JENNA SUTELA
Excerpts from nimiia cétiï
In this EXTRA content you can find some excerpts from nimiia cétiï (2018), an audiovisual work by Jenna Sutela, artist present in Il Pianeta come Festival XL, the event presented by MACRO in collaboration with Terraforma (23 and 24 October 2021).
Inspired by experiments in interspecies communication and aspiring to connect with a world beyond our consciousness, nimiia cétiï documents the interactions between a neural network, audio recordings of early Martian language, and footage of the movements of extremophilic bacteria. Here, the computer is a medium, channeling messages from entities that usually cannot speak. However, it is also an alien of our creation.
nimiia cétiï was created in collaboration with Memo Akten and Damien Henry as part of n-Dimensions, Google Arts & Culture’s artist-in-residence program at Somerset House Studios.
JENNA SUTELA works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela’s work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, Serpentine Galleries, and, most recently, Shanghai Biennale and Liverpool Biennial. She was a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.