Larval Rock Stars
Larval Rock Stars is an ongoing multi-modal project (website, writing, performance/sound/video experiments, couplings, twinning, etc) of the distributed intelligence of the orbifold twins who hold the larvae between them - Pilarva (Praba Pilar) and Larvaidya (Anuj Vaidya), also known as Pilarvaidya. We intersect the bio-techno-critical and the absurd as the segmented paramythology of larvae of the post-human future. “Behold the larva we hold between us – the formless, shapeless, and unknowable potential for new life on earth.” Born of prophesy, and precipitated by the hubris of man, LRS brings tidings of a new future – a post-human future, and offers movement from necrotic egocentrism to biotic ecocentrism.
Larval Rock Stars share gleanings from their paramythologies on ?The Question Mark? These gleanings have been featured at “Perverse Pleasures: Queer Digital Shorts from South Asia and the Diaspora” (Brown University, MA) and South Asia Studies Conference (University of Wisconsin, Madison); Arts, Ecologies & New Materialisms Microsymposium: “Facing the Inhuman”, Centre for Research and Education in Arts & Media, University of Westminster, London; and other locations.
On Saturday, October 2, 2021, Larval Rock Stars presented From Blue Origin New Shepard to Goo Origin CGCB Gonadal ART Machine at the 2021 Society for Science, Literature and the Arts Conference, on the Mind thGAP: the Transgenic Human Genome Alternatives Project (thGAP): Open Source Bioinformatics for Human Gene Editing panel with Adam Zaretsky (NADLinc, United States); Paula Pin (researcher and artist activist, Spain); Cristian Delgado (Nehemeni Labs, Mexico); and Marc Dusseiller (Hackteria, Switzerland). In this talk, we discussed the outcomes from our series of global seances, where we’ve explored innovative and novel methods of securing funding for the World Congress on New Reproductive Technologies, and the Creative Germline Constructs Bank (CGCB).
Larval Rock Stars’ released our latest record, Brain Goo: Experiments in the Sonics of Holometaboly as part of the Transgenic Human Genome Alternatives Project (thGAP) at Hackteria in Zurich, Switzerland on May 16, 2021. We shared our musical and laboratory experiments on holometaboly and reprotech with the public.
Over 2021, Larval Rock Stars will be virtual collaborators in the Transgenic Human Genome Alternatives Project (thGAP) - a series of “hybrid” labs on ReproTech & Arts/Germline Hacks and Designer Babies, hosted by Hackteria’s wet-lab artist-in-residence Adam Zaretsky and virtual collaborators around the planet Earth.
Larval Futures and The Pedagogy of the Pluriverse, November 20, 2020
Live performance/presentation, as part of the series Unsettling the Present: FemiQueer Frames, presented in collaboration with Strike University in Professor Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Feminist Theory Open Classroom at Montclair State University.
2020 Larval Rock Stars founding member Anuj Vaidya essay Forest Tales: Toward a Practice of Eco-Cinema published in Performance Matters 6.1 (2020):48–67. In this essay analyzing concepts of ecocinema alongside Vaidya’s experiments to cinematically ‘return the forest to the forest,’ Vaidya defines larval cinema, as:
A larval cinema, therefore, enacts a politics of retreat, and I use “retreat” here in its multiple valences. As a noun, a retreat is a place of refuge and reflection, a place from where to start again with renewed insight. As a verb, to retreat is to refuse engagement with the extractive “ecologics” (Ivakhiv 2008, 24) of cinema; it is as much as a strategic withdrawal as it is a reorientation: not a retreat from cinema, rather a retreat to the cinematic. The cinematic is a field of vision that expands cinema’s purview beyond the image to include the apparatus through which these images are made, circulated, consumed, and eventually disposed of. It makes visible the embodied entanglements of cinema, which works through and on the body. Rather than viewing cinema as simply a cultural phenomenon, a larval cinema demands that we not separate nature and culture, but rather recognize cinema as a natural-cultural phenomenon that emerges from and merges back into the biophysical world.
