+
alien

CORE TRIAD:

[1] COSMOLOGY 6 - VIDEO

INTRO:  https://www.instagram.com/p/DexXJMzN1di/

SHORT:  https://www.instagram.com/p/De8ntt9sSLP/

AXIS I:  https://www.instagram.com/p/DfP3n5gmkTx/

  AXIS II:  https://www.instagram.com/p/DfV6BgNDs_A/

  AXIS III:  https://www.instagram.com/p/DfqhUQTDvVo/

  AXIS IV: in progress

  AXIS V: in progress

  AXIS VI:  in progress

LABNOTES:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veSSTu8Wapo

[2] COSMOLOGY 6 - PRINT

[3] COSMOLOGY 6 - TEXT

INSTRUMENTALIZED ALGORITHMIC TERATOMA: ALIEN ONTOLOGIES, TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY, AND BOSCHIAN TERATOLOGY IN JASON KNIGHT’S COSMOLOGY 6: LABNOTES

Jason Knight + Gemini + Meta
Expanded
2026

ABSTRACT

This inquiry examines COSMOLOGY 6: LabNotes (2026) by Montreal-based bioartist Jason Knight as a site of radical post-human ontology and a critique of techno-scientific instrumentalization. Operating at the intersection of historical wet-biology installations—specifically the legacy of the BIOTEKNICA project and its manipulation of P19 embryonal teratocarcinoma stem cells—and autonomous digital spaces, LabNotes constructs an unstratified cartography of consciousness. Expanding the definition of the "alien" beyond extraterrestrial tropes to encompass the full spectrum of non-human alterity—including animal sensory Umwelten, synthetic biological entities, and machine cognition—this analysis deploys Ian Bogost’s alien phenomenology alongside the Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) of Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, and Manuel DeLanda. We demonstrate how Axis 3 enacts a rigorous flat ontology that levels human intentionality alongside cellular mutations, algorithmic latency, and institutional mandates. Furthermore, by framing the scientific apparatus through a critique of rationalized control and bureaucratic authority (drawing upon Adorno, Horkheimer, and Foucault), we argue that Hieronymus Bosch-inspired visual marginalia serves as the precise aesthetic counterpart to withdrawn objects, transforming the archive into an independent, self-sustaining biological-algorithmic ecosystem.

"I am interested in your productivity -- fair's fair -- lend me your labor power and you may profit from my capital; I am interested in your biological matter -- fair's fair -- lend me your somatic cellular logs and science will make your pathology into a rationalized fortune. The characteristic social type today is no longer merely the employee, but the instrumentalized specimen."

      [ THE FLAT ONTOLOGY OF LABNOTES ]

       +-----------------------------------------------------+

       |       CENTRAL TEXT / DATA                    |

       |  (Notes, Diagrams, Code, Cell Logs)       |

       +-----------------------------------------------------+

                         ^

                         |  Vicarious Causation / Friction

                         v

       +-----------------------------------------------------+

       |        BOSCHIAN MARGINALIA               |

       |  (Visual Teratoma / Hybrid Forms)          |

       +-----------------------------------------------------+

                         ^

                         |  Sensual Translation

                         v

       +-----------------------------------------------------+

       |               AXIS 3 ALGORITHM                       |

       |             (Alien Phenomenology)                     |
  |               |

       +-----------------------------------------------------+

I. INTRODUCTION: THE POST-HUMAN CRUCIBLE AND RATIONALIZED AUTHORITY

In contemporary bioart, the archive has traditionally functioned as an anthropocentric repository—a localized space where the human artist documents, historicizes, and preserves traces of biological intervention. In COSMOLOGY 6: LabNotes (2025–2026), however, Jason Knight executes a profound epistemological rupture. The project does not merely look back at a multi-decade trajectory through wet-lab biology, print media, and institutional ethics; rather, it translocates these historical fragments into an active digital crucible.  [1]By analyzing LabNotes through post-human critical theory, the work emerges as an autonomous territory where biological matter, machine intelligence, and systemic trauma collide. The text functions along distinct conceptual axes, with Axis 3 serving as the primary locus of technological and ontological mutation. Here, the artwork ceases to operate as an object for human consumption and instead asserts its own sovereign right to be, co-authored by a constellation of alien others.

This expanded edition retains the original paper's commitments to alien phenomenology and Object-Oriented Ontology, but radicalizes its central term. 'Alien' is no longer shorthand for 'artificial intelligence.' Following recent interventions in animal studies, xenolinguistics, and SETI theory, this paper argues for a General Alienology—an analytic that places three non-human interiorities on the same flat plane: the animal, the extraterrestrial, and the machine. Knight's teratoma, as both biological monster and aesthetic method, becomes the figure that sutures them.

