In her final 2025 Artlab Editorial Fellowship essay, writer Elvia Wilk explores Jenna Sutela’s “many-headedness”—channeling of bacteria, slime molds, and machine learning to confound notions of singular authorship. In a close reading of nimiia cétiï (2018), Wilk connects the Finnish artist’s practice to 19th-century spiritualist Hélène Smith, whose ‘Martian language’ structured the video’s uncanny vocalizations. Wilk concludes that Sutela is herself a medium—listening first, then attuning us to new frequencies.

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s Starmirror (2025), a new immersive sound installation created with sub architects, transforms Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art into a training ground for a public choral dataset. During recording sessions, choirs sing from an AI-generated songbook based on a morality play by medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen. “We see analogies between her celestial hierarchy and the stack of influential protocols that determine our culture,” the duo notes.

Musician Benn Jordan teaches a rescued European starling named ‘the Mouth’ to reproduce a spectral synthesizer drawing, demonstrating songbirds can function as biological data storage devices. Jordan’s ultrasonic recordings reveal the Mouth replicated the sound-image with striking accuracy, storing 176 KB of information. Going down an avian acoustics rabbit hole, he shows how DIY recording setups can unlock the “hidden and extremely weird world” of bird communication.