Protean Language Model & Water/Soil Discontent 水土不服
How do we define modification when living things are already constantly shaped by their environment? HSURAE brings this debate to life at Mediamatic through two compelling works during Museumnight.
Ideas around place and placelessness are animated in the two works via the flower Helichrysum italicum, aka Immortelle. This plant has long been prized for its anti-aging properties. Historically, its value lies in its relationship to place: wild blooms from Corsica yield different essential oil profiles than those from Croatia. Today, biotech labs are changing that story by making it genomically legible, growing its cells in petri dishes, and using engineered E. coli to produce its precious compounds without ever needing the plant or its soil. In other words, the plant is becoming placeless.
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Protean Language by Hsurae for Museum Night 2026,Photo credit Kathleen Pracht -
Protean Language Model
Experience Protean Language Model, a participatory performance exploring how humanity’s obsession with immortality shapes technology. Human language is passed through an engineering pipeline that is being used by the industry to create plant compounds via microbes. This involves inference through a protein language model, translating its outputs into vocal instructions.
Participatory performance
21:30–21:45
23:30–23:45
Water soil discontent - ©Walker Tufts -
Water/Soil Discontent 水土不服
Ever felt your body shift after traveling somewhere new? Water/Soil Discontent 水土不服 transforms the science of gut colonization into a live Museumnacht performance and tasting installation. Blending biomedical research with traditional Chinese medicine and migration stories, this immersive experience approaches these questions through the act of imbibing, with a menu drawing on the limestone, rain, sea air and sunlight of immortelle’s environment.
Participatory performance
21:30–21:45
23:30–23:45
HSURAE
Instead of working to reveal or accelerate, they find small pleasures in the indeterminacy that latent space and latent knowledge offers. A sort of photogrammetry of the universe from inside Plato’s cave. Their artistic medium, like their self, is never pure object, never pure subject; ranging from hot glass to fibroblasts, passports to fecal sports. Their current research entertains the irreducibility of artificial intelligence as an aesthetic quality. A quality that, like latency, resists total comprehension but invites speculation.Information
Performance
7 November 2026
21:30–21:45 & 23:30–23:45
Mediamatic Sluisdeurenloods (Barn)
Part of GMO: How far are you willing to mutate? during Museumnacht Amsterdam 2026.
Protean Language Model is produced in partnership with Bioart Society, who have commissioned and supported the work of HSURAE and Laura Elidedt Rodriguez within the framework of the Horizon Europe project deCYPher (2023–2027).
Questions? program@mediamatic.nl
