Into the futurewith mushrooms
A multidisciplinary art project by Tolk, Farming Utopia and the Art & Science Center at ITMO University. Interactive website, VR, sound, exhibition.
We spent months making Fungal Disputes, a podcast about mushrooms, and came out of it with an uncomfortable thought: we don't just underestimate fungi, we are hopelessly behind them. So we teamed up with Farming Utopia, an urban farm that grows rare mushrooms, and the Art & Science Center at ITMO University, to ask what the fungal kingdom could teach us, and whether there is still a place for us in the future.
We invited eight experts. Eight mushrooms, eight species, from Pink Oyster to Enoki. Each has one thing to say about where humans went wrong and how to catch up. Click a mushroom to hear it out.
To hear its voice, flip the switch next to it. The voices are made from the mushrooms' own electrical signals, recorded on the farm. Want more? There is a mixing desk further down. Turn on a few switches and make your own mushroom mix.
It began as a podcast. It turned into an invitation: to look for your own place in the future, in the company of the most advanced kingdom on the planet.
We spent months making Fungal Disputes, a podcast about mushrooms, and came out of it with an uncomfortable thought: we don't just underestimate fungi, we are hopelessly behind them. So we teamed up with Farming Utopia, an urban farm that grows rare mushrooms, and the Art & Science Center at ITMO University, to ask what the fungal kingdom could teach us, and whether there is still a place for us in the future.
We invited eight experts. Eight mushrooms, eight species. Each has one thing to say about where humans went wrong and how to catch up. Tap a mushroom to hear it out, flip the switch to hear its voice, made from its own electrical signals.
Mixing desk
Mix the voices
Eight switches, eight mushrooms. Turn on as many as you like: the voices loop, and the mix is yours.
Golden Oyster King Blue Oyster Pink Oyster Pholiota Black Pearl Oyster Reishi Lion's Mane Enoki Golden OysterKing Blue OysterPink OysterPholiotaBlack Pearl OysterReishiLion's ManeEnokiVR and sound
Fungal Broadcast
Fungal Broadcast is a series of audiovisual experiments that widen the ways we meet the natural world. Fungi are mostly hidden: what we see above ground is a fraction of the organism, while networks of mycelium run for kilometres under the soil and spread through spores too small for the eye.
VR artist Nadezhda Bey uses 3D scanning to carry these organisms into a virtual world that runs on the laws of the digital universe. There you can look at each mushroom up close and notice how fungal bodies differ and repeat. Her VR drawing adds one more visual layer, a way of thinking about how interconnected the fungal world is.
The sound of the project was made by artist Kira Gorshkova with a Playtronica board, which closes an electrical circuit between mushroom and computer. Scientists study the hidden life of fungi by measuring their electrical signals: fungal electrophysiology says a lot about how they communicate and how they respond to their surroundings. Kira takes signals recorded from real mushrooms at Farming Utopia and turns them into sound, so that each mushroom gets a voice of its own, the pulse of a living thing.
The website, built by Tolk together with the project's partners, became a digital artwork in its own right: a canvas where the audience composes its own fungal symphony and steps into the "fungal entanglement". Through it, the mushrooms find a voice and share what they know.
Creative curator: Khristina Ots
Exhibition
Fungal Entanglement
The project grew into an exhibition. Fungal Entanglement, a joint show by the Art & Science Center and Tolk, brought together artists from five countries, many of whom made new work for it. The fungal kingdom embodies and outruns humanity's boldest ideas about the present and the future: horizontality, resilience, the internet, resistance to capitalism. Drawing on current mycological research, the artists looked at where the fungal and the human meet, from the standpoint of science and technology art.
The programme ran alongside the show: reading groups with the publisher Ad Marginem and a performance, Forest. Mushrooms, played on instruments built from objects found in the forest. Exhibition page, in Russian.
Partners
Farming Utopia is an urban farm that grows rare mushrooms. Its mushrooms, scanned in 3D, took part in Into the Future with Mushrooms and can be met again in the VR forest of Fungal Broadcast, shown at the Fungal Entanglement exhibition.
