Symbiotic Intelligence is an art-led research collective that explores how mycelium can perform a different form of intelligence in the age of AI - one rooted in collective assemblage, symbiosis, indeterminate movement, and emergence.
About
There is an intrinsic connection between the narratives we craft about AI and the trajectory of its development. Stories inspire technical breakthroughs, and technological advancements, in turn, generate new stories. The rapid emergence of machine learning (ML) has regenerated discussions about the nature of intelligence. Mainstream big-tech AI corporations, such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind, have revived the eugenics-associated concept of Charles Spearman’s g-factor through their drive towards AGI. A dominant 'us v them' survival of the fittest paradigm has emerged within AI discourse, warning that AI development could outcompete humanity. These narratives centre on competition and evolutionary dominance in AI development and pose significant risks by perpetuating a dangerously narrow and competitive perspective on intelligence, reducing it to a metric of superiority and survival. It has become urgent and critical to shift the narrative away from binary divisions toward collective imagination, ecosystems, and agency.
Symbiotic Intelligence is an art-led research collective, developed by Dr John Wild and Dr Shira Wachsmann, that works with mycelium as both a conceptual and material collaborator, offering a new lens through which to rethink dominant AI imaginaries and notions of intelligence. We work with mycelium as a living sensor of environmental change, creating new poetic logics, AI narratives, and technical interventions. Using immersive installations as rapid-prototyping tools, we connect to, read, and seek to understand subtle changes in the electrical signals that mycelium uses to communicate through its hyphal network. Building on research in evolutionary algorithms, the project is developing a symbiotic algorithm—both an algorithm and a theoretical framework—that enables our installations to emerge, learn from, and interact dynamically with both the mycelium and its environment.
Symbiogenesis: is an installation originally developed for a cave in Mittweida, Germany, as part of Chemnitz 2025: European Capital of Culture (and was later exhibited in Iklectik, London, 2025).
This site-specific installation connects five networks of grey oyster mycelium (Pleurotus sajor-caju) to light-emitting fibre-optic cables extending to the cave roof.
The mycelium operates as a living, real-time environmental sensor, translating electrical voltage spikes within its network into pulses of light transmitted through fibre-optic cables.
The installation incorporates sound recordings of the Earth’s deep bass vibrations, captured from the perspective of the mycelium.
Forest: is an immersive installation developed for ReWilding AI: The Radical Mattering of Narrative Ecologies, held at Snap VisLab, Royal College of Art, on 28 March 2025.
Forest was a collaboration between Shira Wachsmann, John Wild and Tom Simmons
AR developed by @_samuelealbani_
Immersive projections supported by @rian.stephens
Forest – an augmented wander through dense, 1000-year-old forests, where the symbiotic intelligence of fungi, birds, and the entangled visual, sonic, and sensuous relationships between the geosphere, atmosphere, and electronic Noosphere come to life.
Forest explores the symbiotic relationship between multispecies co-evolution within situated ecologies. In collaboration with mycelium networks, it rethinks artificial intelligence through the sporing of birdsong, symbiotic algorithms, and indeterminacy, moving into collective assemblage. Engaging with augmented reality (AR) and its relationship to AI-generated birdsong and human-bird soundscapes, it creates interactive portals into the forest as a form of intelligence.
Forest consists of three interconnected elements:
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An immersive LiDAR scan of an ancient banyan tree in a Hong Kong forest, accompanied by birdsong.
- A living mycelium network with sensors that enable an encounter with its internal communications.
- An augmented reality entity featuring AI-generated birdsong.
The installation creates a social space for rethinking dominant AI narratives around evolution and intelligence, allowing for new imaginaries of relationships between human, non-human, and technological intelligences.
Interference Spores 2.0 : Internal mycelium communication signals sending disruptive interference signals into the WIFI network.
Showcased as part of the Radical Matter exhibition at Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL) in Vienna.
Exhibition text:
Interference Spores is an immersive art installation that reimagines AI by asking the following question: What if AI's significance lies not in competing with, supplanting, or surpassing us, but in fostering complex, ecologically sustainable symbiotic relationships with both machinic and organic intelligences?
Mycelium has evolved by building strong symbiotic relationships with other species. It uses neural-like spikes in electrical activity to share and process information throughout its large, entangled network of hyphae[1]. Interference Spores directly connect to mycelium's intricate patterns of electrical messages, amplifying its internal communications and making them visual by blacking out attached lights, creating marks on an LCD screen, and broadcasting signals into the WIFI network in an attempt to set up an encounter with the global internet. The mycelium continues to grow within the installation, eventually disrupting its geometry through the growth of mushrooms and sporing.
New interdisciplinary research in sensory biology and physical computing has begun to rethink the very nature of generative AI by showing how pedetic/indeterministic motion of sporing functions as a critique of Machine Learning’s Linear regression and as an antidote to its predictive stasis. ‘Interference Spores’ takes up this urgent challenge in contemporary generative AI systems by merging unconventional computing practices, such as Permacomputing and Fungal Machines, with contemporary art to craft, design and imagine new alternative symbiotic foundations for AI.
