Towards a species-centered approach to biological writing?

Contemporary art is swirling with living beings, semi-living entities, and life-like systems. In light of the post-anthropocentric turn closely related to the climate crisis, more and more artists are exploring the agency of organisms, their cells, fluids, and metabolic processes. Art critics, art historians, curators, and practitioners use diverse strategies to discuss and describe their practices. Among them are the grouping of artworks that would entail or discuss a specific (rather broad) area of technologies and media, for instance, synthetic biology, genetic engineering, artificial life, tissue culture, and biomedia. Others would focus on specific materials and their metabolic processes, for example, fermentation. Many texts discuss art in relation to concepts from philosophy and science and technology studies. Some works focus on specific ecological niches, topologies, kingdoms (fungi), or rarely specific species. Each approach helps to illuminate specific characteristics of artworks and situate them in the context of related cultural, biological, and socio-political issues.
This paper focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of writing about biological art, focusing on a group of species called yeasts. From a taxonomical point of view, yeasts are unicellular organisms ascribed to the fungi kingdom. Although yeasts are often used as synonyms for baker’s yeast, they are diverse and belong to two taxonomic classes of fungi. However, the advancement of identification and classification technology and, subsequently, the reidentification of new species leads to significant revisions in yeast classifications. Moreover, grouping species based on similarity is considered an anthropocentric practice that preserves the vision of universal humanity. If the category “yeasts” is constantly changing in terms of classifications, and the finding of new species can even lead to re-classification, what is the practical usage of this term when writing about biological art with these beings?
This text argues that despite the mentioned above limitations, discussing artworks in relation to a species group is beneficial for unpacking the contexts of artwork production, the usage of technological tools, and the nature-cultural arrangements of yeast themselves. When I am writing about yeasts in this work, I refer not to a fixed category of “yeasts”. I instead treat them from a material-semiotic perspective as nature-cultural entities with the notion of yeasts as constantly changing conceptual framework. From this perspective, I look at yeasts as biological entities, as a dynamic set of knowledge and practices around them, as entities playing a role in numerous cultural practices.