The Whispering Garden explores ideas of post-digital participation within the setting of bio-digital assemblages
of interspecies collaboration. As part of the Transindividual Protocols series, the project draws on Gilbert
Simondon’s notion of transindividuality as the sensual, affectual, and ecological interpretation of the social
model of becoming collective, to explore collaborative design methods that address the endemic disconnection
of agencies and technological infrastructures within the current digital participatory practice. As an
entanglement of matter, technologies and living species, an expanded notion of transindividual subjectivity is
constructed as the entry point for the reconceptualization of the collective and extended processes of
cognition, describing novel trajectories for aesthetic speculations that transcend matters of organised
complexity to introduce neo-baroque principles of instability and polydimensionality.
The paper describes the theoretical and methodological framework that spurred this specific investigation by
outlining the results emerging from previous design-research practice that used Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)
to map emotional feedback from human participants. Within this line of enquiry, the project further draws on
biological and bio-computing studies that used the measurement of extracellular action-potential to determine
neural activity and excitation in algal and fungal colonies, as the basis for an exploration of transindividual
protocols for multi-agential collaboration. Constructed as a coevolutionary cognitive infrastructure that
incorporates parallelism of processing and learning through principles of performative feedback and machine
learning, the Whispering Garden offers a critical precedent of a mediated human-biological protocol of
communication with the potential to affect spatialised transcalar and translocal assemblages of collaboration
