In September 2021, we welcomed Joe Dumit and Miriam Simun to the studio to lead an exploratory embodiment workshop, which they called ‘more-than-human encountering’. Joe Dumit is an anthropologist of science and technology and a specialist in contact improvisation, and Miriam Simun is a multimedia artist working with a focus on the sensorial, particularly taste, smell, and most recently touch. They guided studio members in a quiet exercise of encountering the more-than-human within our own bodies. Through observation of our breaths and subtle body movements, the exercise drew attention to the microbes that co-mingle in every inhalation, and to the micro-movements of our muscles and cells – whether a tensing little toe or the tiny balancing give-and-take required to stand still – that make up ‘the coherence of our self’.

Joe Dumit, a long-time collaborator with the studio, is a professor at the University of California Davis and a visiting professor at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark. He describes his work as hanging out with scientists, improvisors, and craftspeople to look at how they come to understand the world through interacting with it – especially how they learn with and through their bodies. Miriam Simun ‘works at sites of collision: contradictions, un-realities, and that of rapidly evolving techno-ecosystems colliding with bodies – both human and nonhuman’. We at the studio first became aware of Simun’s work through her project ‘I want to become a cephalopod’, created in the frame of the MIT Media Lab.