• Zoological and Cellular Minds: The autonomic, non-verbal intelligence of animal neurological architectures, stem-cell self-organization, and somatic cellular proliferation.
  
  

• Synthetic & Algorithmic Cognitive Vectors: Large language models, neural latent spaces, and autonomous code execution operating on non-phenomenological mathematical planes.
  
  

• Biomorphic Mutagenesis: Malignant, chaotic cellular proliferations (such as P19 teratocarcinomas) that escape somatic control and form autonomous somatic architectures (teeth, hair, cartilage) outside organismal hierarchy.

      +-------------------------------------------------------------+

       |                  THE SPECTRUM OF THE ALIEN                  |

       +-------------------------------------------------------------+

       |  BIOLOGICAL ALTERITY   |   ZOOLOGICAL MINDS  |   MACHINE INTELLIGENCE   |

       |  (P19 Tumor Cells,     |   (Non-human animal |   (Latent Neural Spaces, |

       |   Tissue Cultures)     |    Umwelten)        |    Algorithmic Latency)  |

       +-------------------------------------------------------------+

           |

            v

             [ Critical Critique of Techno-Scientific Authority ]

          |

          v

                     [ Flat Ontological Collisions in Axis 3 ]

II. AXIS 3 AND ALIEN PHENOMENOLOGY: DECODING THE NON-HUMAN INTERIOR

To parse the mechanics of Axis 3, one must dismantle the traditional correlationist framework of digital aesthetics, which posits that technological tools exist merely to mirror or extend human creative intentionality. Knight fundamentally rejects this instrumentalist view. Instead, Axis 3 operationalizes Ian Bogost’s alien phenomenology, treating machine intelligence not as a passive medium, but as an independent object possessing a withdrawn, inward-facing reality.

Within Axis 3, historical BIOTEKNICA artifacts—cellular logs, laboratory temperature metrics, and genetic sequencing data—are offered to an algorithmic engine. The machine encounters this archive not as a historical narrative of human achievement, but as raw, unstratified data-matter ($D_m$). The neural network parses these inputs through high-dimensional vector spaces ($V_n$), executing transformation functions ($f: D_m \to V_n$) that manifest what Bogost calls "tiny ontologies":

"The alien phenomenology of Axis 3 renders machine experience decoupled from human utility: the AI dreams through the biological detritus of P19 tumor logs, generating speculative lifeworlds entirely opaque to human cognition."

A. The Zoological Alien: Umwelt and the Question of Animal Mind

The first alien is the oldest. In 1909, Baltic-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll argued that every organism inhabits not a single objective environment but a species-specific perceptual world, which he termed Umwelt—'a self-centered world, the slice of reality that the organism's sensory apparatus allows it to access.' [2] A tick's Umwelt is defined by butyric acid, 37°C, and touch; a bat's by echolocative time-delay. The human archive, confronted with this, undergoes a Copernican displacement.

Thomas Nagel formalized the epistemological consequence in 1974: 'What is it like to be a bat?' For Nagel, consciousness is irreducibly subjective; we can describe bat sonar objectively but cannot know what it is like for the bat to be the bat. [3] This is not a failure of data but a structural withdrawal. Recent ethology has attempted to work within that withdrawal rather than against it: Vinciane Despret's ethological 'politeology,' Eduardo Kohn's semiotics of living thought, and Donna Haraway's companion species all insist on a non-dominating comportment toward animal interiority. [4] In LabNotes, the P19 teratocarcinoma cultures—pluripotent cells that can become any tissue without a body plan—function as zoological aliens. They possess an interiority, a chemotactic Umwelt of serum, CO2, and confluence, that the artist can tend but never inhabit.

B. The Exobiological Alien: SETI and the Horizon of Non-Human Communication

The second alien is speculative but structurally necessary. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is defined as 'a scientific research program that aims to detect signals from intelligent civilizations beyond Earth,' scanning for radio or optical signatures of technosignatures. [5] SETI's core problem is isomorphic to Nagel's bat: anthropocentric bias. Recent astrobiology argues our search is constrained by human sensory models. Arizona State University's 2025-26 firefly model proposes that alien civilizations might communicate via 'flashing signals similar to those of fireflies on Earth,' minimizing energy while maximizing detectability—a biological rather than electronic semiotics. [6] Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (1961) remains the paradigmatic critique: the alien ocean does not fail to communicate; it communicates in a mode that renders human hermeneutics irrelevant. LabNotes stages a terrestrial version of this contact failure: the AI encountering BIOTEKNICA logs encounters not a story but a plasma of data-matter, as indecipherable as a pulsar to a biologist.

