Concept, script, voice, sound and production: Miriam Simun
3D artist and programming: Ker Chen
Original field recording at Les Pléiades: Nicole L’Hullier
Composition and audio production of Monitor the Carnivore: DE13
Contact Zone Level 1 was commissioned by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and developed with the support of the Onassis Foundation and the ONX Studio

Contact Zone Level 1 is an infinitely changing computer-generated animation. Two sites of rewilding collide—the Swiss Alps and the artist’s intestines—while an AI monitors them, itching to intervene. The animation is populated by imaged creatures generated by computer models, conjured by text-to-image AI algorithms, and captured by automated camera traps in the forest. It is accompanied by a seven-chapter soundtrack that uses sonic strategies of repetition, interruption, and release in weaving together ecological and mythological histories with philosophies of seeing, knowing, and controlling. The animation unfolds in endless permutations as the algorithm assembles the narrative order; field recordings; location, time and weather; creature actions; and camera views in ever-new variations, enabling fresh meanings to emerge.

Miriam Simun is an artist working at the intersection of ecological crisis, emergent technology, and somatic practice in multiple formats including video, performance, installation, writing and drawing. Trained as a sociologist and taking on the role of artist-as-fieldworker, Simun spends time within communities of experts, including biomedical engineers, carnivore conservationists, hunters, cephalopods, free divers, and breastfeeding mothers, to create research-based artworks rooted in lived experience. Simun’s practice excavates the poetic and the political from collisions of human and non-human bodies among rapidly evolving techno-ecosystems.

Featuring sounds and voices of:
Anja, Florin, Luc, and Manu, wildlife ecologists at KORA – Carnivore Ecology and Wildlife Management
BuBoon (house cat at La Becque Résidence d'artistes)
Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, 1983
Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld/Knowns
Fred Moton, On collaboration within practice research | Fred Moten & Stefano Harney at the Scottish Graduate School for Research 10 November 2021
located first in Lamin Fofana’s NTS mix 01.12.21
Igor Tkachenko, Little Samba of the Mind
Mol’far Nechay, Hutsul drymba melodies
Musica Maya AJ, Traditional Mayan Music of Guatemala
Ramon Amaro (in conversation with Jackie Wang), AI Anarchies Autumn School 15.10.2022: Anti-Computing: Models and Thought Experiments
Slavoj Žižek, On Donald Rumsfeld (unknown knowns), talk at Calvin College on November 10th 2006: Why Only an Atheist Can Believe: Politics Between Fear and Trembling
Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag, E.O. WIlson & Roger Penrose at MIT, Images & Meaning Conference 2001

Script influenced by the powerful words and ideas of the following books, authors, choreographers (quoting them directly or indirectly, sometimes taking the liberty of playing with their words):
Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty, Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health (2021)
Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2015)
Bradley Cantrell, Laura J Martin, and Erle C. Ellis, Designing Autonomy: Opportunities for New Wildness in the Anthropocene (2016)
Bryony Dunne, personal conversation, 2021
Jamie Lorimer, The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life (2020)
Jessie Wender, Meet Grandfather Flash, the Pioneer of Wildlife Photography (2015)
luciana achugar, Seeing without Naming movement practice
Nastassja Martin, In the Eye of the Wild (2021)
Nora Khan, Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019)
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)