Enter the underground world of fungus and mushrooms. A sensor transforms your silhouette into a living mycelium mesh, seeking new pathways for nourishment, and a live webcam gazes out across Hay Town, transmitting the colourful bustle of its everyday life in pixelated detail.
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It’s Alive! Fungi
It’s Alive! Fungi is a living digital artwork that transforms a view of a familiar place into something uncanny and ever-shifting. A live webcam gazes out across Hay Town, transmitting the colourful bustle of its everyday life in pixelated detail. But layered within this digital surface are three fungal species that coexist in dynamic tension. One species consumes the image itself, gnawing holes through reality to reveal an underlayer of writhing, organic forms. A second species pushes back against the destruction, weaving hyphal threads to patch the gaps, mending the disrupted picture. A third emerges opportunistically, producing fruiting bodies that thrive precisely where chaos and order brush against one another.
Together, these fungi perform a relentless cycle of growth, repair, and decay, continuously reshaping Hay Town into a hybrid of documentary image and speculative landscape. The result is strangely beautiful: a town seen simultaneously as itself and as a fungal underworld, half real and half imagined. The piece invites the viewer to reinterpret what they see—is it a warning of ecological collapse, a whisper of rewilding, or a dreamlike mutation of technology and nature entwined? Its shifting forms remind us that change is constant, and that art, like fungi, can create fleeting yet transformative visions of the world we live in.
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The Mesh
Composition and decomposition, creation and destruction: these are the fundamental processes at the heart of The Mesh. This interactive artwork allows you to experience what it is like to dissolve into, and emerge from, a living structure. Inspired by the behaviour of fungi, The Mesh grows in response to your movements, echoing the way fungal hyphae branch out in multiple directions, testing different pathways until one connects to a source of nourishment. That branch strengthens while weaker ones decline, a simple strategy that enables fungi to solve complex networking problems in nature and sustain their growth.
When you encounter The Mesh, the boundary between artwork and body dissolves. Your gestures become food for the structure: move slowly and you fuse into its rhythm, hold still and it grows around you, as though you are feeding it with stillness itself. In this way, the piece places you briefly inside the perceptual world of another organism, inviting empathy with nonhuman life. The experience is both generative and ephemeral. When you leave the interactive zone, the forms you shaped with your presence decay, breaking down in a soft act of digital decomposition. Your trace disappears, yet the memory of participation lingers. Interactive art is uniquely positioned to enable this exploration of otherness.
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