Piscine Becoming-With

1. Overview

Piscine Becoming-With is a research-led artistic inquiry into interspecies shared mobility and more-than-human agency. The project investigates the design of a piscine–human shared mobility assemblage from multiple perspectives, unfolding across design probs, performative organs, and contact improvisation- –based performance. These explorations collectively examine how entangled agencies emerge through the co-constitution of decision-making, body movement, and relational embodiment through technical bodily couplings and interspecies chronography.

2. PiscineMobil - Fish is Driving

•Design Probe / Epistemic device
•Public deployment and situated interpretation
•How nonhuman-led mobility and nonhuman agency are culturally understood in situ

PiscineMobil operates as a research apparatus; intentionally non-aesthetic and infrastructural, it functions as a Design Probe that stages encounters with unconventional, inverted and redistributed agency through the shared mobility assemblage within everyday public contexts.

3. PiscineNode

•Performative Organ — An artwork and performative piece
•Reconfigurable wearable artefact with head / arm / torso configurations
•More-than-Human Agency as co-constituted and entangled

PiscineNode functions as a reconfigurable performative organ forming a piscine–human shared mobility assemblage. Through multiple wearing configurations, it enables different situated bodily couplings, allowing agency to emerge relationally without residing in a fixed cognitive and bodily locus.

4. PiscineMobMore-than-Human Chronography - Fish Are Driving

• More-than-Human Chronography
• Collective interspecies performance / Dancers wearing PiscineNode and contact improvisation
• Mobility and Agency as a shared, distributed, and emergent conditions

PiscineMob extends the inquiry into a collective performance context, where multiple dancers and multiple fish form a distributed interspecies assemblage. Movement unfolds through negotiation, temporal attunement, and mutual responsiveness, reframing choreography as a more-than-human process and relational composition.

5. Conceptual Framework
•Becoming-with
•Assemblage
•Cybernetic and posthuman lineages
•Relational embodiment

The project is informed by posthuman, cybernetic, and assemblage-based approaches to agency and embodiment, and grounded in relational embodiment, a theoretical synthesis from the artist, that understands embodiment as an emergent, situated process and relation enacted across bodies, species, technologies, and planet.

Piscine Becoming-With is grounded in a constellation of relational and posthuman theories that challenge anthropocentric views of agency and embodiment. Drawing on concepts of becoming-with, the project understands agency as an ongoing process that emerges through relations. The project is further informed by posthuman traditions that conceptualize agency as distributed and shaped by situated coupling rather than centralized control. Assemblage and cybernetic thinking further informs the work by framing body movement, decision-making, and embodiment as effects of heterogeneous configurations of human, nonhuman and technical actors.

Building on these lineages, the project materialize relational embodiment and reframes embodiment not as an individual, self-contained condition, but as an emergent and situated process enacted through technical mediation and interspecies interaction. Within Piscine Becoming-With, embodiment is understood as something that happens between bodies of human, piscine, and technical through shared mobility, performative coupling, and chronographic public engagements.