Pei-Ying Lin is a designer and artist working with a range of nonhuman and human collaborators and companions. Born in Taiwan, she is currently based in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Her artistic mediums range from installation, fiber arts, and dance and performance, often working with both artists and scientists. Her work asks complex questions about what it means to be human when we have so many nonhuman organisms in and around our body. Within these collaborations, she engages with nonhuman beings who precariously teeter on the invisible or the seemingly "inanimate," such as viruses, microbes, plants, and, most recently, data sets and artificial intelligence. As our conversation reveals, her detailed attention to the varying ways microscopic nonhumans perform is a central focus of her work.
Pei-Ying Lin spoke with me from Eindhoven, Netherlands via Zoom on October 3rd, 2022. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ELIZABETH SCHIFFLER (ES):
Much of your work explores human and nonhuman relationships, such as viruses and microbes. Have you always engaged with microscopic partners? And how did you find yourself in these assemblages?
PEI-YING LIN (PYL):
Well, it's not just the microbes. One of the earliest was the Plant Sex Consultancy, which I did with Špela Petrič and two others, which asked if we could think on the plants' behalf using sex and pleasure, something we have in common.1 So that might be a nice entry point because we are all biological. So I think that was the first attempt, and then later I was engaged with microbes. But then I think there's a difference between bacteria and viruses, because bacteria are much easier to have hands-on experiences with.
ES:
Why is that?
PYL:
Well, because you can just grow the bacteria with a petri dish, so you don't really need to inoculate it on another living thing. It's close to kitchen DIY. It has that aspect that is very close to daily life. I'm not looking to do high tech things in the lab, but I'm more interested in this embodiment experience that we share with the others. And that's why viruses become interesting, because viruses have their own philosophical specialty, somewhere between living and nonliving. It performs as a living thing when they are in their host. So I quite like that notion when it gets activated within a body. I also like the debatable question of whether they are living or nonliving. Because they are invisible, it's really impossible to see them [gestures in front of her body]. Unlike bacteria, where there are ways to see them visually.2 So I think it also adds on an abstract layer of imagination or the ability to bring our thoughts into another space, because you are then imagining and trying to trace out the traces and routes of the viruses.3
ES:
In a previous interview, you've talked about the importance of distinguishing viruses and microbes. The "nonhuman" has become its own kind of celebrity in academia, but when thinking about nonhuman/human relationships, why do you think it's important to distinguish nonhuman actors?
PYL:
Actually, I first discovered that [distinction] when I was collaborating with Špela on the Plant Sex Consultancy because we were trying to interview the plants. And by giving us this task, we started to wonder, how can you interview the plants? Like, how do you actually have that mentality? It was funny, it was comparatively easy for me, but comparatively hard for her, for she felt a resistance, as if she's conducting a kind of romanticism. While for me, I'm from Taiwan and the background of Taiwanese is very close to the mix between Chinese and Japanese, where the religion or the general belief is closer to animism. There is a belief that everything is living to some extent, you get used to referring to things as they have spirit. I think it is a comparatively Western concept that separates human and nature, placing nature as the resource. That conversation helped me realize this perspective difference on the nonhuman. I live in Europe and work mainly in English. So while discussions of bio-art Asia are still emerging, most of the references I work with are Western European ones that do not come from Eastern philosophy. I find that phrase interesting because it makes me aware of this difference and it makes me able to see myself better. So then it becomes a series of experimenting my ways of seeing things from the nonhuman perspective, but also the challenge of how do I communicate the nonhuman perspective to my audience.
ES:
So you like the word nonhuman?
PYL:
Yes, I quite like it. I mean, because nonhuman in a way, it's quite precise [PYL gestures inches away from her body], nonhuman, you know, the division is just right next to the human instead of other places. It feels more detached from me if I'm discussing divisions between humans and nature. The nonhuman division, I quite like the position of it, it fits with my own culture. But at the same time, it has the ability to open discussions from other cultures as well. It's fascinating because although we have the tools to see them, we anticipate that the divisions are clear, but as we develop more tools, then you find that, no, the division is not that clear. And there is a very, very vague boundary, especially when it comes to viruses.
ES:
In many ways, all theatrical or performance art–based work is assemblage work, right?4 Collaborations, relations between spectator and audience, there's already an assemblage. I am really drawn to how your work has a doubling of these assemblages. It's hard to write or narrate because the performance [consists of] assemblages on assemblages. For example, in Virophilia, the assemblage of a virus inoculated into an egg that spectators are invited to eat [is folded into] an assemblage of human bodies in relation to the performance itself. How do you interpret that kind of assemblage work?
