EOD04: Bioelectricity, Colonial Legacies, and the Politics of Non-Human Communication

EOD04 is a new media installation that explores the electro-sensing and communication mechanisms of weakly electric fish—aquatic species that navigate and interact through electric discharges. These organisms function as living bio-monitors, their electrical signals shifting in response to changes in water quality. By amplifying these imperceptible transmissions through sound and light, the work foregrounds bioelectricity as a mode of non-human communication, making visible the often-overlooked relationships between environmental health, technological mediation, and colonial histories of resource exploitation.

The study of bioelectricity has long been entangled with colonial science and extractive epistemologies. European naturalists in the 18th and 19th centuries, driven by imperial curiosity and commercial interests, systematically cataloged and experimented on electric fish, such as the Amazonian Electrophorus electricus, often in violent ways. These investigations contributed to early understandings of electricity, paving the way for technological advancements that fueled industrial expansion, including telegraphy and biomedical research. The same colonial infrastructures that facilitated scientific discovery also disrupted Indigenous ecologies, displacing local knowledge systems that had long recognized the interconnectedness of aquatic life and environmental balance.

EOD04 situates these histories within a post-colonial framework by transforming the fish’s electro-communication into an interactive sound and light composition. Three plexiglass tubes, each equipped with custom antennas, track and sonify the electric discharges, turning the fish into both signal generators and sentinels of ecological change. As their bioelectric language modulates with water quality, the installation underscores how environmental degradation—often a consequence of colonial-era industrialization and ongoing extractivist policies—directly affects non-human life. 

From a decolonial perspective, EOD04 challenges anthropocentric hierarchies of intelligence and communication, positioning weakly electric fish as agents of knowledge rather than objects of study. By making their signals perceptible, the work resists human exceptionalism and calls for an ethics of multispecies entanglement—one that acknowledges the agency of non-human organisms in sensing and responding to ecological crises. In doing so, EOD04 not only amplifies the spectral presence of bioelectric life but also asks us to reconsider our role within the more-than-human world, beyond the colonial logics of domination and control.

Biomimetic Futures

Inspired by the remarkable capabilities of weakly electric fish in detecting and recognizing objects with their electric sense, one could design technical sensor systems that can solve sensing problems by applying the principles of active electrolocation to devices that produce electrical current pulses in water and simultaneously sense local current densities. Depending on the specific task, sensors can be designed which detect an object, localize it in space, determine its distance, and measure certain object properties such as material properties, thickness, or material faults. Infused with artificial intelligence it could create holistic ecosystems that connect the physical architecture with the living (eco)systems.

Technical

The installation is based on 3 plexiglass tubes (1200 L x 20Ø) with a custom integrated audio filtering and amplifying and electro tracking system. Each tube contains an array of antennas/electrodes allow to capture the fish signals, which are directly linked to two speakers transforming these signals into sound. What the viewer hears is the fish electro-communication and active object sensing and communication apparatus. Furthermore, in each tube an array of LED light is placed. The light tracks the fish position based on its EOD. The sound can be routed out of the tubes by using a stereo mini-jack.

Bio-Electricity: A Spark in The Darkness

There are many other life-electricity associations that come to mind, they are more tenuous but they are there, mostly fiction or anecdotal. When they clone an animal, they first take an egg cell and remove the original genes and substitute the DNA from the animal they want to clone. They then have to zap the cell with electricity which starts the first division. Michelangelo depicting the Creation of Adam had God giving Adam the spark of life. In Frankenstein, the monster is brought to life with a spark from captured lightning. Our own nervous system uses an electrochemical signaling system, like an incessant ‘electric storm.’ The modern world is dominated by electricity with an endless profusion of it’s technological applications. In medicine, and particularly in fields more or less connected to neurosciences – electricity is even more pervasive. Most of the electric apparatus we developed and knowledge that we acquired over the years is thanks to the study of the electric fish. From this perspective EOD04 can be contextualised as a media archeology work of art.

Electro-Communication

Communication can go far beyond the ‘common one’. Weakly electric fishes, for instance, develop intricate and fascinating ways to communicate. They ‘sing’ electric duets, electric courtship songs and sabotage each others frequencies to create an intelligent network of communication signals. Technology makes these signals touchable, audible and visibly perceivable and introduces new dimensions of communication, compromising the prevailing anthropocentric viewpoint in art. As a consequence; a new concept and perspective upon ‘man – nature – technology’ interaction is born in art. The concept exists through a technologically mediated ecosystem from which the artist extracts information. It’s novel, because of the high level of technological control over these biological systems, a prime requirement to make a radical change in interspecies communication possible

◊ EOD04 is a produced by Frederik De Wilde with the support of the University Hasselt. Special thanks to Prof. Jean Manca and lab manager Michel De Roeve.