Entertaining the Environment

This artwork is part of a larger series of both individual and collaborative works that that explores the concept of ‘entertaining the environment,’ speculating on the power of the non- or more-than-human world to act of its own volition, and exploring the possibilities for artworks to entertain or engage themselves in lively and relational activities that are not centred on the human or predicated on demonstrating this liveliness to a human audience, but instead invite human participation in ecologies lived at other speeds and scales. While this work is not specifically concerned with forests, its principles of ecological intelligence and interconnection, and its invitation to an attunement to more-than-human care provide a speculative path to thinking ethico-aesthetic modes of engagement with ecosystems.

Inspired by the mycelial networks found in forests (and of course many other environments), ‘Shroom consists of a series of mushroom grow bags delicately networked together using acupuncture needles so that their electrical charges are transmitted from one mycelial bag to another. Here they are able to connect and communicate their experiences of the earth to each other, in what might speculatively be thought of as a form of ecological intelligence or consciousness. Fungi are always relational: sensitive to sound, electrical fields and pulses, vibration, humidity, temperature and pollution. Fungi emit a variable electrical charge dependant on their sensitivity to these environmental factors and the stages of their growth cycles. In ‘Shroom this charge is amplified to audible human level to provide a felt experience of the dynamics of the fungal shifts and pulses.

Fungi are always in the middle of something: joining, relating, feeling the world, but they remain undervalued, undetermined, literally underfoot. ‘Shroom speculates on the possibility of their communicative capacities and invites audiences to pay attention to fungal tendencies or manners of becoming with the environment. It asks what happens if we begin to pay attention to other intelligences, to tune into their rhythms rather than demand they perform for and like us. Unlike some recent narratives than attribute human-like sentience to the non-human world (‘mother trees’ for example), ‘Shroom speculates on the possibility of a decentred, environment conception of intelligence as an irreducibly relational and material sharing. While the ‘thinking’ of the artwork is unknowable, the work tries to explore the potential for an affective and meaningful connection. In addition, the work explores ideas of care, as the fungi require tending several times a day (both prior to and during any exhibition), thus instead of a human artist/audience demanding the work orient its attention towards the human, ‘Shroom requires a human tuning or giving into the rhythms and needs of the fungi.