Homo Mycelium is an art and research project exploring fungal networks and interrelation - the 'mycorrhizal network'.
The project emerged alongside and through Mycorrhizal Meditation (Mm), a newly commissioned sound-art work for Are We All Addicts Now?, an enquiry by artist Katriona Beales into the normalization of addictive behaviours through our everyday interactions with digital devices, to be exhibited at Furtherfield Gallery 16 Sep - 12 Nov 2017.
Mm will be delivered as a free download, accessed via posters in the gallery and across Finsbury Park. Mm incorporates a spoken-word guided meditation that choreographs a connective journey through the human body and down into a dynamic, semiotic underworld of living soil and mycorrhizal network, with sound recordings made in wooded places, including movement and rhythm captured from microphones hidden underground and inside trees. It complicates a notion of nature as ‘ultimate digital detox’, and guides the user towards the startling interconnectivity of beyond-human nature, the ‘wood-wide-web’ that predates our digital connectivity by millennia.
On Saturday October 21st, FM : FP presents a performance-lecture, informed by the history, art and science of human-fungal relations. It explores themes of reciprocity, intuitive and nonverbal interconnection between people, psychedelic consciousness, fungal songs, shamanic journeying, and plant communication. FM : FP will lead a live ritual performance of Mycorrhizal Meditation. A fungi specialist will lead a walk that explores some of the fungi growing in Finsbury Park and on the Parkland Walk Nature Reserve.
The essay Homo Mycelium will be published in the accompanying AWAAN? book, edited by Vanessa Bartlett and Henrietta Bowden Jones, designed by Stefan Schåfer and published by Liverpool University Press.