2019 Larval Rock Stars co publication, Eco-Poetics for a Pluriverse in Transit co-written with Alex Wilson, Elin Már Øyen Vister, and mirko nikolić. In MAI: FEMINISM & VISUAL CULTURE, Issue 4: 'Feminist New Materialist Practice - The Mattering of Methods,' published May 21, 2019.
Behold the Larvalscene Performance at Third Street Gallery, San Francisco, California, 2017
How does the universe speak? How does it bear witness? How does it, in all humility, undo itself? From radioactive waste to microplastic pollution, from military bio-engineering to genome sequencing, the Anthropocene has reduced the embodied emergent to a machinic eradication. We transit collective toxic entanglements by decentering the false consciousness of the human – a sad artifact of the ‘hubris of the zero point’ (Castro-Gómez). We transitivize segments of the LRS paramythology to help Homo Sapiens crawl away from scopophilia, logocentrism, and ecocide. We model ecdysis, or moulting, as a proliferative technique to discard the ideological parasite of human exceptionalism (Loa loa ideologica), and restore states of larval potential. Our distributed intelligence contages others into co-creating the microbial proletariat to usher in the post-human Larvalscene.
Photos by Martin Franco.
Eco-Belligerence, from performances during our second eclosion, various locations, 2017-2018. Please start video at 2 minute mark. Each eclosion is a metamorphosal stage in the unfolding of Pilarvaidya. Mothers, daughters, grandmothers to each other, we are kin of unknown origin crawling astride binary narratives of biology and (re)production. We are guided by the wisdom of the ‘question mark’; it is a conceptual measure of the infinite possibility of the unknown, and an embodied presence leading us towards our metamorphosal destiny at the edge of the sixth extinction.
Ambient Performance at Environmentalism Outside the Box: An EcoSex Symposium, Santa Cruz, California. May 17-20, 2017
Larval Rock Stars brought their Pupation Station to Environmentalism Outside the Box EcoSex Symposium, a multi-disciplinary gathering to explore our relationships with the environment and social justice, engage in human/non-human collaboration, critique ideologies and debate new sexualities.
Participants ingested larvae, tried our Question Mark Re-Visioning Lenses, walked the labyrinth of the Question Mark, and imbibed the possibilities of larval becomings.
Photos by Zen Cohen.
2017 Science and Technology Studies Retreat Workshop, Headlands, California
In this workshop, we transitivized segments of LRS paramythologies which help homo sapiens crawl away from scopophilia, logocentrism, false consciousness, hubris, and ecocide. We shared our growing tales/tails, our practices of ecdysis or moulting, and with participants co-created contagions of existing ‘technology’ with multi-species biotic-tech. Together, we amplified our larval sensoriums to offer movement from necrotic egocentrism to biotic ecocentrism.
Environmental Humanities and New Materialisms: The Ethics of Decolonizing Nature and Culture, Paris, France. June 9, 2017
Larval Rock Stars joined Alex Wilson, Elin Oyen Vister, and mirko nikolic to dialogue, think and make together and then share our practices of an eco-poetics and bioethics for a pluriverse in transit. We were unable to travel to Paris at this time, so participated remotely.
“The Second Nature” Riga, Latvia, September 19, 2017
By acknowledging the work of First Nations, Inuit and Māori cultures in thinking an expanded idea of ecology, The Second Nature inhabits a collapsed border between the self and the environment, and between those who protect, and that which is to be protected. On the one side it drags the human as part of nature in the ecological concerns; on the other it explores the assigning of a political agency to non-human entities, challenging the anthropocentric delimitation of political agency at the core of Western politics. A program in the middle of nature to reflect on nature with feminist and indigenous ecologies.
With Elizabeth Povinelli, Karrabing Film Collective, Candice Hopkins, a concert by Uyarakq; a sound intervention by Elin Már Øyen Vister, Mirko Nikolić, Alex Wilson and Larval Rock Stars, and the screening of Melanie Bonajo’s Nocturnal Gardening in the forest.
Gleanings from our first eclosion can be found in the ruins of the following website: www.larvalrockstars.wordpress.com