Techno-natural Mutations

Marginal

— Installation

We tend to treat technology and nature as opposing domains — one engineered, the other inherited; one accelerating, the other giving in under that speed. But how can binary describe how energy, organisms, and built environments actually interact? Infrastructure alters metabolic pathways, generates new habitats, and is regularly subverted by the life forms it attempts to manage. Challenging the narrative that infrastructure simply sits on top of an ecosystem, Techno-natural Mutations explores this entanglement as an ambient, daily condition, that is forming a not-so-speculative future.

In Unplugged? Symbiont No. 3, Lorena Cocora and Alexandra Costea present a fictional technological ecosystem. Incorporating copper tendrils, thermoelectric Peltier junctions, and radio-frequency coils, the installation bypasses the centralized power grid to scavenge what the city constantly leaks: electromagnetic haze, subterranean transit vibrations, and thermal exhaust. The work operates in the space between parasite and diagnostic tool. It poses a straightforward structural question: if a device survives on the residual noise of urban life, is it autonomous, or has it simply adapted to our systemic inefficiency? Avoiding the techno-utopian promises of clean energy, the work delves into the continuous, uncaptured runoff of our built environment, treating the city's residue as an ecological niche.

In contrast, Miguel Teodoro tracks a biological entity co-produced by human systems. His video essay, _porumbeithe synanthropic augur, examines the pigeon as a technoscientific subject rather than an urban nuisance. Moving between the streets of Bucharest and the digital realm, the work maps how pigeons have been enlisted into human networks of communication, early aerial surveillance, military logistics, and laboratory testing. The work mixes field recordings, archival documents, and computer-generated imagery to break down linear histories of progress. The pigeon emerges as an unexpected collaborator — an organism whose behavior, reproduction, and distribution have been conditioned by human technology, even as the bird routinely disrupts the smooth operation of that same infrastructure.

Techno-natural Mutations proposes a direct structural analysis based on artistic research. Without searching for a clean resolution or a moral directive, the works map the subtle political and material friction between organisms and machines. When the entanglements around us become more and more complex, how can we start making sense of the persistent mutations taking place in the background of our cities.

A project by MARGINAL
Part of the Unplgged? project co-funded by the City of Timișoara through the Center for Projects and The Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN).