Adventure: Biopolymer Aesthetics and Empathetic Materialism—Another World is Possible

This paper discusses affective methodologies within a practice-based PhD research project using plant-based and bacterial biopolymers (bioplastics) for painting, siteresponsive intervention, and collaborative video. Biopolymers have long material histories with a range of material qualities and affects that inform adventurous working methods. These methods and associated affects could be said to produce a biopolymer aesthetics and an empathetic materialism forms of onto-aesthetics involving what Elizabeth Grosz (2017) and Félix Guattari (2000) respectively term an onto-ethics and an ethico-aesthetics. In this paper, new materialisms are used to understand the pedagogical qualities of worlding through the artworks of the author, where biopolymer aesthetics generate adventure and bewilderment—aligning with Jack Halberstam’s (2020) idea of an aesthetics of bewilderment.


Introduction
Biopolymers (bioplastics) are adventurous materials-water-loving, thermoplastic, and porous-that have different material sensitivities and languages compared to petrochemical polymers (commonly used in art during the 20 th and early 21 st centuries). In my artworks, these differences are evident in the instability of forms. This inherent instability risks deformation, challenges conventional thinking about the potential forms and deformations of matter, and generates learning through "groping experimentation" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 44). This learning invigorates creative methods and habits, enabling adventurous methodologies to emerge over time. In this paper, I use my own biopolymer art practices to think with the kinds of bewilderment that can generate worlding. The experimental learning I propose here, is developed via an attempt to construct a systemic understanding of biomaterials at their molecular and social-ecological (molar) levels, as well as the way they come together and circulate as material affects. My attempt to generate a wild pedagogical art practice is built around the flows of matter and energy that Gilles Félix Guattari (1987 and articulate as geophilosophy. These flowing processes of thinking/learning/praxis are made evident in my investigation of the collaborative film made for Stef Animal's track "Adventure"-from the album Top Gear (Animal, 2018; uses, and risks of biopolymers as well as their laboratory production processes. At Scion, I participated in the development of biopolymer materials using both plant and bacterial polymers, including hydrophilic plant-based cellulose paint medium and thermoplastic blends. This work as "an artisan and no longer as [just] an artist" has enabled me to connect the materials I work with to "forces of consistency and consolidation" as well as with forces of "deterritorrialisation" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 346). What captivates me about biopolymers, as an artist and artisan, are their material and conceptual capacities for entanglement.
To come together and be perceived as material, plastics go through a process called polymerisation where individual molecules called monomers assemble into threedimensional chains known as polymers. The roots of this word are in the capacity to share in something (Wagner-Lawlor, 2017). These entangled chains create reconfigurable mass-changing arrangement, expanding, and contracting when triggered by factors like heat or hydration. Biopolymers are less fixed than petrochemical plastics (which are prone to a more permanent and insensitive fusion via heat setting). They readily move between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms over time, allowing painting and sculpture to become four-dimensional. Such fugitive and highly sensitive cellulose materials, as well as the artworks made with them, can rehydrate over time, releasing their layered and embedded images.
Thermoplastic biopolymer artworks divulge three-dimensional shape memoriesplastic images and forms imprinted within their molecular arrangements, revealed, rather than set, through heat. My experiments with the rehydration and shape memory imprinting processes of biopolymers gestate a form of ethico-aesthetic learning that allow artworks and pedagogical practices to be made reconfigurable-enabling their matters and energies be released back into the wildness of cosmic, geological, and molecular flows.
Introducing the terms biopolymer aesthetics and empathetic materialism, I reflect upon the parallel histories and aesthetics of conventional petrochemical polymers and the even longer histories of biopolymers within Indigenous and non-Western cultures.
