Teresa Stoppani at the MIT Press Reader:
The unsettling operation of worms is something science realized a long time ago. Drawing on observations by Charles Darwin and Otto August Mangold, Jakob von Uexküll explains that the earthworm identifies different parts of a leaf or a pine needle — not by shape but by taste. There is “nothing to the notion of shape perception in earthworms,” Uexküll concluded. “The worm is in no condition, by its constitution, to develop shape schemata,” and it is the change in taste that becomes the “form symbol for the earthworm.”
Indeed, no shapes for the earthworm, which smells and tastes and operates by moving matter around and through its own body. If anything, it is this that the architect can grasp and represent. The traces left behind/around by the earthworm are not only the marks of its movements and the spaces of its making, but the product of the transformation of the soil it performs: the transferring, the processing, and the digestion of matter.
Consider “The Nebelivka Hypothesis,” a collaboration between Forensic Architecture and archaeologist David Wengrow in 2023. Their research project, which focused in part on the village of Nebelivka, spread across a wide area of the Ukrainian steppe to explore the traces of 6,000-year-old settlements.
more here.
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