Saliva Commune is an installation composed of bacterial cultures grown from saliva collected from various people. The cultures are housed in Petri dishes and connected by copper wire, forming a living circuit that feeds into bio-mediated sound devices. Using code written in SuperCollider, biological input is translated into MIDI data, which is then used to compose, modulate, and distort a soundtrack. The soundtrack incorporates an excerpt from Biocosmist Poetics by Alexander Svyatogor, a Russian poet, anarchist, and founder of the anarcho-biocosmist movement, read by an AI voice.
The work positions saliva both as a site of intimacy and biopolitics, where the medium is closely associated with biocitizen profiling, policing and forensic science. The work revisits avant-garde concepts of bio-techno utopia as a commune where biological processes, coded systems, and architecture might co-compose a sensory environment in which the kinetic forces of biology, intimacy, and technological mediation are no longer separate conditions, but active forces shaping one another.