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.