Turn Me On

How’s it going, Fun guy?

This artwork is a combination of a portable installation and a video as the documentary to record me taking the fungi to experience various activities while collecting the electronic signals. Research shows the existence of a kind of “language” in fungi’s bioelectronic signals. Based on such assumption, there is a method to communicate with fungi, thus building a new bridge between humans and fungi.

Inspired by Donna Haraway's Chthulucene, I turned to fungi as the call of "making kin". The artwork is about how I consider fungi as a friend and take them to experience things like human beings while recording their "comments" with a sense of humor as a new way of perceiving other species.

The shape of the it is an octagonal metal shell with a hemispherical transparent top. On the front of the shell, there is an OLED screen displaying the waves of analyzed signals in real time. The installation is built to create a space for the fungi to live while recording and visualizing the data into waves.

In the video, I took it to experience activities humans usually do such as listening to music (auditory sense), watching a film (visual sense), and so on. All the data generated by the fungi while doing so was processed and presented in the images of the video. This work was created in 2023 and has now been exhibited and shown in galleries and at a conference.