The Art & Science Center at ITMO University is a platform for transdisciplinary dialogue between artists and scientists, and one of the first institutions in Russia to research and develop science and technology art.
Media partners
Team
Fungi can do anything
Hi, I'm a Pink Oyster. What do you know about me? That I grow in the tropics and taste spicy, sweet and meaty when fried? Can a whole kingdom be understood at the scale of your frying pan? If you're a human, yes. A fungus would never try.
Nothing escapes our attention and no process in nature happens without us. We live everywhere: in glaciers and hot springs, in deserts and semi-deserts, even on the hatches of the International Space Station.
Fungi push art forward
Hi, I'm a King Blue Oyster, a hybrid of the king oyster and the blue oyster. Nobody can predict what I'll look like when I appear: electric blue one time, dark beige the next.
Fungi don't fit neat definitions. A giant underground network, a prized find in a basket, the mould you hate: we keep our taste for freedom and ambiguity. And while you spend your time squeezing us into the cells of your classifications, only a few of you manage to find beauty in our complexity. Mostly artists.
The performance Forest. Mushrooms, made for the Fungal Entanglement exhibition, compared mycelium with the most complex and ambiguous part of you, your nervous system: a lecture on neurobiology and mycology, whispered over instruments found in the forest.
Fungi will save humanity
Hi, I'm a Pholiota. While you lie awake at night worrying about your future and spend the day destroying it, I keep saving the world and buying us all a little more time here.
Leather grown from mycelium. Soils restored after oil spills. Heavy metals pulled out of the ground. Fungi may be humanity's last hope, so watch and listen carefully if you want a chance to avoid the apocalypse.
Fungi grow everywhere
Hi, I'm a Golden Oyster. You already know that fungi can grow anywhere, from glaciers to deserts. Let me add that we also talk to each other constantly, and reach an understanding across the longest distances. Which is more than can be said for you humans.
Good that at least some of you try to listen in and speak our language. Fungal Aria, a project by the art group KVEF, turned the electrical activity of my neighbours at Farming Utopia into music and words: a choral score built from a graph of fungal signals, following Andrew Adamatzky's idea that fungi may have a language of their own.
Fungi invented the internet
Hi, I'm Reishi, and I have no taste. Neither do you. Unlike you, though, I know how to build horizontal, decentralised communities based on cooperation and support rather than inequality and mutual destruction.
That you built the internet, even if you copied it from mycelium, deserves respect: it's rare for our ideas and yours to run side by side. Some manage it. The art duo LUKÚTA made Hartig Net where digital generation meets biological growth: living agents fill the cavities of an incubator and reshape its structure from within.
It was shown at Fungal Entanglement, one of the few human-made places where you can learn something from fungi.
Fungi kill and heal
Hi, I'm a Lion's Mane. Since humans do nothing but fall apart, I can help with your gastritis and your anxiety, if I'm in a good mood. If not, I'll send my relatives to grow on your dead body.
We accompany every form of life and death and step across the border between worlds. We embrace what is dead, dissolve it into the air and carry the blood of the forest through kilometres of mycelium tunnels. We are the cause of life and the consequence of death. Don't compete with that.
Fungi are ready for dialogue
Hi, I'm a Black Pearl Oyster. The main reason I'll be taken into the future and you won't: you can't talk with interest and curiosity to those who are different from you.
If you really want to know who fungi are, get closer and look into a kingdom you don't know. Farming Utopia sells grow kits, and we're sure there's room on your windowsill for an unexpected housemate.
And if you'd like to know how we live inside your science, art, medicine and superstitions, and why we know more about you than you do, keep listening: the voices on this page are only the beginning.
Fungi know more than humans
Hi, I'm an Enoki, Flammulina velutipes, the winter mushroom. I like to begin my life where others end theirs: I grow on weakened and damaged trees and on dead wood.
I look at humans with mild sorrow. You think you know everything. It's easier for you to fill a basket without thinking and produce yet another empty classification of species than to accept that other species, not you, hold the secret of the universe.
Can the world deform inside a human mind? Can you feel the processes running inside the natural world, hear the liquid flowing through mycelium, sense the electrical signals fungi send each other? The switches on this page are one way to try.