PYL:
But I think the best part is because it's so hard to write about it, you really have to experience it. I have to be honest, my background is not in performance, but somehow because of this, it just kept pushing me into learning from the performance field to find tools or elements or routes that will be able to communicate and transmit the thing that I want to explore into something that others can understand without words or beyond words.
ES:
In your work Virophilia (2018–20), you propose the question, "Can we start to see the connotation of viruses differently, especially those that cause infectious diseases?"5 This multimedia art piece, ranging from printed cookbook to film to performance dinners, shifts from even seeing the viruses differently to tasting them differently or experiencing them differently6 (fig. 1). In the case of the performance dinners that are a part of Virophilia, why work with food as a medium to respond to this question?
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Figure 1.
The Virophilia performance dinner at the Asian Film Festival, Eindhoven. (Photo: Pei-Ying Lin.)
PYL:
So the virus project before that one was Tame Is to Tame (2016), which was trying to tame the virus.7 Which, funnily, COVID felt that way to some extent. It explores how intimate we can be with viruses. So I was looking for a way that you can be even closer to the viruses and eating became the way, because you cannot have any closer relationship with others than eating them and then having a part of them become a part of ourselves.8 That was the starting point.
ES:
While there are other ways to kind of get that embodied intimacy, food kind of necessitates it as soon as you have something in your mouth.9
PYL:
Yeah. And it's so natural because everybody does it. I also played a little bit with the placebo effect. People were imagining—I find that even more interesting than just making the food—that our bodies were asked to transform our experiences of sickness, and then apply that in our mind onto the food. It was really fun to see when people were trying to do that.
ES:
At the dinner, spectators were feeling sick?
PYL:
Yes, there were a few participants who started to be afraid. They would stop eating halfway. They were thinking, maybe it is dangerous? Because I really felt something! Even though I was using other spices to mimic viruses, it's a trigger, you know, you first trigger with taste and then you start to imagine. And because the virus is something you cannot see, they would think it is worse than how it is.
ES:
In Virophilia, the cookbook is written for the "22nd century human"—a future thinking project. But your performance dinners place these assemblages in the present (fig. 2). I appreciate the tension food brings between text and body, and ultimately a new type of nonhuman liveness. Can you talk about your experience with the performance dinners?
PYL:
Well, I collaborated with chefs in different locations. The first performance I did the cooking myself, but then I realized that it's really fun to collaborate with the chefs. In our conversations, I would first ask them what kind of food they would use. Because different chefs have different specialties or techniques or cultural backgrounds. From there, looking at the ingredients, I'll look at what kind of viruses might affect this ingredient and what kind of viruses might affect the body. And then from there we find the common ground between the chef's food culture and the reasonable spices to use to mimic the sensation of a virus. A lot of this was during the pandemic, so we would try to communicate about what a certain taste tastes like and how that would make the body feel, all through online meetings. Occasionally I would go to a store to buy exactly the same ingredient as the chef. We would taste the same experiment in different locations, then I would write out the story of what it is. It's all just synthesizing, trying to synthesize the body experience through the ingredients, through the conversation, through our shared experience of food.
That's the most interesting part, because you can say that everybody tastes things slightly different[ly], but when we're seeing the human body as a small theatre, we have to see if the taste will play the right way with the right storyline[s] all inside the food. And I really enjoyed that moment, because it has much more physicality than the cookbook itself. And as an artist, I can learn from the conversations. For example, with one collaboration with an Indonesian chef who lives in Berlin, the question we asked was: What is the authentic taste of Indonesian food and to what extent can you manipulate it, but still feels right? Instead of, you know, sometimes you go to a foreign country and you try your home food there and it feels like it's a crime how they made it. We were also trying to avoid that area. It was a balance of the right kind of food that also combines the feeling of sickness or the textural change that might be induced by viruses.
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Figure 2.
Still from Virophilia, "SM Brewery," filmed by Erfan Abdi.
ES:
The food you make, as a performance, brings in viruses and microbes. Do you think that while you complicate what food is, and what the body is, instead of searching for a microscopic "truth" (for example, the virus is really there), you find a new relationship with authenticity?
PYL:
That's like the combination of imagination and embodied experience. In our daily interaction with food, the dominant performances focus so much on what food is supposed to be. Food is at the center of daily performance. Then within the daily performance, the human becomes the main perspective or the main element to pay attention to. In Virophilia, I have the pleasure of bringing the nonhuman, which shifts the human and the food to both become the facilitating element here.
ES:
The nonhuman is the performer?
PYL:
You anchor the performance on the nonhuman and everything else is just there to support it. Which is important because in food performance, I think the food is usually the main focus. You see the performance itself extends along the food. You ask, how do you present the food, how is the food put on the plate, how is it being eaten, how is it being prepared? That's the focus. Then the narrative will be a narrative around the food itself instead of a narrative around the virus. If you emphasize the human, the focus is the human's action of making food. But by incorporating the nonhuman, it becomes appropriate to have both at the same time while both are sort of more balanced.
