+++ Ana Salvan gave a general presentation about the project at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (Mountain View, California, August 2025).

+++ Panel at the at the SLSA Conference on “Risk” (Corvallis, Oregon, August 2025):

João introduced the key ideas of the project and gave an overview of the previous work of the bio artists we will be working with: Stephanie Rothenberg/Kathy High and Cosima Herter/Hege Tapio.

Ana Salvan talked about risk in the context of everyday decisions that astrobiologists from São Paulo’s Astrolab have to make, separating “good/useful” bacteria from those that are merely seen contaminating their experiments.

Lizzie Smith presented a paper on Christian Bok’s bio-poem The Xenotext: she provided an overview of the entire project and an in-depth analysis of Book II, which came out this July.

+++ Presentation of the key ideas of the project by the PI at BEACON (Reykjavik, July 2025), a conference organized by the European Astrobiology Institute.

+++ Panel on Human and Cosmic Aging at the SLSAeu Conference on “The Lifespan” (King’s College London, May 2025):

João presented a paper on “Lumenfabulator” (Liu Yang) and how the exploration of the ambiguous boundary between organic and mineral “life” can yield interest political insights. Living “like a rock”, according to a geological chronicity, is at odds with neoliberalism’s 24/7 fascination with youth, productivity and self-reinvention.

Ana Carolina Meireles focused on Tessa Fisher’s “Spider Plant”, on bacteria and how those lifeforms are often discounted in the public sphere. Ana is an Animal Studies scholar, so she attempted to flesh out Lizzie Smith’s concept of “uncharismatic life” from that discipline’s vantage point.

Julie spoke about the figure of the alien in SF and how the stories in Life Beyond Us differ from the norm in terms of how they represent extraterrestrial life.