Living Ideas

Living Ideas is a microbiome of ideas, rendered in clay. Across roughly four hundred polymer sculptures, Shono mapped a hypothetical organism that he imagined to be spreading quietly across the research campus during his residency at Eawag's Department of Environmental Microbiology. The form takes the shape of a mind map: nodes and clusters and isolated outliers, growing into and away from one another like colonies on a slide.

The work emerged from conversations with the researchers themselves. Shono asked each of them how original they believed their ideas to be, and how those ideas might behave if they were living things. From those answers the organism took its shape, and from its shape further questions followed. How do ideas connect and grow? How do some stick and flourish while others remain isolated and die? What drives an idea to spread, or to survive? Can an original idea exist in isolation from the wider network it belongs to?

The installation hands these questions back to the people who handle ideas for a living, inviting them to observe their own thinking as a living system, and to consider that the organism studied in the petri dish may behave much like the one inside the head bent over it.