remote mentor (online)
yhsu01@risd.edu
http://www.hsurae.com
she/her/hers/they/them/theirs

BIO 

As an artist I’m committed to foraging and presenting moments that point to a primordial intrusion of alterity, an intrusion that would be crucial to the onto-epistemological understanding of what a self is, or could be. My research employs the science of microbiome and fermentation as methods of inquiry into endosymbiotic aesthetics. My practice is research-based and materially-informed. I have worked across many mediums, engaging vocabulary from hot glass to fibroblasts; passports to fecal sports. In my process, I tend to forgo eye and vision as the prioritized seat of knowledge production, and consider instead values that have been squared out of the equation—affect, touch, smell, sound, taste, uncertainty. Working with the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, my recent works speculate on microbial ethics within interplanetary travel, reconstructed against narratives of space colonization. I’m also currently working on a microgravity performance and a film on alternative cosmologies regarding the celestial and its extended voyages.

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY & MENTORSHIP

Teaching is for me a form of communing, a coming together with our resources to make and share and complain (academically) about how resources are distributed and how we might hope to turn the flow. Together we explore the grounds of empiricism, intentionally troubling its histories and conditions. We undermine the authority of imperial language with a combination of abjection and seduction, inviting the Other to an affective relationship rather than an alienating one. We contaminate the establishment of boundaries and categories with perverse pleasure. We break into the gated communities of sense and sensibility. While we’re at it, let’s decode the doctrine of humanity, known for being a project of exclusion, via plural perspectives. We welcome contamination, and transcend contaminants beyond the metaphor of invasion, towards an invitation. And we do all these things together, because we are each other’s environment, because we are beholden to nothing but gravity and one another.