Mike Phillips

A phage is, in Phillips’ words, ‘not an objet but a network.’ Named after bacteriophages, the viruses that penetrate bacterial membranes, these devices sit somewhere between a game controller and a séance planchette. Each one combines microcontrollers with biometric and environmental sensors, and several can work together to control virtual objects collaboratively. Like the planchette, the phage is imagined as a means of communicating with entities from beyond, echoing Thomas Edison’s dream of a ‘spirit phone’ that could be operated by ‘personalities which have passed on to another existence.’ Phages have been used to steer flocks of AI-driven ‘boids,’ to read users’ bodily states and to register emotions, and they have become instruments for breaching the membrane of Fulldome projection environments. This edition carries an RS-232 port, a memory of efforts in 1984 to connect the Slade School of Fine Art to UCL’s computer network for Roy Ascott’s telematic projects, efforts blocked by a Slade Professor who could not see why they couldn’t ‘just meet people and have a cup of coffee with them.’ Its small screen shows 3D objects from those early networks, many of them lost, now imagined ‘somewhere still circulating as code.’