“Mycorrhizal Insurrection: Rerouting Anthropocentric Socio-Technical Systems (Online)” presented by Unknown presenters
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Artist Talks Online Content
Presentation Title:
- Mycorrhizal Insurrection: Rerouting Anthropocentric Socio-Technical Systems (Online)
Abstract:
The art collective Cesar & Lois discusses the collaborative, non-disciplinary-specific development of a mycelial AI, with the intent of orienting human socio-technical systems to non-hierarchical models persistent in the living world. In growing a system that integrates living and digital mycelia, the experiment-as-art unfolds through the duo’s accounting of past workshops that include mushroom foraging, spore printing and thinking like a mushroom. Ahead of the art collective’s premiere of Mycorrhizal Insurrection at the 2022 Mercosul Biennial in Brazil, the artists discuss the process of developing the training database for a non-anthropocentric AI, the challenges in connecting artificial and mycelial intelligences, and their conversations with mycologists and philosophers. Merging prehuman (fungal) and posthuman (digital) systems, the artists speculate on the possibility of post-anthropocentric futures. With documentation of iterative nodes in the project’s development, such as the June 2021 exhibition, “Eat the Anthropocene with Cesar & Lois, Mycelia and Friend Entities” at Yes We Cannibal in Baton Rouge, the artists project a machine logic that operates contrary to capitalist ideals, and the resultant values and concerns of a narrow group of humans. In response to Jason W. Moore’s use of the term, planetary proletariat, the artists imagine a socio-technological insurrection by incalcitrant bhiobrid (bio-digital) systems. Listening in to the pulses to hyphae, an AI thinks less and less like a human.
