RM 102: Room for Multi-Species Rest
Invitation to create an installation for Hotel Confidential taking place in the Annex Rooms of the Royal Hotel, Picton Ontario April 2026
Curated by Christina Zeidler and Stacey Sproule. Tosca Terán transformed room 102's kitchen and living room areas.
A room imagined as an ecosystem, where forest futures unfold through the entanglement of human, more-than-human, and technological life. Here, mycelial thinking guides the space: reciprocity over extraction, listening over control, rest as a shared ecological condition.
Part shelter, part proposition, the room holds open the possibility of a world where rest belongs to all species. It invites rituals of care instead of consumption, and kinship that grows outward like a living network.
Fungal mycelium was cultivated from a local species of Ganoderma lucidum inside of an aquarium that would act as a terrarium. The top of the terrarium was sealed with a laser cut piece of plexi-glass that had three ports. 2 ports allowing electrodes grown within the fungi to extend up and out of the tank to biodata-module and to a custom Eurorack system. The mycelium created the soundscape within the room. 2 touch-plate surfaces on the table allowed visitors within the installation to create the soundscape with the fungi. Two dinner plates along with the dining table had visuals projected onto them. The dinner plates showed time-lapse elements of microbial organisms, fruiting fungi and expanding Physarum polycephalum. The dinner table had swirling microbial forms, when people approached the table to place their hands onto the touch-plates they were scanned by a Kinect sensor which activated the microbial organisms through colour shifts and and swarming behaviour.
In the living room space I set up another Kinect sensor to scan the kitchen/entrance areas- as guests moved through the room they would see themselves transformed into Holobiont forms as they watched 3D forest scans (Gaussian Splats from Mt Douglas, BC) rotate and mirror, dissolve and reform.
Photography: Tommy Feiler
