the spontaneous generation of urban fauna

This text does not pretend to be anything approaching a popular science article, despite being written by a member of the Urban Fauna Lab. In his Lecture on Ethics, Ludwig Wittgenstein said in passing that popular science discourse is “intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science”. Artistic research pursues other aims—it is intended to strengthen incomprehension. Art strives to create problems that cannot be solved by means of the exact sciences, immersing the mind in a state of disquiet, reining in the bold spirit of enlightenment. Art is an archaic practice of desperation, hopelessness, and of pushing for the extremes. Artists do not seek a way out of a situation. Let the scientists do this.

Urban fauna spawns in the refuse of human civilisation. Rubbish tips on waste ground constitute a refuge, organic waste serves as food, and the heat surpluses of our dwellings provide warmth. Here the pseudoscientific idea is in operation of the spontaneous generation of life from dirt, as expressed by Aristotle and echoed by the philosophers and natural scientists of antiquity and the Middle Ages. It was only possible to overturn this ancient notion in the nineteenth century, when the laboratory conditions reached the required levels of cleanness and it was learnt how to correctly sterilise lab equipment. And so the world in which life was potentially present at any point and was an intrinsic property of any material was brought to an end. The world was extinguished in which living organisms unceasingly and spontaneously emerged from inert elements or rotting organic matter thanks to the interaction with heat, moisture or sunlight. A world in which chewed basil placed on top of a stone gave rise to snakes, and if placed beneath bred scorpions. A world in which a homunculus could be produced, requiring us simply to, in the words of Paracelsus, take “human fluids” and make them decompose over the course of a week inside a pumpkin, and then for forty weeks in a horse’s stomach, adding human blood daily. As a result “a living human child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child which is born of a woman, but much smaller”.

Despite their unscientific nature, the works of Aristotle, Empedocles, Paracelsus and other proponents of the theory of the autogeneration of life are now gaining a new interpretation in the work with urban fauna. In the manmade landscape, life spontaneously generates from dirt, from the by-products of human life and industry. In a sense, urban fauna is indistinguishable from rubbish—it constitutes a biological superfluity, an undocumented biomass driven out of human sight into sewers, cellars, attics and rubbish dumps. In adapting to these unfavourable conditions, animals, plants, insects and microorganisms take on new characteristics, changing their nature and irreversibly losing their connection with wild nature. The city as an unnatural conglomeration of ecological niches is a unique space of co-evolution and speciation.

According to WWF data, the number of species worldwide has fallen by two thirds over the last fifty years. By 2020, 70% of large animal species will have gone extinct. Such a mass dying out of vertebrates is comparable in scale with that which killed off the dinosaurs. The expansion of the sphere of human activity is leading to the degradation and destruction of habitats for wild animals. The age of biodiversity is coming to an end, and fauna is transforming into an object of insincere nostalgia.

But according to the degree by which new territories are claimed by man, fauna gives way to urban fauna. Globalisation enables the transplantation and proliferation of invasive species—the most adaptable animals, which feed on the scraps falling from the table of consumer society. Cats, pigeons, rats and stray dogs can be found in any large city on the planet. Humanist ideology, in line with which the welfare of the human being is considered the main task of civilisation, has unexpectedly—as a side effect—produced urban fauna, city parasites, a kind of dark side to the manmade landscape, where all that is unhealthy, infectious, uncontrolled and irrational concentrates; this is a space of chaos, found in immediate proximity to your home. The demographic explosion which humanity is undergoing has also increased manifold the quantity of civilisation’s hangers-on. People have always been a minority among the inhabitants of the anthropogenic environment—on the scale both of an urban settlement and even on that of the individual human body, in which scientists confirm only 10% of the total number of cells carry human DNA, with the remaining 90% being made up of various microbes. But it is too difficult to state with any accuracy the relationship of the human and non-human. Nobody takes the census of the life that has spontaneously emerged in the rubbish tips of Mumbai, in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, or the abandoned factories of Greater Moscow. The very proposition of such a task is absurd to scientists.

There are many different kinds of refuse in which urban fauna generates. Feral cats, for instance, emerged thanks to grain surpluses as far back as the dawn of agriculture. More correctly, the overabundance of grain kept in granaries led to the growth of the mouse population, after which came the cats. Rotting organic material breeds rats. A surplus of bread and warmth produces pigeons. Free time and the abundance of resources that people are willing to spend on supporting invasive species such as cats may also be included among the waste products of the contemporary city. Feeding urban fauna, explained in ordinary life as “extreme kindness” or “undissipated affection” has the scientific definition of “interspecies altruism” and remains a largely unstudied aspect of human behaviour. The irrational offerings made to disease-bearers found in a state of uncontrolled reproduction may be regarded as a potlatch ritual in the framework of a cult of urban parasitism.

