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Keep an eye on this, its like a trends predictor for you.

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Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.

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Mocha Stump cake chocolate coffee chiffon roll cake Bûche de noël chocolat cafe 摩卡树桩蛋糕巧克力咖啡戚风卷蛋糕

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100 Chairs in 100 Days by Martino Gamper

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City Gallery Wellington
Civic Square, Wellington, New Zealand
08 April - 13 August 2017

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Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976), passage.

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Project One

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I will modify the video and add background sound

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This is a work completed in a master class, mainly examining the role of tools in their historical background and current environment, as well as the characteristics and properties of the tools themselves. By combining McLuhan's four laws of media with tools, I chose the chair as my tool.

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This is my project two

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Video slices of books burned

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How to make plants visible: design to make plants visible and reflect their subjectivity

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[Видео] «Bio designing with Plant Root» в 2025 г | Обучение цвету, Декорации, Флористика

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11 авг. 2025 г. - Rootfull grows textiles from botanical root, uniting design with biology and reconnecting humanity with Nature. It’s a pioneering initiative that explores the binding properties of root by crafting memorable artefacts, across fashion, art and design. Rootfull is a material innovation company, developing a new generation of root textile solutions for the circular economy

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PLANTS BRIEF: “Plant Blindness” (working title)

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PLANTS BRIEF: “Plant Blindness” (working title)

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Google do with working copy of the brief to develop

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hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." So said the nature writer John Muir. His statement is spectacularly true of fungi. Mostly, they come to our notice as mushrooms, moulds, wood-rot, infections and antibiotics but, invisibly, they are inside us and all around us.

Fungi live in all kinds of organisms, on surfaces, in and below the soil, in the air, in water, in deep ocean floors and inside solid rock. In these places, fungi are not merely present. They are structural. Their interaction with other matter has played an essential role in making the world we inhabit. The symbiotic merging of algae and fungi to form lichens enabled the rootless ancestors of all our plants to emerge from water. Ninety per cent of all plants depend on fungi for minerals. Fungi can eat most rubbish, and even oil spills. We can use them in numerous ways (drugs, cooking, even furniture building). And when we look closely, we meet large, unsettling questions.

Merlin Sheldrake, a mycologist who studies underground fungal networks, carries us easily into these questions with ebullience and precision. His fascination with fungi began in childhood. He loves their colours, strange shapes, intense odours and astonishing abilities, and is proud of the way this once unfashionable academic field is challenging some of our deepest assumptions. Entangled Life is a book about how life-forms interpenetrate and change each other continuously. He moves smoothly between stories, scientific descriptions and philosophical issues. He quotes Prince and Tom Waits.

There are more than 2 million species of fungi. Most, he explains, take the form of multi-cellular filaments called hyphae, which grow at their tips, branch in all directions, mate, fuse, entwine and tangle, creating the networks known as mycelia. The fungi we see, the mushrooms, brackets and moulds, are the fruiting bodies that sprout from the mycelia to release spores: 50 megatonnes each year. Spores concentrate in the atmosphere, sometimes changing the weather: a droplet forms on one, which then traps more moisture, becoming the nucleus of a raindrop or hailstone.

Bioluminescent ghost mushrooms. Photograph: Alison Pouliot Photography

Mycelium, Sheldrake says, is the tissue that holds together much of the world. The filaments thread through the soil, and through living and decomposing bodies, plant or animal. Each exploring tip is looking for water and nutrients, which it will begin to absorb, sending chemical signals to other parts of the network. In some species, scientists have also detected electrical waves. Other filaments nearby that receive these messages turn towards the nourishment. The network can store information. Scientists have tried removing the food source and severing all the connections. New filaments appear and set out in the right direction. It is hard not to call this "memory".

The tips circulate "information", and, in response, the mycelium makes advantageous changes to its behaviour. This is more than mere chemical reaction. Here is a responsive entity with interests that its actions can serve or harm. Sheldrake tries out the idea of swarm-intelligence, but a swarm consists of separate individuals, whereas the network of fused or entangled hyphae functions as a physical whole - or much more like a physical whole. Studying fungi makes these lines harder to draw.

