2024
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 re-think 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).
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 re-think 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).