Understanding the geological, biological, and social histories of petrochemical and biobased polymers acknowledges how we produce and sustain materiality through memory, habit, and industry (see Grosz, 2013). This understanding informs my practice of alloplastic worlding within a context of larger systemic and planetary changes (Saldanha & Stark, 2016). Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy and ecosophy also help me understand how "self-organising material systems" (Protevi, 2001, p. 2) and various liberatory non-hierarchical systems may function in resistance to the forces of extractive colonial capitalism that sustain fossil fuel-derived petrochemical plastics (Coleman, 2013). In connection to the foregoing, I explore how, in the 21 st century, circular and doughnut economic frameworks-which can be traced back to Guattari's ecological registers (also see Vare, 2020)-are being used to envision possible liberatory bioeconomy futures, where plasticity becomes a circular and symbiotic component in the making of a new Earth and in the framing of an ecosophic pedagogy (Guattari, 2000).

Adventure
Aotearoa New Zealand-based musician Stef Animal describes how the album Top Gear (2018), including the track "Adventure," draws from Maurice Sendak's trilogy of illustrated children's fantasy books exploring the adventure of childhood psychological development: the toddler phase In The Night Kitchen (1970); the pre-school phase in Where the Wild Things Are (1963); and the pre-adolescent phase in Outside Over There (1981). The music video for "Adventure," as seen in Figures 1, 2, and 4, explores this developmental adventurous and wild dynamic. It was filmed in infrared by filmmaker and artist Jess Charlton, who intuitively observed children encountering hydrophilic biopolymers for the first time, moving through developmental and adventurous processes of familiarisation, territorialisation, and creative destruction.
Each of the site-responsive biopolymer artworks discussed in this paper are formed through adventure with unfamiliar and unstable biopolymer materials that stand in for phases of adventurous development, while generating moments of extreme material fragility and precarity that elicit material empathy and learning (see Gauld, 2014). I am formulating an adventure methodology as a creative and pedagogical method of risk, involving affect-generating and affect-driven developmental processes. I see this as an extension of diffractive learning methodologies (see Barad, 2014;Geerts & van der Tuin, 2016), whereby a diffractive reading of texts or artworks can alter the flow of ideas, around and through each other, creating waves and new potential for thought and action. While diffraction and flow are temporal and physical processes, a diffractive methodology applies this dynamic materiality to conceptual thinking and alters pedagogical processes by experimenting with inter-textual and interdisciplinary relationships (Barad, 2014). Adventure methodology is similarly time-based and physical, while also being spatially unfixed and open to the affective qualities of risk within research and learning. As with diffraction, encounters between materials and ideas may happen multiply and together over time-not as one singular diffraction or adventure. This allows adventure to redistribute affect through various locations, morphologies, and images of the paintings, sculptures, and site-based interventions.  (Martyn, 2019a). Courtney Place Lightboxes, Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
Sixteen images on eight free-standing lightboxes Adventure may involve loss-breakage, injury, ephemerality, disorientation, and reorientation. These are the risky material affects of adventure methodology that play The remediated quarry cliff-face and coastline, a popular recreational weekend destination, present dramatic metamorphic strata and fault lines. The biodegradable artworks (Figures 4 and 7), appear and disappear into the coastal landscape for which they were commissioned, performing a kind of return and affective gesture of remediation and love. In both the lightboxes (Figures 1 and 2) and the coastal installation (Figures 4 and 7), the sedimentary and metamorphic processes of orogeny-mountain-building-are used as an analogy for how systems deform under pressure, while also invoking some of the affective qualities of lovemaking. The word adventure, manifest in these artworks, conjures images of caving and canyoning trips, suggesting a navigation through cavernous sedimentary rock forms, carved and made porous through geotrauma (the underground bifurcations and flows they enable and are subject to). According to Noys (1998, p. 504), such underground sites of adventure invoke Georges Bataille's "bowels of the earth" and Deleuze and Guattari's processes of sedimentation. The navigation of cave systems used within search and rescue misadventures involves forms of learning developed through habits of wayfinding and subterranean shape memory. Greywacke Love Poems (2019a) activate this pedagogical sensorama of wayfinding and shape memory-invoking loss and return akin to the shape memory of the bacterial thermoplastics (which are deformed and then returned to an earlier shape via a trigger temperature). Greywacke Love Poems: Returns (2019b) is ongoing exploration of some of the artworks' slow degradation. The returns-independent of transaction-take place as redistribution, somewhere between gift, use, and loss. Anthropocene might be (Wark, 2020).
