Ingenious and Fearless Companions

Ingenious and Fearless Companions brought together members of the High Altitude Bioprospecting (HAB) collective at Birmingham Open Media from 1 April to 11 June 2016. The exhibition explored curiosity-driven research through the search for microscopic life in space, connecting aeronautics, microbiology, performance, and artistic experimentation. In that setting, Alex May’s contribution sat within a wider collaborative investigation into how scientific inquiry can become public, material, and speculative.

The exhibition framed space research not as a distant technological frontier but as a field shaped by bodies, organisms, and shared forms of exploration. Its references to bacteria travelling with astronauts and spacecraft, and to extremophile life sought in the upper atmosphere, placed art and science on the same ground: both became ways of asking what kinds of life travel, survive, and transform under unfamiliar conditions.

For May, this context aligned closely with a practice interested in how technological systems mediate what can be sensed, recorded, and remembered. At Birmingham Open Media, that meant presenting work within a collective exhibition that treated data, biology, and atmosphere as cultural material rather than neutral research topics. The accompanying Space Biohack weekend in May reinforced that approach, extending the exhibition into a live public process of experimentation and exchange.