FORMATA is a multi-sensory art installation that simulates the conditions of a hypothetical planet rich in liquid formamide, enclosed within a bioreactor. Inside, chemically animated blobs drift, transform, and self-divide in the primordial liquid. These entities are composed of abiotic fatty acids, amino acids and hydrocarbons—substances that mirror those found in meteorites and comets. The bioreactor’s environment departs dramatically from terrestrial norms: its atmosphere includes carbon monoxide, ammonia, and argon, while its rocky surface contains warm pools of formamide. Within these pools, the blobs enact a continuous choreography of movement and metamorphosis.

By staging alien active matter, we aim to challenge the entrenched anthropocentric mindset that dominates our utilitarian understanding of matter. For us it is important that the audience experiences how these unfamiliar entities become operative and autonomous in an alien environment. We aim to reveal how their ability to act is rooted in their materiality, without the need for complex mechanisms, genetic instructions or water. In other words, we aim to exhibit how a self-assembled body, an embedded protometabolism, the capability to deform, move and self-divide are all present within these agents in the form of material agency.

In this work, alienness and the perception that these entities are not yet alive but already more-than-inanimate confront visitors on multiple sensory and conceptual levels. This bodily encounter between the audience and alien active matter is critical to the project. It is important not only in the way that these entities materialize non-human agency, alien life, and the unknown, but also for the way in which they compel us to re-evaluate our place in an active, more-than human cosmos.

That alien matter can be experienced as active and performative, as a physical and sensual encounter, can not only help us understand how matter itself behaves, but also allow us to rethink the basis for how we perceive and relate to materials, objects and the living. Through these bodily encounters, FORMATA challenges the prevailing narratives that shape our engagement with matter, paving the way for an ‘unscaled agency’ where living, partially alive, and non-living entities coalesce.