Recent work

About the work

Mycelium Drawing is a study made from 143 hyphae of the fungus Podospora anserina, each traced from a laboratory time-lapse of a single thallus growing on agar, recorded by Éric Herbert and colleagues at Université Paris Cité. Every line is a real filament: its shape is the path the hypha took across the plate, and its weight is the speed at which it grew. Each iteration draws twelve hyphae together from base to tip, and a thirteenth arrives late.

Each animation begins with a poem written in the form of a Python script and takes as its starting point a quote from the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which he describes his earliest memories of sensation and language. The animations borrow the logic of the calligram, as poems that take the shape of or depict their content. Letters then morph into forms such as a seahorse, birds, and moths, which multiply, sing, or tremble in response to real-world data: hydrophone recordings, radio waves from the magnetosphere, birdsong, and fungal electrical signals.

Three embroidered collars carry the imagery of the animations into stitch, connecting the human hand to the virtual world and extending the collaboration through embodied and tactile experience.