[1] See Adamatzky, A., Petrova, I. and Gandia, A., 2023. Fungal Gray Matter. In Unconventional Computing, Arts, Philosophy (pp. 423-433).
Interference Spores: Interference Spores was exhibited at ‘A pAIn in the...’, an exhibition and program of workshops exploring critical Artificial Intelligence (AI) narratives at season. s.z.n Gallery, London, June 2023.
Exhibition text:
Interference Spores is an augmented mycelium network. Myceylium uses neural-like spikes in electrical activity to share and process information throughout its network of hyphae. Interference Spores amplify mycelium's intricate patterns of electrical communications to black out attached lights and broadcast signals on the same frequency as WIFI networks.
Publications
Symbiotic Intelligence: Rethinking AI with Mycelium
Arts 2026, 15(4), 69;
Abstract
Symbiotic Intelligence (SI) rethinks dominant evolutionary narratives within Western artificial intelligence (AI) development through a practice-led research methodology centred on co-creating with mycelium. This research investigates how living mycelium can inform and reframe prevailing AI narratives, particularly those shaped by evolutionary logics. These [...]
Read more.
Symbiotic Intelligence: Glossary of Terms
radical⇌matter International Journal of Art. Philosophy. Wild Science. Journal No.2 2026.
ISBN 978-3-902374-33-2
Abstract
There is an intrinsic connection between the narratives we create about AI and the trajectory of its development. Stories inspire technological breakthroughs, while technological advances, in turn, generate new stories. The rapid emergence of machine learning (ML) has reignited discussions about the nature of intelligence. This article presents a glossary of terms used by Symbiotic Intelligence (SI) to generate new narratives and inform the development of a series of immersive installations. Order Copy
Workshops
& Talks
& Talks
Alongside the creation and exhibition of installations, we deliver talks and community workshops that encourage participants — particularly those whose lived experiences are underrepresented in mainstream AI discourse — to reconsider AI through the lens of mycelial symbiosis.
We speak at conferences and public events, such as Peckham Digital, and work with developer communities to foster new approaches to AI development.
We are available for invitations to exhibit, deliver talks and facilitate workshops. Contact us.
Symbiotic
Intelligence
Glossary
Intelligence
Glossary
We are developing a glossary of the terms that underpin Symbiotic Intelligence, laying the groundwork for a conceptual shift in the way we think about life and Intelligence.
Sporing
The current emphasis on Machine Learning (ML) within AI highlights a technology that generates predictions by attempting to replicate its training data. These algorithms not only exclude future change but also amplify pre-existing biases in their training.
The indeterminate motion of sporing functions as a critique of ML’s predictive stasis. Indeterminacy is not a random movement; the movement of spores is intimately connected to the mushroom's ecology: the weather, wind, temperature, and humidity. We believe the indeterminacy of spores is the key to emergence.
Symbiotic Algorithms
Symbiotic algorithms stand for both narrative imagery and an attempt to rethink Machine Learning at the code level. They challenge the dominance of 'survival of the fittest' narratives in the popular AI imagination and within the code structures of evolutionary and genetic algorithms. Symbiotic algorithms recognise the importance of ecological encounters, in which entities form, perform, and develop AI. This challenges the prevailing aggressive, extractive, domineering, and destructive environment that is overly focused on systems' notions of winning and losing, profit and loss, etc.
Hyphae
Hyphae inspire decentred, non-deterministic, non-hierarchical organisation. The vast network of hyphae transforms into a mycelial network through branching and fusion. This mycelial network has no command centre and functions as a decentralised, distributed collective network of hyphal tips.
It is a non-deterministic system, as the outcome is not predictable based on the initial conditions and the rules governing the system. The intelligence of mycelium is composed of its environs and substance, introducing indeterminacy and uncertainty that make it impossible to precisely determine the system’s future state.
Mycelium Time
Mycelium Time refers to a spatio-temporal, non-linear network that has no beginning or end, where the past never ends, and the future is already active. Mycelium Time continues to be active in the linkage that projects an anticipation based on the past into the future, which is fed back to create the composition of the now (the present). It is a multi-temporal linkage network in which every mark is a collective mark that entails the long process and memory of history and future simultaneously, allowing the marks within the visible domain to emerge.
Circulation of Information
Circulation or/and rhythm is the movement and spreading or distributing through a system(s). Circulation establishes patterns and repetitions that create a certain knowledge, and in this sense, circulation itself functions as a channel of truth and reality.
Sporing can be seen as the symbiotic, non-linear circulation of information in a non-deterministic system. A dynamic and unpredictable dissemination of information influenced by its ecology and manifest as a topological surface. Sporing allows for multiplicity and multi-temporality to take place in any given moment.