ES:
You expand the relation from just human food to human/nonhuman food. It changes what the efficacy of food is—is it just for us (humans)? For human pleasure? Viral nutrition? Are viruses, in some way, pleasurable?
PYL:
And it helps us to break apart from our standard or default setting of how you should enjoy a dinner.
ES:
Were all of the dinners plating mimetic viruses?
PYL:
Yes and no. Most of the time it is. Once, I was collaborating with a tea master from Japan [who] used white tea, and the white tea is actually [made of] albino tea leaves that have this whiteness because of a virus. And it has a more mild, tender taste.
ES:
Because of the virus?
PYL:
They haven't really figured out the cause; I think they were one step apart from really identifying if it is always the virus? Sometimes in agriculture we know the role of viruses in plants, but with tea it might be a combination of genetics and viruses.10
ES:
I suppose I'm also feeling a bit afraid, or at least seeking some verification—just by asking if the performances really had viruses. There are always real microbes in all of our food. There are always viruses in all of our food. We always have this. What is your role as the artist narrating that?
PYL:
I really like the moment when people were asking me during the performance. Usually, I only revealed the answer if there was someone really concerned if there are viruses—and [then only] at the end of the performance.
ES:
At the end you always revealed?
PYL:
Not always, not directly. I don't go onto the stage and announce that there's no virus. But I say, well, there's always viruses, and I haven't heard of any food administration approval for using viruses in food yet. So I think they start to wonder, if you really think about it, there are always viruses there. We're just eating it unconsciously, and a deeper discussion shows you don't actually know much about the food that you're eating. The tastes that you're experiencing, did it have any effect because of the viruses? Viruses are living with living things, and they also make changes to the living things to some extent; perhaps even if some of the viruses are removed, another biological thing, such as [a] plant or animal, won't be able to live.
It's a challenge for both artists and scientists to communicate this to the general public. But if the audience literally just ate something and we say there's always bacteria and viruses, they start to … pling! [PYL exclaims and gestures as if an idea came from her head] They understand and acknowledge the connection, maybe even become concerned. Or they realize their level of fear [of viruses] is maybe not always correct. Our love of everything that's antibacterial or antiviral is quite wrong to some extent. And then if you look back at the food itself and [realize] that it always contains bacteria and viruses and we've always been safe to some extent, then it makes you think differently. And then I think that's the moment I find it very fruitful.
Working in this dimension between art and science, you have to convince the scientists that you're an artist. Art doesn't fit with scientific criteria, you're not discovering any new thing scientifically, but it still has its [worth]. It's a question for me to ask myself all the time: What is art? And except for making things fancy, what does it really do? Because using viruses as one of the main topics of performance has a lot of ethical issues. For me, it must be justifiable. Well, I just recently learned this phrase "the social responsibility," like scientists will be asked if your research has a social responsibility. And I think to some extent art also has [a social responsibility]. And by asking all these questions, I come back to the definition for myself that art has the ability to reveal things or make you look at things slightly differently from the default. So you gain the other perspective through art. By having viruses play with our daily lives, it has that ability to bring you into this new perspective, and that's how I find it justifiable for my own practice.
So much is about how do you not increase the general fear? Especially with viruses, it's not as much important when you're doing fermentation, for example, but it really matters when dealing with viruses. Are you actually communicating things in the proper way that doesn't both create unnecessary fear to the general public and at the same time also be responsible for the scientists who are collaborating with you?
ES:
This interview is appearing in the special issue "Pathologies and Performance," which aims to "to contribute to an anticipated wave of interdisciplinary scholarship that rejects the instrumentalization of the arts reflected in the medical humanities and instead delves into the profound social and political imbrications of medicine, disease, and illness in the context of the visual, literary, and performing arts." Some of your recent works, such as Studies of Interbeing: Trance 1:1, include collaborations with not only nonhumans, but scientists (fig. 3). What has your experience been in both responding to and working with multiple methods that do not always collaborate "nicely"?
PYL:
Well, the interesting thing about scientists is that it's also a community, meaning that there are many different kinds of people in the community. Because I'm an artist who doesn't really have money, that filters out a lot of people who would collaborate with me. That's actually a good thing because the only people who are interested and open-minded enough are willing to spend time with me.
ES:
Because you can't pay scientists? Is that what you mean?
