Created by Isabell Bullerschen, Ipseria is a series of works that explore blending of realities and deconstruction and rewriting of narratives. By deploying meta-surgical method, her work serves as a scalpel to dissect anthropocentrism where the the binary of human relationships are cut open and insides are turned out.

Organisms like humans and the Earth are holobionts permeated by slime. These biofilms represent the biggest and oldest biocoenosis on the planet. Like these communities of microorganisms, Ipseria is individual and group simultaneously – a single organism and a whole body of slime, a mono- and a multi-entity. Ipseria appears/appear at interfaces and boundary areas of the spheres, on mucous membranes, bridging the living and the Umwelt (environment), the inside and the outside. They know how much an organism can take, and they keep the delicate balance of a system. They mediate, communicate, indicate, and remember. Thinking runs through slime. Knowing is fairly distributed. 

Isabell Bullerschen

The project has produced a range of outcomes, including a two-channel animation video, a virtual reality (VR) experience, and a series of physical installations and objects. Like a warm echo reverberating from a fleshy wall or a slimy membrane, the polyphonic voice of a disembodied entity – oddly non-human and human at the same time—guides the viewer through the animation, based on 3D scans of physically modeled and found objects as well as collected materials. In the exhibition Night Pieces: A Foreign Body Within, curated by CHEN Min, Ipseria takes form as a two-channel video installation accompanied by a 3.45 x 13.16 meter wallpaper. Meanwhile, in the WE ARE AIA exhibition at Löwenbräukunst (Zurich, CH), Ipseria appears in a multifaceted form—as a mixed reality installation populated with spatial objects reminiscent of atoms, box jellies, slime molds, leopard slugs, or social amoebas. Equally, at the Werkschau Kanton Zürich install, we find yet another cave of intelligent slime, this time tendon-like screens and columns made from latex, agar, glycerine, and garden fleece invite visitors to get absorbed in the lulling audiovisual landscape.  Within these environments, visitors are invited to cross over into a VR realm enhanced by haptic, olfactory, and auditory elements.

Although ipseria is/are an inherent potential in humans, it/they is/are being inactivated by rational knowledge systems. Only a sensual experience can stimulate one own’s ipseria back to life…..By re-activating one own’s ipseria, the aim is to reconstitute the ability to imagine life through its richness of diversity with all peculiarities, fluid definitions and unstable categories.

Lorena Harauzek

Isabell graduated from MA Fine Arts, Zurich University of the Arts in 2017 having previously studied photography and video at SVA, NY (2016) and BA in Communication in Social and Economic Contexts, University of the Arts Berlin until 2014. In 2023 she received artist grant from Canton of Zurich, and prior to that grant support from UBS Kulturstiftung, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, NAB Kulturstiftung and others.

Her work is featured in the upcoming Other Intelligences, Haus der elektronischen Künste in Basel, CH (10/05–10/08, 2025).

Created with Unity (VR), Houdini, rendered in Octane.

Project Page | Isabell Bullerschen