MYCELIA MUSICA: Dancing Mushrooms & Unruly Entanglements of Fungal Sculpture, Somatics and Sound

MYCELIA MUSICA is a BioArt installation that incorporates mycelial bioacoustics, myco-sonification and myco-sculpture to interact with Living, breathing mycelium fungi networks through Live performance. For this work, I've designed 8-foot tall myco-sculptures made up of fungal colonies with fruiting mushrooms of different species. Musical soundscapes are created in real time by hooking up the fungi to bio-sensor devices that convert the mycelium’s electrical and textural activity into Live sound. The installation is activated by human dancers merging their entire sensoriums with the fungal Landscape and attending to these porous worlds in their queer becoming.

This artwork creates sites of plurality that demonstrate the possibility of a radically intimate kind of politics, where the distinctions between human and non-human worlds disintegrate in slow and attentive bodily practice. This installation also sheds light on how mycelia networks spawn radically queer temporalities that transcend neoliberal chrononormativity. Through numerous interdisciplinary partnerships, this work articulates a collaborative, interspecies performance in relation to the symbiotic possibilities produced by the intersections of mycology, BioArt design, electroacoustic sound and performance.

My research on designing with mycelia can help illuminate how notions that are central to the arts such as materiality, site-specificity, and embodiment are redefined by shapeshifting fungal entities that embody profoundly different temporalities than the human ones we are used to. With every mushroom cap and stem, this artwork generates new thinking that bridges worlds we know with worlds we don't know, offering imagination, language and artistic possibilities that contribute toward building kinship with the earth.