We can understand this common task as a pedagogical process of worlding, collapsing the space between subject and environment (Palmer & Hunter, 2018). The collapse of worlding happens through human and more-than-human encounters involving processes of expression and legibility that manifest physically and socially. Biopolymer artworks begin to imagine and manifest the way our relationships with plastics could have been and can become more symbiotic and sympoietic (Haraway, 2016, p. 125  As an artist, affect studies offers me ways of understanding how artworks carry affect-by breaking it down into moments of affect rather than the Gestalt approach to affect within artworks and aesthetics. McKenzie Wark (2020) has written in Sensoria about the difficulty of discussing aesthetics with newer generations of students, where she finds that art historically-oriented terms like sublime or beautiful are less useful than references such as zany, cute, and interesting. I like to think of terms such as these coming together as intersecting references of affect, within the bewilderment of biopolymer aesthetics. Within affect studies, Maria Hynes and Scott Sharpe (2015) have described the risks of engineered affect, while also reminding us that affect exceeds use and holds onto the capacity to escape instrumentalisation. Within society's current affect-laden polarisation, both on the Left and Right, affect is often reduced to a reactionary social force, rather than being seen as an active and becoming one. Hynes and Sharpe describe how, despite "warnings about the underhand modulations and manipulations of affect, affect seems also for some to be germane to the solution of the problem" (p. 116).  Grosz (2013) argues that human habits (and perhaps more-than-human habits as well) are forms of potentially creative contraction, where conditions, action and affect intersect. Grosz (p. 231) employs Henri Bergson's notion of vegetative consciousness to explain a materiality of affect, memory and habit, which "consists in the contraction and synthesis of the elements it requires. Even the plant, in other words, has habits, modes of repeated engagement with its environment. ... a kind of memory, embodied in its cellulose structure." In biopolymer art-making, habits operate like adventure memories within the creative intersection of mnemonic organic processes and disorderly/entropic physical processes.

Hydrophilia
Hydrophilic-water-loving-cellulose, creates a paint emulsion that dries into a paintlike film that can be applied to surfaces and later moistened for recomposition or rehydrated to become a fluid medium. Greater rehydration releases pigments into liquid flow, redistributing the image or pattern that was already present within the paintfilm. During dehydration, the material contracts and brings pigment particles closer together, increasing definition of image and depth of colour. As the material moves between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, images or text may warp or distort. whom plasticity presents itself as "the most eloquent motor scheme for our time" (Malabou cited in Lawtoo, 2017, p. 1206; also see Malabou, 2010, p. 15;Malabou, 2011, p. 58), I draw from Deleuze and Guattari's (1994) notion of a plant's organic plasticity. A plant, as they write, contracts "the elements from which it originates-light, carbon, and the salts-and it fills itself with colors and odors that in each case qualify its variety, its composition" (p. 212). Malabou draws my attention to "the mimetic rivalry so openly visible in plasticity's 'refusal to submit to a model'" (cited in Lawtoo, 2017Lawtoo, , p. 1206), while presenting plasticity as an alternative to writing; as a language-akin to those of flowering plants, constantly changing. Plastic image-making allows for impressions, mimesis, phantoms, and copies. The relationships between plasticity and mediums of reproduction like photography and printmaking resonate. By focusing on the material itself as an eloquent image, one locates the image embedded within the material itself-not reliant on a fixed surface coating or light sensitivity. The imprint or impression is internalised, at a molecular level. Affective methods of production are often indexical, allowing for traces to be made evident. This allows for processes to become visible within subjective and intersubjective experience. The materials used in the works displayed at the old quarry site were reconstituted from previous biopolymer artworks, enabling the work to participate in a circular economy. In this way, material repurposed between artworks and projects might escape existing measures of value but also extend the cycles and reach of productivity. Despite these counterhegemonic tendencies, a circular economy nevertheless risks overlapping with the reproductive dystopia of neoliberalism in which labour, care, management, and materials are endlessly circulated and undervalued (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2017). In such a scenario, discrete artworks become another kind of zombie painting (Robinson, 2014). Repossessing materials, and methods therefore risks a constant restaging that might convert the adventure into entropy.
