We Have Never Been Human is a speculative practice that investi-

gates and weaves together processes of non-human morphogenesis

and collective caosmosis.

An immersive, generative multimedia environment conceived to host

and explore ‘chemical gardens’ and delicate structures, as well as to

re-imagine new communal experiences of leisure, action, and care in

parallel possible worlds.

Crossing different skills and knowledges in a collaborative and collec-

tive workflow, a multilayered and enigmatic topography is revealed by

the intra-actions of different means: sounds, sculptures, words, motion

of images, motion of bodies.

An interactive sonification framework has been designed in order to

make the chemical gardens’ growth processes audible. Two comple-

mentary approaches have been tried: the first one includes a mod-

el-based sonification providing an auditory representation of chemical

gardens’ motion data issued from video recordings. The second one

adopts a set of different techniques to directly sonify data stemming

from ‘chemobrionics’ research studies: this new interdisciplinary

scientific field investigates the physical, chemical, and biological prop-

erties of self-organized inorganic processes, shedding light on how

‘chemical gardens’ played a fundamental role in the origins of life.

A spiralling motion through science and history, myth, and technology,

the work addresses the very core of the human(ist) division of the

natural-cultural world and the western anthropocentric perspective, or

the ‘vital exception’, as a weak and very limited interpretation of reality.