Worlding: Sympoietic Mycology
Mushrooms, Synthesizers, and Models for Nonhuman Design
Worlding is a record created by linking the internal communication patterns of Oyster mushrooms to a modular, analog synthesizer. Mushrooms are a sprawling body — the caps which emerge to greet us are just one extension of their sprawling underground network. This network is exploratory: it seeks food, favorable light conditions, recoils from harm. It moves nutrients from one region to another, becoming entangled with the roots of plants and trees.
This outcome was the result of a design process wherein each decision engaged with a philosophical inquiry into human observation and presence, communication and transmission, and poetics of translation and ambiguity. The mushroom-synthesizer interaction is a microcosm for understanding what’s involved in questions about interfaces, information, and flows of exchange.
As a body without a center, a mushroom’s behavior must be coordinated. Oyster mushrooms organize themselves through small voltage spikes, which carry signals through the network. Dr. Andrew Adamatzky, Director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England, Bristol, has identified 50 patterns of spikes which remain consistent as they encounter familiar stimuli. This includes patterns in response to salt, heat, and light. These responses are distinct from those observed in other plants, or from the electric fields generated by most objects. The main difference is this grammatical organization, which suggests a biological, organic process for encoding information without a centralized nervous system.
Worlding extends an entanglement from the mushroom’s network into cables, which move this voltage into a synthesizer. As the mushroom sends these signals, they are divided into sectors by intensity: low, low-medium, high-medium, and high. Each signal then moves along a different path set by wires in the synthesizer to transform the shape, tone, rhythms or voice of the corresponding musical output. Notably, this is a smooth transmission from mushroom to synthesizer: the information is not stored in a database and analyzed, or converted through algorithmic means.
Rather, the voltage from the mushroom is fluid through the synthesizer and shaped into sound directly. These electronic spikes are then heard as music. Everything on Worlding is made this way: by the fluid conversation of electronic communications signals moving from mushroom into circuits.
While a simple decision in hindsight, the design choices reflected important questions about the nature of analog and digital transmission. These design decisions were an enactment of a philosophical question about the nature of reductive, computational logics, and how we might design technologies that move beyond reduction. At the same time, the transformation of the analog signal into another signal was inevitable, as these voltage spikes would be transformed into the clattering of magnets on speakers or head seats. The tensions of translation, preservation, and representation were considered, and the prototype reflected this line of inquiry.
Worlding was created as a musical component of a collaborative sculpture for the Michigan State University Museum’s 1.5 Degrees Celsius exhibition in East Lansing. It was co-created with Claudia Westermann and Vinny Montag at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. In the sculpture, mushrooms emerge from discarded radio equipment, suggesting an emotional landscape wherein mushrooms and debris are engaged in simultaneous breakdown and renewal.
We began with an interest in the capacities mushrooms hold for remediation. Able to metabolize a variety of inedible substances, mushrooms are an essential thread in the fabric of forests not only for distributing nutrients but in producing them. Dead trees, even crude oil, can be absorbed by certain mushrooms while remaining edible. Meanwhile, the mycelial network can move nutrients from where they are abundant to where they are scarce, incentivized by symbiotic relationships with their beneficiaries.
Mushrooms are one mesh of this planetary intelligence, capable of sensing, responding to, and producing information in a biological, organic sense. The connection to a synthesizer creates a prototype for a fungal computer, working from analog and biological responses to create electronic sounds. The intelligence of this computer — what allows it to achieve its purpose — emerges from this connection and entanglement between them. Arguably, this is significantly more generative, or at least responsive, than a database, as the mushroom is able to respond in real time to the local environment. It adapts, it grows, it changes. Likewise, the sound is constantly developing, a sonification of the inquiry as much as it is a sonification of the mushroom.
As the mushroom extends its signal to the entangled patch cables, we may ask if it is engaged in an act of exploratory communication. Another philosophical inquiry arises, leading to design decisions: is the entanglement of the mushroom and the cabling an extension of the signal, or is it an artificial amplification? How might we know? This is a benefit of “entanglement as design” - it produces new orientations to relationships between non-human intelligences. We move from first order cybernetics (the science of systems) to second order cybernetics, the science of observing systems. Then we move into recursion: the act of observing ourselves as we observe systems, the act of observing ourselves reacting and tinkering with systems in response to the responses of those systems, and so on. What matters: the designer gets lost in the entanglement. It enables new questions and new forms of inquiry, all relevant to the dense, interconnected relationships and interactions that our minds are immersed in.
Mushrooms under glow lights emerge from a discarded Chinese radio, part of the landscape on display at the Michigan State University Museum’s Science Gallery and CoLaboratory. Photo courtesy of Mark Sullivan / MSU.
Toward Human Decentered Design
The mushroom-synthesizer was designed primarily as a tool for listening. When the mushroom and the synthesizer meet, they create a feedback loop. These cycles produce their own behavior, and part of my position in designing this synthesizer system was to allow that behavior to emerge. At first, it may seem that the feedback loop is obvious: that the mushroom, responding to its surroundings, sends internal voltage signals outward. This includes responding to the presence of the patch cable. The cable carries that response to the synthesizer. The synthesizer serves as a conduit for electric signals to move through it, vibrating speakers to generate sound. The mushroom also hears this sound, as vibrating frequencies, and responds, creating new opportunities for recursive feedback and emergent behaviors.