Bearing this in mind, the provisional nature of the work is continuously foregrounded, keeping Wark's (2020, p. 11) common task for speculative artistic endeavours in mind; namely, that "the world might be known provisionally, speculatively, tentatively, without any one way of knowing having to be sovereign over the others." Nonetheless, again, such risky and speculative ways of knowing and working characterise the neoliberal mantra of continuous adaptability and flexibility. In other words, adventuresome repurposing risks sustaining capitalism and its precarious systems rather than liberating and repurposing that precarity (Berry & Dunphy, 2018). This is where organic figurations such as sympoiesis and symbiosis "enlarges and displaces autopoiesis and all other self-forming and self-sustaining system fantasies" (Haraway, 2016, p. 125), moving assemblages beyond individualist or purely autopoietic precarious survival modes. As a biopolymer artist, as many artists throughout history, I see artmaking as embracing both autopoiesis and sympoiesis. It involves both subjective and intersubjective expression and often collaboration beyond the human.
Hydrophilia is part of a symbiotic earth-scale imaginary where loss is observed and understood through cycles of everyday erosion and less visible slow-grinding, hotpressing, transformations of matter not necessarily perceived in the day-to-day. This scale of imaginary helps us understand human and more-than-human habits of learning and worlding. Symbiotic geologic plasticity is also present in what I am calling biopolymer aesthetics-with its Western/European roots in Bataille's (1985, p. 45) "base materialism," yet clearly predated in Indigenous bio-material relationships As mentioned in the "Adventure" section earlier, affects of uncertainty and instability can prefigure progressive change, however, they can also prefigure further governmentality that exploits uncertainty. This can accelerate aspects of neoliberal control within settler-colonial capitalist systems (see Berry & Dunphy, 2018). Two wellknown examples of this are carbon trading and biotech patenting (Pellizzoni, 2017).
However, as Hynes and Sharpe (2015, p. 116) observe, we might challenge this acceleration of control by actualising "affect's resistant potentials." As they explain with a nod to excessive base materialism, "the gift that affect theory offers to thinking lies in the fact that affect exceeds the economy of exchange to which intellectual thought is today so often subjected" (2015, p. 116).
As a publicly funded outdoor artwork, the intensity of labour and ongoing care

Plasticity is life
Our sense of the worlding that has come before us-and what is possible in the future-can be altered by lesser-known and revised material histories. The altermodern project that influenced Haraway's (2016)  petrochemical plastics that were developed to mimic tortoiseshell, circumventing the scarcity of the shells and reach a broader market (Meikle, 1995). Bioplastic aesthetics continue to be responsive to markets-code switching between petromimicry and biomimicry, during production and marketing (Wagner-Lawlor, 2017).
Both bacterial and cellulosic bioplastics can be generated through symbiotic processing of waste streams, or through extractive feed-sources and forest use. In  Bataille, as Noys (1998) also explains, understood that base matter and its affects are excessive yet often hidden. According to Melillo (2014), Bataille extended the metaphors of 19 th century metabolic rift to claim that human waste had become disconnected from the metabolism of local pastoral spaces. Roland Barthes' (1972) meditations on petrochemical plastics works with Bataille's base materialism (1985, p. 45), speculating on the past, present and future of bio-based plastics. For Barthes, base and superstructure exist in material entanglement, as the active nature of base matter means it does not stay put in a binary of high and low. This structural imaginary becomes anarchic, foreshadowing artist Gordon Matta Clark's 1970s notion of anarchitecture (see Halberstam, 2020;Martyn, 2013). As Noys (1998, p. 503) observes, this entanglement is a risky adventure that overburdens the affective potential of matter with revolutionary intent, creating an "unstable discourse, which …provide[s] a cultural medium to carry the contagion of base matter, in the same way that a virus or a bacteria are grown and developed … [as] an infectious thought." This infectious thought shapes human memory and epigenetics, which carry intergenerational forms of gene behaviour that respond to changes in environmental, material, and social conditions, as well as affective regimes. This adaptive plasticity is somewhat akin to shape memory in bacterial biopolymers. The bacterial thermoplastic biopolymers, and polysaccharide blends used in Greywacke Love Poems: Returns (2019b), reconfigured through heat, trigger shape-memories at predetermined heat settings, revealing a plasticity that exists in recognition of a resiliency which involves flexibility but also resistance, deformation, reformation-wilder capacities to reconfigure. Both Barthes and Malabou think about the plasticity of childhood and the ways that children experience trauma and interact with the world beyond trauma (see Wagner-Lawlor, 2017, p. 77). Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (2017, p. 74) notes that Barthes (1972) derided the shift from wooden toys to plastic toys and she suggests that he thought of plastic as anaesthetic. Malabou's understanding is less anaesthetic: plastics "bring together the origin, as their name indicates, and the future [in their] capacit[ies] for self re-form" and lend themselves to a kind of "biological alterglobalisation" (2008, p. 80; 2011, p. 73). Such an alter-globalisation might involve the kind of more-than-human/intergenerational solidarity already present within Indigenous thinking where plastics derived from fossil ancestors are considered kin (Liboiron, 2019).
