International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Volume 16, Issue 3
· publication
The Human Super-Organism was featured in Volume 16, Issue 3 of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, where the work appeared on the cover and was discussed in relation to scale, visibility, and the human microbiome.
The Human Super-Organism was featured in Volume 16, Issue 3 of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, published in 2020 and noted on Alex May’s site in January 2021. The work appeared on the cover of the special issue and was discussed in James R. Ball III, Weiling He, and Louis G. Tassinary’s article The zoom function.
The article uses May and Anna Dumitriu’s interactive installation as a way to think about scale, visibility, and the translation of microbial life into human perception. In The Human Super-Organism, visitors place their hand on a screen and trigger spreading fields of colour that suggest bacterial colonies blooming across the body. That encounter brings microscopic processes into public view and turns an otherwise invisible ecology into something experiential and immediate.
For May, this kind of publication context matters because it places the work within a wider critical discussion about how art and technology reshape perception. Rather than illustrating science from a distance, The Human Super-Organism makes the unseen felt at the scale of the body, connecting digital mediation, biological knowledge, and public experience in a form that is central to the wider practice.