Aodhan Madden on Sporal, in Worldbuilding, Gaming and Art in the Digital Age (Hatje Cantz, 2024)

Mimosa Echard’s shape-shifting practice is positioned somewhere within the horizon of ‘images’, images as inherently undetermined things. Whether it be through the use of techniques grounded in the history of experimental cinema – such as superposition – the history of collage – juxtaposition – or within the historical vocabulary of feminist abstraction – Benglis’ excessive pouring, for example – her work unbinds the seeming (and literal) status of the image as ‘evidence’, blurring any definition of what that thing might be.
If one were to take this further – because after all, many contemporary artists might show us the inadequacies of current aesthetic categories – the particular way in which Echard makes images break down is through a kind of dissolution. Take for instance her series of ‘paintings’ Numbs (2021) where pharmaceutical capsules subtly bleed into her compositions, their colour dissolved into the work’s surface alongside various other stuck objects: medicinal flowers, mirrors, photographic prints, sex toys, glass beads, fake hair, fake nails, a model of the moon. Like the skin of the repeated bare-bottom androgynous figure in each of the works, the accumulation of these elements suspends the paintings’ surface in a moment of impossible absorption, the glut of pharmakoi both concealing and revealing the black hole (anus) of representation itself.
Shown in the Centre Pompidou Metz edition of Worldbuilding, her videogame Sporal, presented in the form of three recorded Twitch streams and a painting, further expands and complicates the idea of how an image might dissolve. Developed through her encounters with various Japanese scientists working with myxomycetes – an unclassifiable, unicellular and ‘intelligent’ organism, otherwise known as slime moulds – Sporal began as a song that Echard commissioned from Koharu Yanigaya, a Kyoto-based musician and shamisen master. Inspired by the many transformations that occur across the organism’s life cycle, the lyrics retell a variation of Kiyohime and Anchin, a Japanese folk tale of love and vengeance, where Kiyohime transforms herself into a dragon-snake and burns Anchin alive. This song has since been absorbed within the videogame, the player encountering elements of Kiyohime’s narrative within a slimy, shiny environment assembled out of various other references, characters and objects: 3D-scanned agar jelly; a dysphoric seahorse; the mandala of Minakata Kumugusu1¹; spore idols; talking flowers; Charli XCX’s voice; droplets of various fluids; among many, many other things. Supposedly not a game about slime moulds, but rather a speculation on their desire – their ‘one cell fantasy’ – Sporal displaces this organism from its habitual (and popular) ‘scientific’ context, situating it within a network of different (social, cultural) elements that dissolve any notion of what this organism really is. Where slime moulds have in some ways been fetishized within scientific pop culture as a signifier of ‘smart’ non-human agency, Echard metabolises this image, suspending and complicating notions around what ‘intelligence’, ‘reproduction’ and ‘objectivity’ might mean within the confines of classical Western epistemology.
Yet, and perhaps most importantly in the context of Worldbuilding, Echard never presents Sporal as a game as such. In the gallery, the viewers’ experience is always mediated by something else: a monumental patchwork, another player, a glitch, or ‘recycled’ within a painting. For Echard, Sporal is not an end in itself, but rather a rhizomatic means to play with another kind of fluid ‘new media’ metaphor: immersion, and its limits. Where video games as an art form can be thought of as a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk, in Echard’s practice, this proliferating totality is always somewhat compromised, any promise of transcendence always partially corrupted. Rather than leaving the body, both the viewer and the work are suspended in a state of tension, between the boundedness of embodied matter, and its hypothetical dissolution. In other words, if Sporal attempts to make an ‘image’ of the desire to escape one’s biological categorisation through the inherent ecstatic/dysphoric qualities of immersive states and slime moulds, this desire always leaves something behind, not yet absorbed, still stuck on this side of image’s horizon.