Stickiness, especially when we unexpectedly encounter and touch it, automatically evokes a feeling of disgust. That instinctive response is compounded by our technologically evolved pursuit of a clean, smooth experience, June Yu argues, and that's a problem. She considers a 'sticky literacy' necessary for the future, in order to relate to the more-than-human world. “We live in an age of individuality and grave social ecological destruction because of our way of being that privileges purity, integrity and their defenses. While we are entangled in a complex support network of beings, all clinging to each other to the point that they sometimes become an indistinguishable sticky mess.” Interfacing Stickiness is a proposal to rethink how things arise, how they are connected, and based on that, rethink our relationship with nature, ecology and the more-than-human environment. Striving for a more interwoven, relational world, Yu applies this metaphor at various levels, from cells to people and nations.

With Interfacing Stickiness she starts a multi-year plan for removing the boundaries between scientific research and artistic practice. Here too the metaphor of stickiness, that borders are not tight but porous, sticky, fits in a constant exchange. Yu has a background in astrophysics and graduated in 2018 from the KABK in the bachelor's program ArtScience. In 2019, she was an artist mentor at the Lucitopia Design Challenge in China, where international design teams sought to devise a systematic program to revitalize a rural area in Jiangxi. At Melly she organized workshops on copying in relation to the myth of originality. In 2020 she started experimenting with ArtScience alumni and as part of research duo waterybeings she is investigating the changing relationship of Rotterdammers with water. The R&D committee thought it was a well-founded research plan with current ecological aspects, which attracted the artist with beautiful metaphors.

Yu planned three collaborative research sessions on how materials form, sustain themselves and reproduce. This is about cell structures and proteins, secondly about digital services and technologies in social practice, and thirdly about different habitual practices from community building and walking to cooking. To this end, she will collaborate with the Koenderink Lab for biosoft matter at Delft University of Technology and with Varia, Center for Everyday Technology in the south of Rotterdam. At Varia she researched methods of 'contamination' and cohesion, and strategies of marketing stickiness. She wants to process this in two visual essays and prepare a summer school for July 2022 with the research material.