Laboratory for Other Worlds was installed at the Bellevue Arts Museum from 2022-2023. It explored our connection to the more-than-human world of plants and microbes through the lens of the Environmental Humanities, an interdisciplinary area of study that combines art, philosophy, and science. This exhibition is a series of imagination exercises to de-center the human individual and to create space for non-human perspectives. Viewers are invited to push past the limits of objectivity and rationality to experience the installation as a set of tools or devices for understanding expanded ways of being with the wider world.

This work was inspired by more-than-human participatory research practices undertaken at All Faiths Cemetery in Queens, NY. This work takes into account the idea that human life and death are constituted through many non-human forces, from the microbes in our guts, to the insects, plants, and fungi that we live symbiotically with, to the gods and spirits that we summon, all of which connect us to a larger cosmology and to each other.

The installation is in four parts: Cthonos (a multimedia video installation), Plant Communication Devices, Psychic Corporeal Maps, and the Study Center

Photographs by Mark Woods Studio, Seattle, WA

Patte Loper

Patte Loper