The questions grow more complicated. Mycorrhizal fungi are species whose mycelia penetrate and entangle themselves with plant roots. A symbiotic exchange occurs, in which the photosynthesising plant feeds the mycelium with carbon, and receives from it nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients. I nearly wrote "receives in return". Descriptions of this relationship can barely reject the language of bargains. There is frequent adjustment. Plants funnel chemical information from the air to the fungus, whose mycelia bring similar signals to the plant from underground. In woodland, the network, involving numerous species, can be so extensive and dense that trees detect what happens to each other across long distances. Some people call this the "Wood Wide Web".

Sheldrake learns that in parts of a network where phosphorus is scarce, the plant has to supply more carbon in order to trigger the release. Mycelia then carry phosphorus from where it is plentiful to where it commands this superior "price". "Exchange rate", "supply and demand", and other such terms force their way into Sheldrake's account, and he asks himself whether the plants and fungi, though they are brainless, are assessing the trade-off and making decisions. The complexity of the signalling brings words such as "courtship" to mind as well. Hyphae use chemical signs to attract compatible mates, and truffles and other fungi use scent to entice animals that will eat them and spread their spores.

A truffle dog hunting in a forest of truffle oaks in Veyrines de Vergt near Sarlat, France. Photograph: Caroline Blumberg/EPA

Appropriately, Sheldrake is tentative in these descriptions, and offers a range of terms and metaphors, for none seems exactly right. Each articulation seems either too anthropomorphic or too reductive. Some expressions attribute too much intelligence, choice or even feeling to the mycelium; some too little. Sheldrake is feeling his way towards new vocabularies and concepts. A great deal of ecological thought now asks us to take more note of the relationships of interdependency that embed and sustain us, including many too large or small for unaided vision. The interpenetration of these systems raises questions about the boundaries of our selfhood. It is difficult now to think simply in terms of inside and outside, or self and not-self. Sheldrake uses the term "involution", coined recently to shift emphasis from the evolution of separate life-forms to the emergence of these systems.

We may feel that this perspective diminishes our sense of identity and responsibility alarmingly, leaving them clinging to a tiny raft in a great flow. One answer, however, is to endeavour to define these exceptional qualities more precisely, in relation to the networks we can now see. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is a fungus that makes parasitic use of ants. A spore dropped on to the insect becomes a hypha that burrows in and forms a mycelium that eventually makes up 40% of the body mass. Only the brain remains unpenetrated. In a way, this makes the story more sinister, as that brain seems to become a helpless prisoner. Secreting chemicals that manipulate the ant's behaviour, the fungus impels the insect to leave the nest, climb a tall stem, and clamp its jaws into the underside of a leaf. Mycelial threads emerge from the feet and bind the ant to the plant. Then the fungus digests it. As Sheldrake says, the operation is exquisitely precise, for the fungus is able to take the ant to a place with exactly the right humidity and temperature for the fruiting body, a long slender mushroom, which now grows out of the carcass, positioned to drop its spores on the ants' nest below.

I find this a horror, and want to assert our human need to do so, even if the ant experiences nothing that we should call suffering, and it is only as drama that the spectacle is appalling. The fact that Ophiocordyceps has evolved to do this and has no choice makes little difference. A creature's perceptions and desires have turned into enemies steering it to its death. There is no symbiosis or negotiation. Even a farm animal, a free-range one anyway, has some agency while it lives, but this ant has none. It becomes purely a means to an end desired by another. Human beings sometimes do this, and other abominable things that they often succeed in regarding as right, or normal, or not worth noticing, yet humans alone, as far as we know, have a highly developed ability to see their own natural behaviour as wrong. Reading about the fate of these ants made me grab at the idea of a conscience, however imperfect, that makes us different from fungi, or from a male tiger killing a female's cubs to bring her into season.

A "door-opener" book is one with a specialist subject in which it finds pathways leading everywhere. This is a genre devoted to connectedness in all directions, and is one well suited to our times. Sheldrake's book is a very fine example.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (Random House, £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake review - from funghi to questions of identity

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hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." So said the nature writer John Muir. His statement is spectacularly true of fungi. Mostly, they come to our notice as mushrooms, moulds, wood-rot, infections and antibiotics but, invisibly, they are inside us and all around us.

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The Happening is a 2008 psychological thriller film written, co-produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, and Betty Buckley. An Indian-American production, the film follows a group of four as they try to escape an inexplicable natural disaster.

