Dr. Anna-Sophie Springer explores “slippery intelligence” through algae and seaweed to show how their metabolic ways of sensing and adapting can transform curatorial practice and turn exhibitions into ecological thresholds for new forms of attention, care, and collective response.

In this talk, Dr. Anna-Sophie Springer introduces the concept of slippery intelligence: more-than-human forms of sensing, metabolizing, and adaption that resist codification and fixed representation. Turning to algae and seaweed as agents of planetary coevolution, she asks how their metabolic intelligence might reframe curatorial practice. Through the lens of the habitat interface – a framework, borrowed from paleobiology, for transforming inherited infrastructures of natural history – she explores how exhibitions can act as ecological thresholds, cultivating new modes of attention, care and collective response in a time of accelerating socioecological crisis.