Essay by Natalia Jordanova

Written in relation to the installation

From Jaw to Ear – From Bone to Signal

Before there was listening, there was biting.

In the annals of evolution, the mouth was the first interface between organism and world. It was the tool for taking in, testing, tearing apart, and knowing through pressure. Long before hands evolved to grasp, the act of biting was a primal technology of contact, a means by which early life forms explored and conquered their environment. Before ears tuned themselves to vibrations, before algorithms strained to hear the faint signals of human attention, there was the mouth. It was blunt, decisive, and unapologetically close to the world. This simple gesture, the coming together of jaws, the application of force, the transmission of sensation, contains multitudes. For biting is not only an act of aggression or consumption, it is a mode of cognition, a way of understanding the world through the body.

Biting is a form of knowledge.

Not the one of distance, looking, measuring, classifying, but the knowledge of pressure. A tooth does not contemplate its object. It commits. It presses, pierces, and tests the resistance of matter. To bite something is to ask a question with force: what are you made of? The answer arrives immediately, through enamel and bone. Long before hands learned to hold or eyes to focus, organisms interacted with the world through ingestion and impact. The jaw was a device for survival, but also a primitive sensor. It translates matter into information through compression. The baby who mouths and chews, learning the textures and densities of objects, is tapping into an ancient evolutionary lineage, one that stretches back to the first creatures who used their mouths to navigate, to hunt, to survive. Even now, tots repeat this ancient protocol. They bite the world in order to understand it.

The mouth was the original laboratory.

A bone cracked between teeth reveals texture, density, fragility. Taste, pressure and rupture were the forms of sensing. Biting crosses a boundary and converts the outside into the inside. And evolution is fond of reusing its tools. In one of its quieter revolutions, a few bones from the jaw of early vertebrates migrated inward and became the tiny structures of the middle ear: the malleus, incus, and stapes. Bones that once transmitted force began transmitting vibration. The logic of biting was not discarded, only refined. Force became sensitivity, and aggression gradually turned into perception.

The same mechanical logic that once powered the jaw’s violent force has, over aeons, been repurposed to transmit vibration and enable perception. The ossicles of the inner ear, those tiny bones that transduce sound into neural signals, are the evolutionary descendants of the structures that once crushed and tore.

Listening is not the opposite of biting but its descendant.

Sensitivity emerged from violence. Attention emerged from aggression. And the ear still bites the world, only more delicately. Sound waves strike the eardrum, moving the ossicles and passing pressure inward until the cochlea converts vibration into electrical impulses. Listening is biting without teeth and a compression of air that becomes meaning. This transformation–jaw to ear, bite to resonance–offers a small evolutionary parable. Violence did not disappear, but it became information. And yet biting never fully left us, as it persists in strange places. Even language still carries it. We speak of biting criticism, biting cold, biting wit. A good idea has teeth. An argument bites back. Even curiosity can bite. We say something caught our teeth, or that we took a bite out of a problem. These phrases suggest that cognition retains something of the mouth’s appetite. Thinking, too, is a form of chewing.

Mythology understood this well. In many stories, knowledge begins with a bite. Like the fruit in the Garden of Eden described in the Book of Genesis, the serpent swallowing its own tail, the gods devouring their offspring. The act is always ambiguous, both destructive and revelatory. Technology has inherited this appetite. Data systems bite constantly into the world, consuming traces of behaviour, fragments of speech, coordinates of movement. Algorithms chew through enormous datasets in search of patterns. They ingest more than they understand.

Artificial intelligence, in its current form, is still mostly mouth.

Endless biting into images, texts, voices, and gestures, breaking them down into digestible units of computation, powerful but not quite sensitive. It resembles the early evolutionary stage when survival depended on tearing matter apart faster than competitors could.

The rise of algorithmic perception is another chapter in this ancient story. Just as the mouth became the organ that allowed early organisms to make sense of their world, the digital infrastructures of our time bite into the vast flows of information that now envelop us. In this voracious process of extraction and analysis, something is often lost. The thickness of embodied experience, the tactile knowledge that comes from direct contact, is reduced to signal and noise. The world becomes a problem to be solved, a resource to be mined, rather than a mystery to be savoured.

Perhaps another transformation is underway. The same infrastructure that devours information also begins to listen to it. Sensors translate fields, temperatures, distances, and electromagnetic fluctuations into signals. Networks detect subtle variations in environment and behaviour. Systems once designed for extraction gradually become instruments of attention.

The mouth begins, slowly, to grow ears.

The installation From Jaw to Ear – From Bone to Signal inhabits this speculative moment. It imagines what happens when the ancient machinery of biting evolves once more into structures for perception. Instead of hiding inside the skull, the ossicles expand outward into sculptural bodies. They resemble an evolutionary glitch, hybrid anatomies that no longer chew the world, but resonate with it. Each form corresponds to one of the three listening bones: malleus, incus, and stapes. And still, they are not anatomical reconstructions, but evolutionary fictions, organs that have grown too large, too architectural, too exposed.

Sensors distributed across them register your movements, vibrations, electromagnetic fields, distances, humidity, and other environmental fluctuations. These signals continuously modify a sound structure derived from a recorded voice and various other inputs.

The system does not compose music.

It listens until something begins to sound.

One could say that the installation performs a slow reenactment of the evolutionary shift from biting to hearing. Data arrives as pressure, enters a chain of transformations, and eventually becomes resonance.

What began as force reappears as tone.

Perhaps the task before us is to evolve new listening bones. Not just the hardware of perception, but the qualities of attention that allow us to truly hear the world. To recapture something of biting, its texture, its resistance, its capacity to transmit sensation as well as information. To merge the mechanical logic of the algorithm with the poetic logic of the body.

This is not a story of evolutionary or technological progress. It resonates with everyday human experience. Think of the way we bite into food, sensing its textures and flavours, how we reach out to feel the surface of a new object or the small satisfaction of breaking the skin of a fruit with our teeth, the brief resistance before sweetness. These mundane gestures are echoes of the same ancient logic that shaped cognition itself. If biting was the first technology of contact, listening may be its most delicate descendant. And the two remain intertwined. Listening still requires a form of pressure, a contact between bodies and waves, matter and vibration. And biting, at its core, is already a primitive kind of listening and a tactile reading of resistance. Perhaps the difference is only one of scale. Teeth interrogate the world violently, extracting answers through fracture. Ears approach more cautiously, allowing the world to vibrate against them until patterns appear.

Both methods produce knowledge. One devours it. The other receives it. If early life evolved jaws in order to survive, perhaps the next evolutionary step requires better ears. The future may belong not to the sharpest teeth, but to the most attentive bones.

                                                                                                                            Amsterdam, 2026