It had its premiere in New York City on June 10, 2008, and was later released on June 13, 2008, in North America. It received generally negative reviews from critics and grossed $163 million worldwide against its $48 million production budget.

In New York City's Central Park, people begin committing mass suicide. Initially believed to be caused by a bio-terrorist attack using an airborne neurotoxin, the behavior quickly spreads across the northeastern United States. High school science teacher Elliot Moore and his wife Alma are convinced by Elliot's mathematician colleague Julian to accompany him and his daughter Jess on a train out of Philadelphia. During the trip, the group learns that Boston and Philadelphia have also been affected. The train loses all radio contact and stops at a small town. When Julian learns that his wife has left Boston for Princeton, he decides to go look for her, and entrusts Jess to the Moores. However, Julian arrives to find Princeton has been affected, and he commits suicide by slitting his wrist.

Elliot, Alma, and Jess hitch a ride with a nurseryman and his wife. The nurseryman theorizes that plant life has developed a defense mechanism against humans consisting of an airborne toxin that stimulates neurotransmitters and causes humans to kill themselves. The group is later joined by other survivors coming from various directions, and the small crowd chooses to avoid roads and populated areas. When the larger part of the group is affected by the toxin, Elliot suggests the nurseryman was right and that the plants are targeting only large groups of people. He splits their group into smaller pockets and they walk along. The trio ends up with a pair of teenage boys, Josh and Jared, who are later killed when Elliot unsuccessfully attempts to reason with the armed residents of a barricaded house.

Elliot, Alma and Jess wander the countryside and come upon the home of Mrs. Jones, an eccentric and paranoid elder. Jones initially agrees to house the group for the night but is suspicious of them having bad intentions; the next morning, she decides to expel them. In a fury, she leaves the house alone and is affected by the toxin. The shaken Elliot realizes that the plants are now targeting individuals. Left with no option when the woman strikes her head into several windows, the trio chooses to die and embraces in the yard only to find themselves unaffected by the toxin. The outbreak has abated as quickly as it began.

Three months later, Elliot and Alma have adjusted to their new life with Jess as their adopted daughter. On television, an expert, comparing the event to a red tide, warns that the epidemic may have only been a harbinger of an impending global disaster, but his theory is met with disbelief, with the interviewer reminding him that only the northeastern United States was affected. Alma learns she is pregnant, and surprises Elliot with the news at their front step.

Another wave of suicides is initiated in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, France.

In January 2007, M. Night Shyamalan submitted a spec script entitled The Green Effect to various studios, but none expressed interest enough to purchase it. Shyamalan collected ideas and notes from meetings, returning home to Philadelphia to "rewrite" it, and finally 20th Century Fox greenlit the project. Now titled The Happening, the film was produced by Shyamalan and Barry Mendel and was the former's first R-rated project. On March 15, 2007, Shyamalan described the film as "a paranoia movie from the 1960s on the lines of and Invasion of the Body Snatchers". An India-based company, UTV, co-financed 50% of the film's budget and distributed it in India, while Fox took care of other territories.

Later in March, Wahlberg, with whom Shyamalan had been negotiating at the same time as his deal with Fox, was cast into the lead role of the US$57 million project. Shyamalan had previously cast Wahlberg's brother Donnie in The Sixth Sense.

Production began in August 2007 in Philadelphia, with filming on Walnut Street, in Rittenhouse Square Park, in Masterman High School, on South Smedley Street, and at the 'G' Lodge in Phoenixville. The release date was June 13, 2008, intentionally set for Friday the 13th to suit the thriller also filmed in Michigan.

On its opening day, The Happening grossed US$13 million. Over the weekend, the total gross came in at US$30,517,109 in 2,986 theaters in the United States and Canada, averaging to about US$10,220 per venue, and ranking #3 at the box office, behind The Incredible Hulk and Kung Fu Panda. Foreign box office gross for opening weekend was an estimated US$32.1 million.

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 18% of 186 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 4.00/10. The site's critical consensus reads, " The Happening begins with promise, but unfortunately descends into an incoherent and unconvincing trifle." At Metacritic, the film was assigned a weighted average score of 34 out of 100 based on 38 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "D" on a scale of A+ to F.

