Bingo! Food is cooperation is an interactive social practice artwork that explores the cooperative behavior found in kombucha, and an interactive game that encourages us to think about food and food sharing as integral parts of everyday life.
We don’t often think about behavior in terms of microbes, but our recent paper, “Kombucha: a novel model system for cooperation and conflict in a complex multi-species microbial ecosystem,” published by the Aktipis Lab, presents kombucha as a model system for addressing important questions about the evolution of cooperation and conflict in diverse multispecies systems. Kombucha is just one of many foods containing a multitude of cooperative species; other examples include yogurt, cheese, sourdough bread, and kefir.
We see kombucha as a complex system that is heavily reliant on multiple species interacting with each other, which parallels our own experience with food. COOPERATION+FOOD+BINGO! players will interact with strangers, friends, and family and have lively discussions about food, cooperation, and other human behavior.