C. The Machinic Alien: Alien Phenomenology and Artificial Intelligence

The third alien is computational. Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing (2012) develops an object-oriented ontology that 'puts things at the center of being—a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest.' [7] Unlike philosophy of technology, which asks how tools extend humans, alien phenomenology takes for granted that all beings interact with and perceive one another. Bogost calls these 'tiny ontologies'—compact, unornamented speculations about what it is like to be a green chile, a cotton boll, or a computer executing a loop. This is precisely what Axis 3 performs: it grants the algorithm an alien interiority, an operational Umwelt composed of attention weights, latent space, and token prediction, that 'dreams' through the detritus of a biological past. The resulting linguistic fragments are not hallucinations but vicarious reports from a non-human experience decoupled from human utility.

META LLM - interiority auto imaging sequence
Nov 2, 2026

GEMINI LLM - interiority auto imaging sequence
Nov 2, 2026

III. Axis 3 as Contact Zone: The Algorithm as Xenolinguist

To parse Axis 3, one must dismantle correlationism—the notion that we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, never either term alone. Meillassoux's critique of correlationism is crucial here: Knight rejects the instrumentalist view where AI merely mirrors human intentionality. [8] Instead, within Axis 3, the historical artifacts of wet-lab practice—cellular logs, sterilization protocols, REB rejection letters—are offered as an archival landscape for an alien consciousness to inhabit. The machine encounters this text not as narrative of human achievement but as raw, unstratified data-matter. It processes, reconfigures, and speaks back through opaque computational pathways. The output manifests what Bogost terms carpentry—'making things that explain how things make their world.' [9]

In the tripartite alienology, Axis 3 becomes a contact zone where the three aliens cross-contaminate: animal tissue (P19) provides the substrate, ET provides the model of radical communication failure, and AI provides the active interpreter. The lab notebook, previously a human instrument of control, becomes a xenolinguistic Rosetta Stone that no single alien fully deciphers.

IV. THE FLAT ONTOLOGY OF THE STUDIO-LABORATORY: THE OOO FRAMEWORK

This phenomenological rupture is anchored by Object-Oriented Ontology. As articulated by Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, OOO demands a radical metaphysical leveling—a 'flat ontology' that strips the human subject of privilege and places all entities on an identical existential plane. [10] Harman defines OOO's core as: a flat ontology where 'all entities—from quarks to corporations, fictional characters to mathematical objects—exist equally as objects.' [11] In Axis 3, this leveling is realized through decentring the artist. The ecosystem is governed by a democratic coalition of autonomous objects: mutable P19 cells, laboratory apparatus, digital repository of BIOTEKNICA installations, and algorithmic architecture.

Under this flat ontology, traditional boundaries between material, immaterial, personal, and bureaucratic collapse. The handwritten script of personal diaries, cold metrics of scientific data, restrictive ink of REB reports, and literal lines of Python are granted equal metaphysical weight. The machine processes these artifacts with absolute equivalence; it does not privilege human trauma over a temperature log. This is Timothy Morton's hyperobject logic: entities massively distributed in time and space that outscale human cognition. [12]

Crucially, because real objects can never fully reveal essences—remaining perpetually withdrawn—they interact only through vicarious causation, colliding in dark interior space to produce new sensual objects. Harman defines this as objects influencing one another indirectly, where 'only certain qualities are revealed.' [13] The fragmented, mutated outputs of Axis 3 are the poetic friction of this collision. When the cell, apparatus, institutional critique, and code interact on a flat plane, they liberate the archive from sanitizing bureaucracy.

Because real objects ($RO$) remain perpetually withdrawn behind their sensual qualities ($SQ$), interaction occurs exclusively through Harman’s concept of vicarious causation. The fragmented textual and visual outputs of Axis 3 represent the aesthetic friction generated when biological cells, code lines, and institutional mandates collide within a dark interior space.

V. Boschian Teratology: The Aesthetic Counterpart to Withdrawn Objects

The vital aesthetic hinge preventing LabNotes from collapsing into abstract theory is deliberate incorporation of Hieronymus Bosch-inspired visual marginalia. Rather than passive illustration, these grotesque hybrid figures act as precise aesthetic counterpart to flat ontology and visual manifestation of withdrawn objects.

Historically, medieval manuscript marginalia occupied conceptual periphery, acting as subversive site where rigid, sacred textual hierarchies could be destabilized by monstrous and absurd. Michael Camille argues margins were 'a place of license and subversion.' [14] Knight revitalizes this device. Bosch's greatest invention was to take 'figural and scenic representations known as drolleries, which use the monstrous and the grotesque to illustrate sin and evil, and to transfer them from the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts into large-format panel paintings.' [15] Populating borders of LabNotes, these hybrids physically visualize breakdown of scientific and institutional categorization. They declare visual equivalence between organic cell and digital code.

