For the opening of the Vorspiel Transmediale on 19 January 2024, an interactive audio-visual performance took place in the WerkStadt. The idea of the live performance „Feeling Fungal“ is to create a multi-sensory experience and enable a change of perspective between humans and fungi. Questions such as „What is a fungus?, How does a fungus feel?, What do we have in common?, Where does the fungus begin and where does it end?“ are the starting points for the performance concept. "Feeling Fungal" is about human and non-human alliances accomponied by a bio material study.
The performance uses reishi tea, 3D animations and 3D scans of the forest, while mushrooms from the Grunewald forest and mycelium are microscoped in real time and incorporated into the projection as a visual experience. The sound artist Siamend Darwesh works with a spoken narration of a mushroom in the first person. The performance takes up topics of ecological equality, new materialism and post-humanism and is intended to sensitise people to them in an artistic way and provide impulses for their own research.
After the performance, mycelium objects were exhibited in plastic boxes in the WerkStadt art space for a further two weeks. As the mushroom mycelium is a living organism, it adapted to the conditions in the WerkStadt and continued to grow there. Mushroom mycelium consists of an underground, interwoven network of fibres. These so-called hyphae give rise to fruiting bodies known as mushrooms. Fungal mycelium is currently the subject of major research. It opens up a discourse on non-human forms of existence and as a sustainable, living (building) material. In nature, fungal mycelium is responsible for breaking down organic waste and forming symbioses with plants and microorganisms. All mycelium objects consist of reishi. Reishi has played a special role in Chinese medicine for several thousand years. With its more than 400 bioactive substances, it is mainly used as an immune booster or antioxidant, sometimes called "the mushroom of immortality". Kindly supported by Bürgerstiftung Neukölln.
Photos by Raiko Sánchez, documentary video by Clara Becking, video by Achi Shengelia.
Grow
Grow
Grow
Grow
Connect
Connect
Connect
Connect
…
With others
With everything
Around you
Inside you
With others
With everything
I am pores
I am spores
I am gills
I am hyphae
Made from chitin
Eat me
Be me
The last sequence of the performance shows an AI altered animation of a video input of myself. The simple promt "red mushrooms" transforms me into a network of organisms, mycelium, mushrooms, electrical impulses and more.