Creature Rituals

Creature Rituals-

The belief that humanity has evolved past creaturehood is a delusion which has caused every other creature, including the Planet and ice caps and oceans, to suffer. As I cope with the cognitive dissonance our species employs during this moment in biological history, I turn to other creatures to see how they cope, and what I found is that we all continue to address our material selves with a ritual compassion in moments of grooming, rinsing, picking, and other types of neural circuit patterns I began to refer to as creature bathing. Through exploring these rituals we share in common, and learning the choreography of our kin, I hope to learn how other forms of sentient bodies continue existing amid this 6th mass extinction. Though I expect to observe more gestures of suffering than coping, I hope my hypothesis is disproven and we may learn from creature gestures of compassion like grooming, which may provide a means of connection and support across species.

Independent of my own observations and discoveries in this experiment, my primary goal of highlighting the uniting behavior of grooming is to prove that humans are creatures (and creatures are machines!) by laying bare our basic relationship between body and mind, motor sequence and neural circuit; dismantling the illusory boundary we have created between ourselves and the creatures we face extinction with together as one network of organisms, a body with no vestigial or accessory organs. This piece questions the autonomy we attempt to establish over our own neural circuits, posing the idea of free will as part of an algorythmic relationship dependent on the same factors as fruit flies: current sensory cues, internal state, and past experience. I hope this can act as another mode of exposing Humanity’s fundamental creaturehood, we are cause and effect machines.

I will be creating an immersive installation space in which some factors affecting the fruit fly’s neural circuits fluctuate, establishing an environment that oscillates through different combinations of scenarios (hot, wet, still and bright; cold, dry, windy, dark). I will then perform a “pas de deux” of grooming in this space with either a live fruit fly or a projection if the former is not possible.

This exhibition would provide an opportunity to share the findings of Simpson Lab’s research and to communicate its importance in a broader context.

Fruit Fly Neural Circuit//Motor Sequence Study by Simpson Lab @ UC Santa Barbara:

https://simpson.mcdb.ucsb.edu/research

Animals chose among a wide range of behaviors depending on current sensory cues, internal state, and past experience. They execute these behaviors by coordinating a limited repertoire of motor neurons driving muscles in their limbs. Since they cannot perform all behaviors at once, they must select among choices. A changing series of choices can result in a behavioral sequence.

We are interested in how animals make these choices, both at algorithmic and neural circuit levels. We have developed fruit fly grooming as a model to understand motor program selection. Grooming is a complex behavioral sequence assembled from simpler motor subroutines executed in order. When a fly is completely covered in dust, it cleans itself by an ordered series of leg movements targeted first to the head, then abdomen, then wings, and then thorax.

We study how the fly’s brain coordinates this progression using quantitative behavioral analysis genetic perturbation of specific neurons, and imaging neural activity during grooming The genetic reagents available in the fly make it possible to dissect the relevant neural circuits completely at single cell resolution. By discovering the organizational strategies, circuit motifs and activity patterns that produce the fly grooming sequence, we hope to provide insights into universal mechanisms for the ordered execution of competing behaviors.

Fly Grooming Schematic. Credit: Tianyi Qin