Mother and Spawn

​

Interactive sculpture

​

Arduino, neopixels, mycelium, moss, mushrooms, scoby, natural dyes

​

2019

​

Mother and Spawn is an interactive sculpture that explores the relationship among environmentalism, sustainability, and the ethics surrounding artificial intelligence. The work (consisting of a mother and her offspring) is constructed from biomaterials: mycelium, bacterial cultures, mushrooms, natural dyes, and moss. These strange, fungal organisms include ultrasonic sensors that trigger various LED patterns when participants move within a certain proximities. These light patterns are accompanied by a surreal soundscape of ever-changing natural and technological sounds (radio static, whale songs, etc.) Both resemble antique radio systems that communicate through bioluminescence. Both sculptures imagine a future in which technology and organic matter have reached a singularity, a complete and total integration of machine and living material. In defamiliarizing our expectations of technologies and biological processes, Mother and Spawn entertains a world in which digital systems and fungal colonization exist in harmony within the same intelligence network. Rather than paint the future of human-machine relationships in a negative light, Mother and Spawn encourages participants to consider how digital and biological systems might be imbricated in one another.

​

Exhibited at:

 

Ground Level Platform, Strange Media, Chicago, IL, November-December 2019.