This focuses on a single level of analysis, which is the material interaction between the mushroom and the machine. I create a certain structure for this voltage to flow through: I decide where the voltage activity will go, which shapes the resulting sound. Once that structure is in place, I take my hands off of the system and listen to what emerges.
Worlding refers to a concept best defined in an essay by Helen Palmer and Vicky Hunter, summarizing Kathleen Stewart:
Stewart (2012) provides a definition of worlding referring to the "affective nature" of the world in which "non-human agency" comprising of "forms, rhythms and refrains" … reach a point of "expressivity" for an individual and develop a sense of "legibility". Through this process a particular 'world' emerges for the individual through their engagement with a number of interrelated phenomena.
The synthesizer affords the mushroom a kind of presence, one that could notify me that a lamp hovering over it was too hot: the longer it stayed on, the more aggressive the spikes flowing through the speakers. When I turned the lamp on, I realized I’d been drawn into the feedback loop. The world of Worlding was not just wires and mycelium. It was the lamp, the electricity, the speaker vibrations, and it was me, being drawn into response by the mushroom’s response: a whole other dimension of feedback.
TENS cables carry information from the mushroom to a synthesizer, allowing the mushroom to serve as the source of control voltage for the modules (seen on bottom). Unlike other plants, that we know of, mushrooms sent these spikes in reliable patterns in response to certain patterns, formulating something like a grammar. Andrew Adamatzky has identified 50 such patterns in Oyster mushrooms, measured using similar methods to what we have applied to this system. The design is not radical; it makes use of a consumer-grade synthesizer module for converting these signals, known as the Instruo Scion. This is not intended as a technological exercise, but a philosophical exercise pointing to speculative design for nonhuman systems.
Sympoietic Mycology
As we consider the often bleak horizon for humanity — with climate change, nuclear war and the global rise of authoritarianism — worlding suggests a hopeful expression of the turn away from strict computational logics and the desire to trap the world in the stability of datasets. Far from being pessimistic about technology, this project points to a new, underdeveloped approach to non-human intelligence distinct from the current approach to artificial intelligence. Instead, Worlding is an attempt to make present the sentience that already surrounds us, and the intelligence that emerges through relationships. Rather than relying on stable datasets, it points to possibilities for adaptability and response. Rather than “autonomous” systems, the project is sympoietic — a “making-with,” as Donna Haraway writes in Staying with the Trouble:
“collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change. … Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it.”
My mushroom colony plays sound through a synthesizer, a small model of a larger piece of world. It’s a prototype, an experiment in this way of making-with. The music that emerges offers me an opportunity to be silent and listen. In that sense it is, as Claudia Westermann has described, a “technology for floating.” The music invites me to move from observer to observing, from observing the system to observing myself within the system. The thoughts drift to the possibilities of exchange, communication, and models of distribution and kinship that a mushroom models for us.
It also means decentering the human: moving ourselves out of the center. We’re human, we will bring ourselves to this process anyway. But design may benefit from disorienting that anthropocentric impulse and pointing to new sets of exchanges and interactions.
It’s important not to overstate this. I don’t think a cybernetic mushroom synthesizer will change the world. But it was an opportunity to explore new frames for design, in ways that reappraised organic intelligence. It is a refreshing pivot from 21st century design, which too often places data and networks “in the lead” instead of “in the mix”.
Surfing on Recursion
Music systems can serve as a test site for engaging technology and design. The output is safe. The process requires careful attention to the purpose of the system — in this case, it was my goal to offer a mushroom colony a platform for self-expression. It was clear that fungal bodies had a language, and that this language had surprising overlaps with computing systems (per Adamatzky). A synthesizer is a kind of computer: it operates on the same principles as analog machines, where the presence or absence of voltage signals organized the system: on or off, zero or one.
The synthesizer responded, but had its own role to play. Each module did different things with the signal. The knobs — usually used by human hands to extend, shorten, splice or distort this voltage into sound — had to be controlled by the mushrooms. Each track connects the mushroom and allows it to navigate the synthesizer based on its internal electrical activity. Some tracks respond to light, heat, a mist of water from a spray bottle, the frenzied electrical output of newly-blooming colony (heard in “Pinning”).
I didn’t want to direct the mushroom’s activity in the soundscape, but found it compelling to record the variations of response that could emerge from listening to different states of growth and exposure to different stimulation. I was “outside” of one system as an observer, but “inside” this larger system as an observer observing my observing, and responding in my own way.
Thinking by making offers a nice opportunity to move between these frames: to wait, to listen, to decide when to act, to think about my decision to act or not act. All of this, too, is in the music — in other words, I stepped away from the machine, but I also stepped into it. This is something like surfing on recursion: we can think about thinking and think about thinking about thinking, until we’re spinning in a cycle of waves. But with music, we get to surf a bit, flex the muscles we need to move between scales, lenses, and frames.
I think that’s the practice we need as designers in the 21st century.
Worlding: Sympoietic Mycology was released by Notype on 25 October 2022. It can be purchased as a digital download (or limited-edition cassette + download) through the button above.
Fruiting
Phototropic Response
Pinning
Misting 1
Misting 2
Quiet Thrum
Proximity to a Human Hand
Zero Red One One One One One
Evidence of Growth
A recording of a Leonardo LASER Talk about “Worlding” and other projects delivered for the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in Rochester, NY in April 2023.