Netta Ofer
I am a design researcher exploring more-than-human design perspectives, mostly through the material and ethical qualities of living organisms. Through autobiographic design methods, bodily and movement practices, microscopy, digital fabrication, and digital art, I aim to expose entangled relations with nonhumans, human-centered assumptions, and fabulate and enact different ones. My background is in media studies, human-computer interaction (HCI), and interaction design from the Media Innovation Lab (milab) at Reichman University. I have published and demoed my research at ACM CHI, ACM DIS, and ACM IDC; and exhibited work at The Museum of Boulder and The Arvada Center. I am a PhD candidate at The ATLAS Institute at University of Colorado Boulder, co-advised by Joel Swanson and Laura Devendorf.
 
Email: netta.ofer [at] colorado.edu
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Artist Statement
I investigate the hierarchical nature of human-nonhuman relationships, specifically living organisms. I use design research, embodied practices, and visual art for exposing anthropocentric contact zones and challenging narrow perspectives. From examining the surveillance in microscopic observation to designing embodied interactions with nonhuman organisms, I explore how human exceptionalism shapes the links between bodies and how we perceive them. My practice often relies on growing and tending to nonhuman organisms for surfacing points of connection and tension between our humanism, ourselves, and other agentic forces. These practices reveal what is in-becoming, overlooked, and uncertain in a world that is polarized and forced into categories.

Tracing Slime mold


This work proposes tracing as a material practice that surfaces insights on care and relation in the rich space between the human-designer and organism. Using creative material practices to richly follow and explore the behaviors of the nonhuman living organism (in this work, slime mold, i.e., physarum polycephalum), we capture both the slime mold’s ways and our own, inviting us to observe our actions to facilitate its life. I traced slime mold through visualizations, embodied experiences, and sonifying electrical resistance, all acting as “arts of noticing” within the motivation of stepping out of our own perspectives and ways of viewing the world, and an aim to take on other ones. By tracing experiences of growing and making with slime mold, we re-orient toward nonhuman perspectives and discuss how such practices might advance capacities of design research. 

I outline the process of tracing below:




Below are three tracing explorations of slime mold:


Measuring electrical resistance of slime mold.

Sonification of electrical resistance captured over the course of 8 days.





Published as a full paper in DIS 2024.