The Sentinel Self

 

Sentinels is the collective name given by environmental scientists to organisms whose sensitivity to environmental change helps to understand the health and vulnerability of an ecosystem. These creatures can range from tiny water fleas to giant whales. The study of sentinel organisms in the oceans sheds light on the effects of microplastic pollution, where oceanic creatures become a kind of "canary in the coalmine". Recent research, however, has shown that microplastic pollution is also found within human bodies, suggesting that humans have joined the ranks of the sentinel species. It is time for human sentinels to realize that our bodies are intimately intertwined with the health of other organisms and environments.

The Sentinel Self is a real-time simulation artwork that imagines an "immune ecosystem" within a body, that floats around in a watery environment (We are all in relation to water, all the time). Inside this Immune Ecosystem you will encounter various populations of creatures, whose behavior is inspired by processes in the human immune system, as well as keystone species in watery ecologies. By connecting your own body through a heart rate sensor you will be able to travel inside, having your own internal rhythms animate the world, and become part of the work.

Background of the work:

The Sentinel Self was born out of collaborations and conversations with immunologist Juan Garcia Vallejo and ecotoxicologist Heather Leslie. They have collaborated on exploring the possible immunological effect of microplastics. Through their work, I became intrigued by how our common perceptions of immunology are tied up with our notion of selfhood. The immune system is often explained through the use of war metaphors, where immune cells are called the "inner army" protecting 'self' (the body) from intruding 'nonself' (pathogens and other 'others').

I became increasingly interested in how these war metaphors were challenged within the field of immunology itself. Immunologists and other scientists describe immune cells more in terms of being internal 'sensers' aiming to maintain equilibrium within the 'ecology' of the body. That microbes navigate between 'shades of good and evil, a position determined during interaction with the host, and which can change with the host, tissue, and time. That immunity is 'controlled by an internal conversation between tissues and cells, and that the most important conversations aren't with our own cells at all, but with bacterial cells that live on and in us.

I became fascinated with this idea of the immune system being a creator of equilibrium within the body, rather than a police force or army. In this view, we have to give up on dualistic thinking of our bodies being separated from the world and start thinking of our bodies as a semi-contained ecosystem existing within a larger, interconnected ecosystem. In fact, the collaboration between an ecotoxicologist and an immunologist becomes the norm - as our immune systems and ecosystems are inter-dependent, our 'immune self' reaches beyond the body, into the world, which the migration of microplastics between bodies of Sentinels can attest to.

Credits:

Web design: Rifke Sadleir

Full installation credits here.