THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FISH

The project

Carolyn Kirschner’s residency project, There Is No Such Thing as a Fish, is an artistic investigation into the zebrafish as a model organism in scientific research, examining its socio-cultural significance and speculating on possible interspecies futures. What does it mean to use the body of one species as a model or stand-in for another? What are the implications of efforts to bring zebrafish’s regenerative abilities into the human body? Are we becoming part fish? Or maybe we always have been?

Working with Physics of Life researchers from TUD Dresden University of Technology, the project engages with a search for the foundational principles underpinning life, and the interplay of living systems with computational processes. One of the project outcomes is a short film, which documents a range of interconnected cultural, material, and ecological landscapes where human and zebrafish worlds collide – from a petri dish in the lab, to pet shops, server farms, rivers and rice paddies in India. The project also leverages advanced computational methods to produce a speculative anatomical model, based on digital reconstructions of the last common ancestor between humans and zebrafish 425 million years ago.

The artist

Carolyn Kirschner is a designer and researcher with a background in architecture. Her work explores the growing entanglements of ecologies and machines in the context of the climate crisis, working with scientific tools, simulation engines, digital fabrication, and film to produce fragments from alternate or expanded worlds. She is a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and previously taught at Parsons School of Design in New York.

Her S+T+ARTS residency project There Is No Such Thing as a Fish was developed in collaboration with scientists from the Physics of Life Cluster of Excellence at TUD Dresden University of Technology. Through film and creative applications of advanced computational methods, the project explores interspecies dimensions of biomedical research and the role zebrafish play in the search for the underlying physical laws and mathematical equations that govern life.