Editor’s Note: Since November 2024, artist Levani (Levan Mindiashvili) has documented a growing resistance movement in Tbilisi, Georgia, spurred by the nation’s fracturing shift from an oligarchic ruling party into a totalitarian regime. Shot in the vertical, vernacular perspective of a phone camera, Levani’s sound and video work what is your form? captures these moments of unrest—protesters gathering amid the barricades surrounding the city’s parliament building; police escalating violent confrontations as those in power criminalize dissent. Chants, electronic music, and other found audio mix to form a complex soundscape, while animations of DNA repairing human cells interrupt footage of the protests, suggesting a connection between the self-regulated systems of the human body and worldwide resistance struggles. Using the materiality of sound as a point of departure, what is your form? situates the growth of a movement as an organic, living form.

Prior work has extensively explored the idea that the autopoietic processes of self-construction of bodies and of minds have a fundamental symmetry. In other words, morphogenesis* itself is a cognitive process and literally the behavior of the collective intelligence of cells (as our mammalian cognition is the behavior of a collective of neural and other cells).

—Michael Levin

* Morphogenesis is the fundamental biological process where cells, tissues, and organisms develop their specific shapes and complex structures—creating patterns and organized forms from a single cell into a complete organism. It is the “creation of shape,” the turning of simple beginnings (like a fertilized egg) into intricate, organized bodies. It is the process wherein underlying questions about matter and form come together to define collective behavior.