Proximity, Precarity, and Microscopic Distinctions in Nonhuman Performance: An Interview with Pei-Ying Lin

Pei-Ying Lin is a designer and artist working with a range of nonhuman and human collaborators and companions. Born in Taiwan, she is currently based in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Her artistic mediums range from installation, fiber arts, and dance and performance, often working with both artists and scientists. Her work asks complex questions about what it means to be human when we have so many nonhuman organisms in and around our body. Within these collaborations, she engages with nonhuman beings who precariously teeter on the invisible or the seemingly "inanimate," such as viruses, microbes, plants, and, most recently, data sets and artificial intelligence. As our conversation reveals, her detailed attention to the varying ways microscopic nonhumans perform is a central focus of her work.

Pei-Ying Lin spoke with me from Eindhoven, Netherlands via Zoom on October 3rd, 2022. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Elizabeth Schiffler (ES):

Much of your work explores human and nonhuman relationships, such as viruses and microbes. Have you always engaged with microscopic partners? And how did you find yourself in these assemblages? [End Page E-101]

Pei-Ying Lin (PYL):

Well, it's not just the microbes. One of the earliest was the Plant Sex Consultancy, which I did with Špela Petrič and two others, which asked if we could think on the plants' behalf using sex and pleasure, something we have in common.¹ So that might be a nice entry point because we are all biological. So I think that was the first attempt, and then later I was engaged with microbes. But then I think there's a difference between bacteria and viruses, because bacteria are much easier to have hands-on experiences with.

ES:

Why is that?

PYL:

Well, because you can just grow the bacteria with a petri dish, so you don't really need to inoculate it on another living thing. It's close to kitchen DIY. It has that aspect that is very close to daily life. I'm not looking to do high tech things in the lab, but I'm more interested in this embodiment experience that we share with the others. And that's why viruses become interesting, because viruses have their own philosophical specialty, somewhere between living and nonliving. It performs as a living thing when they are in their host. So I quite like that notion when it gets activated within a body. I also like the debatable question of whether they are living or nonliving. Because they are invisible, it's really impossible to see them [gestures in front of her body]. Unlike bacteria, where there are ways to see them visually.² So I think it also adds on an abstract layer of imagination or the ability to bring our thoughts into another space, because you are then imagining and trying to trace out the traces and routes of the viruses.³

ES:

In a previous interview, you've talked about the importance of distinguishing viruses and microbes. The "nonhuman" has become its own kind of celebrity in academia, but when thinking about nonhuman/human relationships, why do you think it's important to distinguish nonhuman actors?

PYL:

Actually, I first discovered that [distinction] when I was collaborating with Špela on the Plant Sex Consultancy because we were trying to interview the plants. And by giving us this task, we started to wonder, how can you interview the plants? Like, how do you actually have that mentality? It was funny, it was comparatively easy for me, but comparatively hard for her, for she felt a resistance, as if she's conducting a kind of romanticism. While for me, I'm from Taiwan and the background of Taiwanese is very close to the mix between Chinese and Japanese, where the religion or the general [End Page E-102] belief is closer to animism. There is a belief that everything is living to some extent, you get used to referring to things as they have spirit. I think it is a comparatively Western concept that separates human...