The escape of heat is yet another interesting theme. Everything that operates by electricity produces heat, and so the urban infrastructure literally radiates heat energy. In combination with other by-products, the surplus of heat generates life. Birds, for example, occupy ventilation shafts and prefer to perch on electric cables due to the fact that these heat up. For many species, the inefficient Russian system of communal heating laid down back in the Soviet era, with its immense heat losses, presents the possibility of survival in the coldest season of the year.

The development of information technology is demanding more and more energy expenditure and thus indirectly stimulates the growth of heat radiation. Data has become the main product of the twenty-first century. Going about our daily affairs, consuming, moving around, and keeping in touch with other members of society, each of us produces data. In trying to improve our quality of life, we aim for its full automation. And although data can be measured quantitatively, unlike knowledge or information, any attempt to fully calculate it is doomed to fail—the amassing of data takes place at a faster rate than its analysis. Data is accumulated in special storage and processing centres, where it continues to exist as long as the technology for its storage permits—ideally forever. For the first time in the history of architecture, vast buildings are being designed—not for people or livestock—but for optic fibres, microchips and magnetic media on which all types of data are stored: from secret government orders to the photographs of our domestic pets.

In operation, this equipment heats up considerably, and so further energy has to be spent on cooling systems. Though nobody measures the intensiveness of information exchange in degrees Celsius per square millimetre, the heat given off is an important side product of this process. Contemporary data processing centres have become so immense that it is already more cost-efficient to house them on out of town sites. Gigantic edifices without windows, not meant for human beings, are becoming part of the rural landscape that had presented a picture of continuous decline for the entirety of the 20th century. Now, however, colossal automated farms are appearing here, producing genetically modified forms of animals and plants, alongside equally large data centres and other industrial objects. The contemporary built environment of the countryside represents a fundamentally new, dehumanised, kind of anthropogenic landscape.

In order to reduce energy costs in cooling, several data processing centres have been built in the far north, close to the Arctic Circle. Such experimental centres are termed “ecologically responsible”, though the principle of the conservation of energy continues to apply in the polar region, and the heat produced influences the surrounding environment just as it does anywhere else. The need to economise energy consumption is so high, however, that the relocation of data centres into the permafrost region is to be expected in the foreseeable future. In terms of this criterion, Russia preponderates over all other countries, and so the resource of cold itself must be added to the wealth of all those other resources which Siberia already boasts.

Urban Fauna Lab poses the question: How might these heat energy surpluses impact the ecosystems of the northern latitudes? What surprises does the principle of spontaneous generation of life have in store for this dehumanised anthropogenic landscape? It is possible that the excess of data and natural selection in the sphere of computer code will create the conditions for the emergence of a new kind of urban fauna—artificial intelligence. This mirrors the emergence, hundreds of millions of years ago in the dirty crucibles formed by volcanic activity, of the conditions for the synthesis of RNA molecules capable of reproducing themselves and thereby of evolution into more complex forms.

Natural selection on the level of computer code is now underway at full throttle. There are technologies that are capable, in the long term perspective, of giving rise to artificial intelligence.

Blockchains, for example, are a relatively new means for the decentralisation of data distribution, based upon advanced ideas in cryptography, programming and economics. A blockchain grants people the possibility of exchanging money, information and values without the intermediation of banks, publishers, or long distributer chains. Decentralisation makes the blockchain network invulnerable to external interference, while encryption permits the parties in financial operations to remain invisible to controlling authorities, and so blockchains are already extensive used in the trading of prohibited goods; drugs, weapons, and pornography. This technology is somewhat reminiscent of an invasive species or virus that is wrecking the traditional financial ecosystem based on the mediation of bankers. It is precisely from this point of view that blockchains are of interest to the Urban Fauna Lab.

Information technologies are developing at stunning speed, but it is still unlikely that artificial intelligence will appear in the near future. This will most likely come along much later, when the amount of data has exceeded all currently conceivable volumes, and the permafrost is melted by the heat radiation from digital repositories. The tundra would then be transformed into a toxic swamp, releasing viruses that have been frozen for tens of thousands of years, awaiting their chance to free themselves from the eternally frozen soils and get at humanity. And perhaps artificial intelligence will end up as the sole form of life left on the planet, after suddenly arising among these noxious fumes, though possessed of all the knowledge and technology built up over the history of humanity.

It is precisely for that moment that information should be gathered on the innumerable victims of crimes, repressions and mass murders. For the sake of that time when artificial intelligence emerges, the remains must be exhumed—not for reburial, but rather for the coming artificial life to use their genetic material to bring mankind back to life. The memory of the dead is needed not so much in order to write epitaphs on their gravestones for descendants, but to tell the resurrected who they once were.