Fruiting Bodies (2024)
Fungi-generated audio and interactive projections
Fruiting Bodies is an immersive audiovisual installation. Generative projected sequences of spores and mycelium respond in conversation with surrounding motion, inviting you to embody a fruiting body and consider the cascading effect of your influence on the surrounding environment, and its influence on you.
This project is a reconsideration of intelligence and alive-ness and interconnectivity through an exploration of fungi. Interactive projections invite participants to become a fruiting body of a fungus in a simulation of spores floating in the air, where they may move and influence a macro-view of the seeds of fungal life, much like a small animal or an insect would on a forest floor. Simultaneously, a mycelium projection follows the participant as they walk, observing fungal hyphae grow, branch and fuse around their feet. Both sequences have been developed in the software TouchDesigner and utilize a Kinect device for interactivity.
When the visuals and audio coalesce, an environment is created that feels both ethereal and grounded– of this earth, while beyond the often limited, human conceptions of it. The reciprocity, resilience, and networked existence of fungi, mycelium, and mycorrhizae offer a framework for non-hierarchical, rhizomatic models of exchange and connection.
Biodata sonification device pictured with a flush of blue oyster mushrooms.
