《chain of responses》 is a performance work that questions communication between humans and other life forms through the primitive phenomenon of the chain of stimuli and responses of life.

In this work, stimuli and responses to light are chained in a circle between the performer and the five plants. Each life is placed in a different location, and the stimuli and responses are connected by the Internet. In plants, light exposure and interruption affect photosynthesis, which in turn changes the plant bioelectric potential. The change is read by a machine and relayed to the next life via the Internet. The time between the light conditions change and the plant response that emerges, varies among individual plants. The performer controls the switch in the same way. In other words, the response becomes a stimulus, and it returns as its own stimulus in a circular chain. Each life is streamed using Zoom, and the circular chain is displayed on a monitor.
The performer turns the switch on at the beginning of the performance as an initial value, and turns it off after a while. The actual performance lasted for more than 8 hours.

In this work, I refer to "fundamental Informatics" proposed by (informatics scholar) Nishigaki Toru. Fundamental informatics is the study of redefining information from the perspective of "meaning" for life, and is positioned as neo-cybernetics. According to fundamental informatics, the origin of the general communication model is Claude Shannon's information theory. This model was a theory that dealt with the transmission of information by machines, but it became popular among the population without sufficient discussion of the differences between life and machines. Against this background, Fundamental Informatics proposes the "Hierarchical Autonomous Communication System" to redefine communication. According to this model, we can say that communication has taken place among lower-level systems when the lower-level systems (each life) appear to be functioning in a certain way when viewed from the higher-level system (the work system projected on the monitor). According to this argument, communication for the lower-level systems is nothing more than the biological activity of responding to stimuli.

This work questions communication through the primitive phenomenon of the chain of stimuli and responses of life. I think that our current communication is an extension of the chain of stimuli and responses and the repeated accumulation of feedback from the results, which we have been doing since the birth of life on the earth about 4 billion years ago until now.

Exhibition

Kiyu NISHIDA, "chain of responses", つくるもの、つくるあたま展, 愛知, 2021/11
Kiyu NISHIDA, "chain of responses", IAMAS 2022, 2022/2
Kiyu Nishida, "chain of responses", KUMA EXHIBITION 2022, 2022/3