analogy.In Wheeler's terms, it names the imperfect and creative speculation that cannot be explained directly but rather carries someone or something from one place to another (125).Metaphorical abstraction, that is, the meaningmaking, story-telling and creative intuition that comes with cultural modes of performance, are not performed by humans alone; rather they are enacted by all living things performing in the ecologies in which they are found.In a similar vein, Rosi Braidotti calls upon both genetics and music through her use of 'transposition' to suggest: An intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in the sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another … accountable and committed; creative but also cognitively valid; discursive and also materially embedded -it is coherent without falling into instrumental rationality.(Braidotti 2006: 5) Wheeler's 'metaphor' and Braidotti's 'transposition' edge at the ambiguities that emerge in the thresholds of in-betweenness that necessarily occur when working across human and more-than-human subjectivities.
It can be argued that our performance-based art practises are not driven by deductive and inductive logical processes, but rather bring improvisation and intuition into conversation with constraints -that is -the habitual expectations of what a body can do.Brian Massumi calls this 'lived-intuition' (after Bergson) a 'thinking-feeling' that transports us to the heart of the object or event, arriving at a place that is yet inexpressible by science or even consciousness in psychology or philosophy (2014: 32).Our performances with fungi aim to understand how instinct connected to eating and digestion has the power of transporting one into, and enabling one to have an experience of, the very processes of becoming-alive with fungi, but only if the desire here is not for knowing, but an 'unknowing', of fungi.
To conclude, what we are arguing for is the need to find other ways of investigating care in this ambiguous space between organisms, that is correlational to neither point A nor point B, but as something continually in-process.Performances of care are abstractly liminal and eludes representation especially those in, for and with non-charismatic more-than-human others.Performative acts that move beyond verbal language into gesture, sensoria and the materiality of digestion as a shared process may have more power in bridging human and non-human relations of care than approaches that rely solely on normative human-centred frameworks of care.We circle back to where we started with Sheldrake's performance of intuitive curiosity, as the pretence of formal scientific enquiry gave way to the materially engaged act of 'following one's nose'.The intuitive, creative and careful gestures of unearthing mycelial networks to reveal their complex lifeworld enact a contrapuntal relation between Sheldrake and fungi, as sensory and metaphoric entanglements form the basis of this exchange.As demonstrated in Speculative Care and Careful Whispers, these gestures of care are necessarily moulded by an anthropocentric frame, but they experiment with care for others as a balance between the expected and unexpected; between intuition and creativity, between what is alive and what is dead.We suggest this care is abstract in nature because it cannot be fully elucidated by normal science nor humanities and yet is a vital comportment in contemporary performances of care for non-human others, now more than ever in this time of ecological catastrophe.

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E C T I O N 4 : M E T A P H O R I C A B S T R A C T I O N S , B I O S E M I O T I C P E R F O R M A N C E S A L I A A N D LO O : C O U N T E R P O I N T I N G C A R E Figure 2. Speculative Care, 2019, Alia Parker, Black Box, UNSW Art & Design, Sydney. q and 4.