SymbioShell (2025) explores the creation of a language for a non-human entity. The work integrates a robotic prosthetic hand articulated by artificial intelligence to mediate a symbiotic relationship with Physarum polycephalum, a liminal unicellular organism—neither plant, nor fungus, nor animal—selected for its demonstrated capacity for biochemical memory and spatial intelligence.

This biological intelligence hybridizes with an unsupervised synthetic cognition that acts as an interspecies translator: the AI visually monitors and registers the history of recurrent interactions between the organism and its microhabitat, dynamics that remain invisible to the human scale due to the slow rhythm of the organism’s existence. An autoencoder model feeds on this visual record and environmental data from the biosystem (temperature and humidity) to generate a 32-dimensional latent space—an internal geometry free from anthropocentric classifications—capable of detecting biological states through autonomous clustering.

The language arises from the dynamics occurring within that space and is physically articulated through the prosthesis. The work adopts the anatomy of the hand as an anthropomorphic container that, despite its formal familiarity, appears emptied of human will operating exclusively under the agency of the organism. The structure retains the mechanical constraints of the fingers, and upon the emergence of behavioral singularities, the system improvises and archives new gestures to build a performative vocabulary in real time: each gesture operates as a word that arises from a new action and remains indexed to the corresponding biological state to consolidate a constantly evolving syntax.

However, operating without cultural frameworks, the system does not interpret information through human narratives. Consequently, these gestures lack intrinsic semantic weight: they are pure motor execution. The symbol emerges solely within the subjectivity of the observer, who projects meaning onto the gestures of the mechanized otherness.

---