“Why do we feel so disconnected when our inventions are meant to connect each and every one of us?” asked the artist during her TED talk this year. If Yi has a mission – citing Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing – it’s to recognise the interconnectedness of humans, nonhuman life and machines. At her talk, the artist was joined by a single ‘aerobe’, from the fleet of autonomous floating robots she premiered at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall last year. More interspecific friends were present at her retrospective at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, this time microscopic soil bacteria and algae growing in Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica) (2022). It’s telling that, such is our alienation from the nature surrounding us, Yi’s paintings at her shows at Gladstone’s New York and Seoul spaces appear as digital abstractions, not the depictions of ‘blood cells and fish eggs, scratched and ruptured skin, polyps and crustaceans’ they actually are. Yi was also invited to take part in a yearlong residency at Stanford University, where she will engage students and faculty with her research.