PYL:
Yes, and also my project is not going to be a $1 million EU project, so it doesn't really bring fame. I'm not a celebrity, I don't have money. So the scientists who will stay and have a conversation with me are the people who are actually interesting. In order to understand their interests and earn their trust to work on a project, I have to go through a lot of discussions to build a mutual understanding and long-term relationship where these scientists are not just collaborating partners, they are more like friends. The scientists I'm working with often have a very open mind, they trust artists, and they believe that artists can bring very different perspectives into their research or challenge the boundary of certain things. They are not expecting me to do "science communication," to put it simply. They respect my expertise, and they are also scientists who are interesting people who question everything and are willing to find part of their answers in art. We can engage in a deeper discussion around art, embodied experiences, and the nonhuman perspective. And I have to say, some biologists are actually much better at doing that than artists. I think that's when collaboration happens. It is a lot about finding the right person and finding the right way of communicating.
When the project gets bigger, I see myself somehow becoming the character of mediation. I will bring my other collaborating partners who are in other fields, like, for example, a musician or textile designer, and then I will try to be the translator for them with the scientists.11 So I need to also find the relevant information for each party. And then from there, they sort of assist them to get an entry point to the other field. In these art and science projects, there is always one or two people who are doing this mediation, communication, and translation for all other people in the project. You don't always find the right person doing it, and sometimes I just become the person. That's the special thing about these art projects, because they are not super big. I would probably assume that the bigger interdisciplinary projects will involve much, much, much more work and much more difficulties for all the parties, if you want to engage all of them in the same depth of conversation. In those projects there is also another way of collaborating, which is [that] one person knows where the project is going and they just need to convince all the parties to give what is actually necessary, and [then] the group can each have their own understanding of how the project is. I'm not sure if that's the ideal way. But then it is also a way.
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Figure 3.
Studies of Interbeing: Trance 1:1. (Photo: Pei-Ying Lin.)
ES:
It's almost like another question of scale, right? In the way that this call seeks to reject the instrumentalization of the arts, could we invert that to also reject the instrumentalization of the sciences?
PYL:
Completely! I've heard a lot of stories where scientists were just being asked by the artist saying, "Can you just provide me with this technique?" And then you see the results that, in fact, the artist has a completely wrong interpretation of the connotation of the technique itself. It actually is not so good. At least by my own standard, it would be like looking at the artwork and thinking, if you are not engaging with science communication and you are not asking the core question of design scientific practice, what are you doing? Then it becomes sci-fi elements just for entertainment. And instead of having the sci-fi narration that unfolds and you see the quirkiness around this new technology or use fiction to explore new possibilities, then I think it has a very different type of art. Personally, I'm not a fan of those kinds.
ES:
While science isn't always perceived as a practice by the general public, art isn't always perceived as a practice by the general public either. And so maybe our task is kind of often coming back to the fact that both scientists and artists have practices and questions that fuel them. Going back into the practice and less about the scientific product.
PYL:
Yes, especially in performance. Because there lies a certain truth to investigate and you won't know the answer or result before you do the experiment. So I would say that layer is very similar to science, there always lies the truth of the principle of how the world works. It would be sad not to acknowledge those similarities in the process.
ES:
Yeah, yeah. And then when you start adding assemblage thinking it all gets quite complicated—I think in a good way. When you add multiple perspectives, what the performance "does" becomes really compromised. What's true for the virus isn't what's true for the microbe, isn't what's true for this weird human body thing, which isn't true as you move around the globe—all of these things kind of get quite sticky. [End Page E-109]
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today. My final question for you: What assemblages are you thinking about now?
PYL:
Right now it's AI as an assemblage. I'm exploring how AI can become a collaborator with humans. Similarly, much of the conversation around AI is how it can be a tool, how it can process large amounts of data, how you can use it for civilians, and the concern that it might substitute the human. But I think the conversation also needs to be focus on how do we live together, and actually having a way of living together that's beneficial for both instead of only for one?
ES:
Like your questions of social responsibility.
PYL:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. … A lot of people are afraid of being substituted by AI, because we're just looking at the existing possibilities and seeing how AI can solve the problem. But if it can create new possibilities, create new problems, create new perspectives, then you know, to that extent it's also very similar to when we talk about nonhumans. I mean, it is also a kind of nonhuman, just not a biological one. A lot of the discussions around the nonhuman will be beneficial for the study of AI. Also, after the pandemic—I'm a little bit sick of viruses.
Coda
Often working closely and collaboratively with scientists, Pei-Ying Lin's work challenges what collaboration looks like in performance. Her artistic partnerships are as important as the scientific relationships, and her care and relations with viruses and other nonhuman actors seem an equal force in her work. These nonhuman participants work differently within the human body, on plates, and in global flows. While not reducing science to a fixed-knowledge source, Pei-Ying collaborates with scientists on new questions about nonhumans, and incorporates these complex and malleable questions into her artistic practice. She sets out key questions for what performance can offer scientific approaches and what new methods emerge as these seemingly disparate fields become entangled.