Contemporary popularisation of plasticity is described by Wagner-Lawlor as a form of reproduction. Yet this creativity, as noted, points toward neoliberal motifs of continuous flexibility. When scaled up, industrial bio-based production risks further venturing into endlessly adaptable extractive capitalism, as is evident in a recent discussion of bioenergy plants (see Walmsley, 2020). Biomaterials and associated knowledges are figured within ongoing narratives of coloniality (as manifest in neoliberal extractivism) and its dualist relationship with nature. To date, while Anthropocene scholarship and the new materialisms have highlighted the role of capitalism, they have been slow to acknowledge Indigenous cosmology (Haraway, 2016;Todd, 2016). This has motivated me to think about how artworks (and artists) contend with their material relations to coloniality and extractive capitalism and how affects are generated within these specific relations. My argument is that recognising the dissonance and resonances between the habits and affects of materiality and neoliberal regimes might lead to a more robust alter-global imagination that follows alongside the kin-making material relations of Indigenous thought.

Porosity
Biomaterials are often porous and membrane-like, and in the studio this porosity generates working methods and interfaces where affective processes and regenerative practices allow another world to be possible (see Haraway, 2008). We might talk about such affective interfaces, in a physical and psychic sense that may include more-than-human figures and grounds (Derrida & Caws, 1994). Grosz (2008, p. 70) enlarges this kind of interface via Deleuze and Guattari, into a "plane of composition"-the site of compound sensations like artworks; sexual selection; and the mobilisation of territorialising and deterritorialising forces. Like Grosz, Bataille's imaginary also enlarges the interface of human and more-than-human sensations. Bataille's work (see e.g., 1985) is often about things that pass between things, about the differences and relations that create excretions and separations. "The notion of the (heterogeneous) foreign body permits one to note the elementary subjective identity between types of excrement (sperm, menstrual blood, urine, faecal matter) …a half-decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night in a luminous shroud" (p. 94).
Bataille's collapse of the binary relationship between eroticism and death is a model for a collapse of entropy and empathy; a collapse of the material and immaterial, including biological and sexual selection, which are both corporeal and incorporeal.
Interpretations of Bataille's abject affects can reinforce a heteronormative othering In 2012, I was making large-scale wall paintings by peeling back skin-like layers of acrylic latex house paint. These works often generated an affective narrative of collapse between the liveness of skin and its excretions, and something death-like.
The paint transformed from two-dimensional surface into three-dimensional materialmembrane-like sheets of surface; layered and extended or fallen. The paint became unfamiliar, seamless coating transformed into material waste-not usually visible as such. In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, this artistic praxis seemed to materialise a necessary grief. It also became a provocation: to create a painting that could become fluid again.
