Symbiont::MyceliOhms
XR Installation • iteration 1.0
A contemplative experience bio-electrically guided by living mycelium
The Lab at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, BC
April 1 thru October 29, 2023
Opening reception live quadraphonic performance, April 1, 3PM-4pm PT
Symbiont::MyceliOhms brings Guests within a microbial old growth forest environment, sharing concepts of forest sentience, mycelial communications and how humans are connected to the shared Terrestrial environment.
Projection & interaction: Photogrammetric and Lidar scans of Coastal Old Growth Rainforest areas were captured and turned into Point Clouds. The living fungi are connected into a nodal-based network controlling visual effects. When Visitors move within the space, and occasionally through proximity they will see themselves as microbial, fungal life connecting with the forest, and with each other. How Humans move through a space has impact.
Touch: The branch connects Forest and Fungal communication networks and serves as a memory for gallery visitors into their multi-species relationships and entanglements. When visitors place their fingers onto the gold sensors, their bio-electrical data passes through the branch into the fungi and back into the synthesizers- communicating through bio-electrical activity. A duet with the mycelium network. Touch has an impact.
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Types of Symbiotic Relationships
Symbionts vary according to the types of relationships they share with their host. These relationships are generally described by whether they are useful or harmful to both parties. The six different types of symbiotic relationships are:
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Parasitism
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Mutualism
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Commensalism
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Amensalism
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Synnecrosis
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Neutralism
In his 2014 paper, The Web of Life: Human Symbiosis with Other Life Forms and the Environment, Daniel Benor, MD, offers interesting insights and suggestions for human beings to recognize their symbiotic (and parasitic) relationships. He discusses and breaks down the various definitions of Symbiosis, and asks a lot of questions.
What if non-Indigenous people accept that they are part of a greater, collective living ecological “interbeing” that includes all life on our planet?
Here's a link to the full publication I urge you to read it,
https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/891f98f6/files/uploaded/EdMuse-14-2.pdf
Gold touch-points
The MyceliOhms installation expands upon another view of my research into Fungi sentience, interconnectivity and forest communication. Forests represent to me the most peaceful, calming space. In particular, the old-growth forests of Northern California, the Northwest Coast and British Columbia. Overgrown with lichen and moss, you will find fungi thrive there.
Forest communication. The roots of trees are physically connected to the mycelium that stretches underneath the forest floor, connecting to other trees, quite similar to the human nervous system.
Mycelium composes what’s called a “mycorrhizal network*,” which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon, and other minerals. In the forest-fungi networks are hub trees. Also referred to as “Mother trees,” these are the older, more seasoned trees in a forest. Typically, they have the most fungal connections. Their roots are established in deeper soil and can reach deeper sources of water to pass on to younger saplings.
Symbiont. Here, I am referring to human beings with a heavy influence from Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia by Stephan Harding, Symbiotic Planet by Lynn Margulis, and Sounds Wild and Broken by David George Haskell.
Utilizing augmented reality and interactive projections within a nonHuman collaborative quadraphonic soundscape, I invite guests into this world to imagine fungal and microbial communication taking place within forest biomes and our connectivity within the shared Terrestrial environment.
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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The artist would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
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Ongoing collaborators: Brendan Lehman, Rixx (Sven Steffens), and musical partner Andrei Gravelle.
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Arduino and Photogrammetric collaborators: Lorena Salomé, Leif Blomquist and Allison Moore.
*German forester Peter Wohlleben dubbed this network the “wood wide web,” as it is through the mycelium that trees “communicate.”
2025 - 2026 iterations of
Symbiont :: MyceliOhms
Nanotopia received an invitation from curators, Christina Zeidler and Stacey Proule to install-perform work for their 2026, Hotel Confidential at the Royal Hotel, Picton.
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For this installation I envision an evolved version of Primordial (link) and Symbiont::MyceliOhms
Fungal mycelium connected to Steam Diffusion into TouchDesigner. Using a Kinect for audience interactions visually and sonically.
Above video shares my developement in combining movement with the fungi and DotSimulate's steam diffusion Tox in TouchDesigner.
Connor Glinski, in his article Song of the Mushrooms for Mushroom UK, mentions MyceliOhms; however, he meant Mycelia- the VRC project collaboration between myself and MetaCrew South Africa.