NeoMeta* / Julia Shu — Ukrainian artist and practice-based researcher exploring life, non-life and more-than-human worlds.

About NeoMeta*

Based in Kyiv, I work across bioart, living installation, sculpture, experimental sound, film and digital media. My practice explores nonhuman agency, interspecies kinship and relationships between life and non-life.I hold an MA in Art and Science with distinction from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2024). My research, Listening as Caring, asks how observation, sound and sustained attention might cultivate more reciprocal relationships with more-than-human worlds.

Ways of working

Cultivation

Observation

Filmmaking

Sonification

Field recording

Assemblage

Interactive systems

Collaboration

Research

Nonhuman agency

Interspecies kinship

Ecological listening

Material memory

Care & reciprocity

Shared worlds

Mission

My mission is to support more reciprocal ways of sharing the world. I work with living organisms, discarded materials and digital systems as collaborators, asking how art might make room for their different forms of agency, memory and change.

Across land, water and technological environments, I explore kinship as an ongoing practice of attention, care and responsibility. This includes the rights of more-than-human life and the social conditions that make coexistence possible.

Listening as Caring

Listening as Caring is both a research framework and a way of working. Through observation, cultivation, sound and sonification, I ask what it means to attend to beings that do not share our language, form or pace of life.

My work with Physarum polycephalum follows growth, adaptation and distributed intelligence across living and discarded environments. Sonification makes aspects of these processes available to human perception while acknowledging the limits of translation.

Selected research & publications

Listening as Caring: Sonic entanglements with Physarum toward Interspecies Kinship ↗
Research manuscript; MOTH Festival of Ideas, NYU Law, March 2025.

Listening to Resilient Nonhumans: Sonification of Slime Mould ↗
S+T+ARTS Symposium abstract, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, October 2024.

Towards the Nonhuman Agency in Metascapes of the Natureculture ↗
MA Art and Science research, Central Saint Martins, 2023; Leonardo Abstracts.

Research profile on Academia ↗

Collaboration

I co-founded Others.place, a platform bringing artists, researchers and thinkers into conversation around more-than-human life, and NeoMeta NGO, supporting independent thought through arts, education and cultural activity.

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