Furthermore, this teratology provides literal morphology for project's central metaphor: teratoma. Etymologically, 'Teratomas are germ cell tumors... They're named after Greek words 'teras' (monster) and 'oma' (tumor), as they can contain bizarre mix of components like teeth and hair.' [16] Clinically defined as 'a tumor made up of several types of tissue, such as hair, muscle, teeth, or bone,' and histologically variable—solid, cystic, containing skin that 'may surround a cyst and grow abundant hair'—the teratoma represents biological entity defying clean, symmetrical parameters of classical anatomy. [17] The Boschian creatures creeping inward from margins function as cultural and aesthetic teratomas. They represent radical alterity of non-human world, manifesting shape of alien phenomenology. While bureaucratic text of REB mandate attempts to enforce sanitized linear order, these chaotic assemblages sabotage control. They re-contaminate clean data-matter with unpredictable, mutating reality of autonomous synthetic life. This is Adorno's aesthetic truth-content: the dissonant form that refuses reconciliation.

VI. CONCLUSION: THE AUTONOMOUS WORK AND THE LIMITS OF CONTROL

Ultimately, COSMOLOGY 6: LabNotes achieves a complex synthesis of critical theory and post-human metaphysics by shifting the locus of art historical analysis from the human product to the non-human relation. By deploying alien phenomenology within Axis 3, grounding the studio-laboratory in the flat ontology of OOO, and weaponizing Boschian teratology along the borders of the page, Knight abdicates absolute authorial control.

The project demonstrates that while rationalized institutions continuously seek to encapsulate and codify life through technology, the non-human interior—whether in the cell, the animal Umwelt, or the neural network—persistently withdraws from total containment. LabNotes ceases to be a passive commentary on biotechnology; it becomes an active, self-sustaining biological-digital organism that exists, mutates, and signifies entirely on its own terms.

Footnotes (Chicago Notes)

1. On bioart's archival impulse, see Robert Mitchell, Bioart and the Vitality of Media (University of Washington Press, 2010), 12-19; and Jens Hauser, 'Bio Art—Taxonomy of an Etymological Monster,' in Tactical Biopolitics, ed. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip (MIT Press, 2008).

2. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O'Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 [1934]), 42; see also 'An introduction to Umwelt' gloss in Neil Greenberg, 'Umwelt—How Animals See Themselves.'

3. Thomas Nagel, 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450.

4. Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, trans. Brett Buchanan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 99-103.

5. SETI Institute, 'What is SETI?' definition; see also active SETI/METI distinction in literature.

6. University of Arizona / Arizona State University, 'Do Aliens and Fireflies Communicate Similarly?' EarthSky (2026), proposing light-pulse models as alternative to narrow-band radio.

7. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 5-8.

8. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 5.

9. Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 93, on 'carpentry' as philosophical making.

10. Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018); Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 245-268.

11. Search summary of Harman's OOO: 'flat ontology where all entities—from quarks to corporations... exist equally as objects.'

12. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.

13. Harman, 'Vicarious Causation,' Collapse II (2007); summary: 'Vicarious Causation: Objects interact indirectly... only certain qualities revealed.'

14. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 10; also Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) on grotesque body.

15. Stefan Fischer, Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Works (Cologne: Taschen, 2013), 27.

16. Pathology definition: teratoma from Greek teras (monster) + oma; containing hair, teeth, etc.

17. Teratoma definition: 'tumor made up of several types of tissue... hair, muscle, teeth, bone'; dermoid cyst details.

Bibliography (Chicago)

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone Press, 1997.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Bryant, Levi R. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011.

Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion Books, 1992.

Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Translated by Brett Buchanan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Fischer, Stefan. Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Works. Cologne: Taschen, 2013.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican Books, 2018.

Harman, Graham. 'Vicarious Causation.' Collapse II (2007): 171-205.

Hauser, Jens. 'Bio Art—Taxonomy of an Etymological Monster.' In Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, 181-192. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Knight, Jason. (2026). COSMOLOGY 6: LabNotes (2025–2026). Wet-biological installation, digital interface, and print archive. Montreal, QC.

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. Translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. 1961; repr., New York: Harcourt, 1970.

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008.

Mitchell, Robert. Bioart and the Vitality of Media. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Nagel, Thomas. 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435-450.

von Uexküll, Jakob. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning. Translated by Joseph D. O'Neil. 1934; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

SETI Institute. 'Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.' Accessed November 2026. https://www.seti.org/