Within established painting and sculptural practices, such fluidity, reuse and misuse of plastic and skin-like materials is evident in the work of a number of artists such as Eva Hesse (Aught, 1968), Lynda Benglis (Fallen Painting, 1968), Christine Hellyar (Flotsam and Jetsum, 1970), Linda Besemer (Fold #7: Optical Objectile, 1998), Margie Livingston (Folded Painting, small, 2009), andHelen Calder (Orange Skin (125 fl. oz, 2009) Figure 9) could subsequently be rehydrated to become liquid again, without use of harsh solvents. (see Richmond, 2015). Bifurcation is evident in industrialised plasticity and is evident in the bifurcation fallacies of social contexts, whereby false dilemmas may be created through omission or ignorance. Physical entropy and affective empathy can be understood as forking processes too, running in parallel or apart, becoming confluences or oxbow lakes, moving between scales and forms of material flow (Turpin, 2010). I think of entropy and empathy as interrelated processes and as emergent proceedings, that produce and process traumatic affects (Whitehead, 1929).
Material empathy develops understanding of how materials generate and behave in relation to social and physical forces or "quanta" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 88) that are figured into creative practices.
Empathy is often initiated by events that articulate change or forking processes within a system or entity in the direction of creative flux, entropy, or negentropy. It extends into more-than-human encounters like geo-aesthetics, where we understand geological processes better after witnessing a landslide, or the strata exposed during an earthquake. For Robert Smithson, the "mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason" (in Turpin, 2012, p. 174). Smithson's entropy includes in-between spaces of non-site-between the self and non-self, the individual and collective. Here we can detect the influence of Bataille's (1985, p. 35) base materialism; a more-than-human politics that "brought back to the subterranean action of economic facts, the 'old-mole' revolution [that] hollows out chambers in a decomposed soil repugnant to the delicate nose of the utopians." Within current theories of an affective turn, exercising empathy creates affects within events (Gauld, 2014). Visible or articulated processes like emotional labour and solidarity, are affective at an interpersonal and interspecies level, as well as at a societal and environmental ecological scale. This affective turn is evident in the processes of entropy and empathy that biopolymer artworks evince; a making-visible that foregrounds "the persistent sense that there must be something more than this, that it didn't have to be this way, or that things might have been otherwise" (Kramer 2017, p.120 Bellacasa, 2017). This has resonances in the contemporary context in which empathy and kindness are invoked and critiqued, as academics and artists seek affective ways through neoliberal inequality, austerity, and the rise of far-right populism (see Kukar, 2018).

Conclusion
Methodologies of adventure reorient, disorientate, and bewilder us via pedagogical and affective processes that involve "groping experimentation" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 44). This learning is manifest within biopolymer aesthetics, where making and becoming happen at the interface of regeneration and decomposition, as I argued and as is evident in the music video for Adventure (2019) and in Greywacke Love Poems: Returns (2019b). The deformations within artworks like Adventure (2019) and Greywacke Love Poems (2019a) contribute to a prefigurative politics of reorientation, regeneration, and redistribution. The so-called returns within Greywacke Love Poems: Returns (2019b), cannot be a regressive return to a past state, or a return on investment-it is a return to fluid cycles and the folding more-than-human processes of orogeny (mountain building).
In the context of the COVID-19 crisis, the language of economic recovery is being reconsidered because it assumes a backward lens and an attempt to return to the status quo. Instead, activists, thinkers, and artists-those who are working within paradigm shifts necessitated by ecological and social crises-are reorienting toward the language of regeneration (Stephenson, 2020) Like Malabou's lively and plastic "paradigms of recovery" (Malabou, 2011, p. 73-74) the current shifts language might dismantle and sow different seeds, triggering different genetic compositions, mutation, and a bifurcation of economic and ecologic trajectories. Taken together, such risks constitute a creative and pedagogical bewildering that I have attempted to make evident in my exploration of biopolymer artworks. While writing this paper, I have conceptualised empathetic materialism as a type of feminist materialist entropy that segues with Halberstam's aesthetics of bewilderment (2020). In this confluence, a kind of nomadic thought (Braidotti, 2011) informs both material self-organisation, creative disorder, and the symbiosis of tentacular learning and worlding (Haraway, 2016). The biopolymer aesthetics I have foregrounded, allow conditions of entropy, habit, and bifurcation to come together, generating a kind of pedagogical bewilderment that bridges between affective, psychological, collective, and environmental ecologiesmaking other worlds of thinking and doing possible.