NEW ANCIENT by AVI GOLDMAN

Abstract

With Technology, we can better understand the mysteries of Nature. Science has recently discovered that there couldn't have been life on the land of Earth if it wasn't for fungus; our ancient elder organism, so widely misunderstood. An underground fibrous network of fungi called mycelium for epochs has converted the rock and the dead into LIFE - complex soil giving rise to plants, animals - evolutions later...here we are. Hidden below, the mycelium has remained as the very key life force of the whole show, weavers of a matrix of interconnected aware earth.

Mycelia are primordial pioneers and conductors of the natural life systems humans are in trouble for neglecting and exploiting. What kind of solutions could these wise ancestors of ours provide us? Often we think Technology has the answers to Nature, but perhaps it is can be the other way around? What can we learn from this organism about technology, whose innovation of connectivity predates our Internet?

NEW ANCIENT is a virtual web space documenting my experimentation in creating a living electronic sculpture out of mycelium composite asm an attempt to 'reconnect the network' relating the fungus-trans-human environment, while blurring together the presupposed dualism of Nature and Technology, and assumptions beyond.

The objects created in the sculpture are made out of mycelium. Bio engineers have recently developed methods of growing mycelium as a material. The technology used in this project is called 'mycocomposite' ('myco' referring to fungi, 'composite' referring to its combination with other elements). The fungal filaments of this natural network of intelligence act as glueing agent within various substrates, in this case wood. My mycelia have been grown to envelope technological elements into a structural composite. The embedded technologies in turn have been programmed to grow their own digital mycelium in code and send signals of their own through skulls made of the living material system.

NEW ANCIENT expresses human's primordial relationship with fungi through an electrical current. It offers a platform for awareness of mycelium's vital yet hidden role in our environment. It then presents mycelium as having solutions to our technologically produced disruptions of our environment by using its nature as a technology. It presents Nature as a Technology, then Technology as Nature, finally superimposing the seeming two as one. The achievement is a mental effect. This is an opportunity to challenge our conceptions of distinctions in what seems. If distinctions are melted down, then what is one left with? A slime of bafflement, the gnosis, in awe of the mystery - hooray for life!