On June 7, 2008, days before the first few reviews for the film came online, Shyamalan told the New York Daily News: "We're making an excellent B movie, that's our goal". Some critics enjoyed it because of this. Glenn Whipp said, "Tamping down the self-seriousness in favor of some horrific silliness, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening plays as a genuinely enjoyable B-movie for anyone inclined (or able) to see it that way".

Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter said the film lacked "cinematic intrigue and nail-biting tension" and that "the central menace ... does not pan out as any kind of Friday night entertainment". 's Justin Chang felt that it "covers territory already over-tilled by countless disaster epics and zombie movies, offering little in the way of suspense, visceral kicks or narrative vitality to warrant the retread". Mick LaSalle wrote in his San Francisco Chronicle review that he considered the film entertaining but not scary. He commented, too, on Shyamalan's writing, opining that, "instead of letting his idea breathe and develop and see where it might go, he jumps all over it and prematurely shapes it into a story". James Berardinelli said the film had neither "a sense of atmosphere" nor "strong character development"; he called its environmental message "way-too-obvious and strident," gave it one and a half stars out of a possible four, and concluded his review by saying, " The Happening is a movie to walk out of, sleep through, or-best of all-not to bother with." 's Richard Corliss saw the film as a "dispiriting indication that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has lost the touch". The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips thought the film had a workable premise, but found the characters to be "gasbags or forgetful". Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal said that the film was a "woeful clunker of a paranoid thriller" and highlighted its "befuddling infelicities, insistent banalities, shambling pace and pervasive ineptitude".

Stephen King liked the film, stating: "Of Fox's two summer creepshows [the other being The X-Files: I Want to Believe], give the edge to The Happening, partly because M. Night Shyamalan really understands fear, partly because this time he's completely let himself go (hence the R rating), and partly because after Lady in the Water he had something to prove". Critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, awarding the movie three stars, found it "oddly touching": "It is no doubt too thoughtful for the summer action season, but I appreciate the quietly realistic way Shyamalan finds to tell a story about the possible death of man". William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called it "something different-and a pleasant surprise" among that summer's major Hollywood releases, and approved of its taking "the less-is-best approach." The New York Times' Manohla Dargis praised Wahlberg's lead performance, adding that the film "turns out to be a divertingly goofy thriller with an animistic bent, moments of shivery and twitchy suspense". Philipa Hawker of gave it 3.5 out of 5 stars, commenting on "the mood of the film: a tantalizing, sometimes frustrating parable about the menaces that human beings might face from unexpected quarters," drawing special attention to "the sound of the breeze and the sight of it ruffling the trees or blowing across the grass - an image of tension that calls to mind Antonioni's ". Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times said, "It almost dares you to roll your eyes or laugh at certain scenes that are supposed to be deadly serious. But, you know what, I appreciated this creatively offbeat, daring sci-fi mind-trip". Reviewer Rumsey Taylor said that the film moves forward with "jack-in-the-box suspense, traipsing from one garish death to another in a parade of cartoonish terror," and noted how the film seemed like " Alfred Hitchcock 's , only without the birds."

The Happening has also attracted academic attention. Joseph J. Foy, professor of politics and popular culture, describes Shyamalan's film as an expression of "post-environmentalism" in which traditional paradigmatic politics are replaced with a call for the world to "embrace a revolutionary reevaluation of wealth and prosperity not in terms of monetary net worth or material possessions, but in terms of overall well-being". Foy praises the highly complex narrative in which Shyamalan weaves contemporary environmental challenges with hard science and social theory to create a "nightmarish future that... may advance the type of dialogue that can truly change the cultural conversation".

Wahlberg offered his own opinion of The Happening in 2010, saying that Amy Adams, who was in consideration for the role of Alma Moore, had "dodged the bullet" by not starring in the film. He said, "It was a really bad movie... F**k it. It is what it is... You can't blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher. At least I wasn't playing a cop or a crook." About Wahlberg's reaction, Shyamalan said he is fine with his opinion: "Since that would be the only case of that happening - no. But really, no. It's totally his call. However he wants to interpret it."

In 2019, Shyamalan said that he took some responsibility for the way the movie turned out: "I think it's a consistent kind of farce humor. You know, like . The campy, 1958 debut of actor Steve McQueen, featuring a mysterious, growing amoeba that takes over a small Pennsylvania town. The key to The Blob is that it just never takes itself that seriously. I think I was inconsistent. That's why they couldn't see it."

The film was nominated for four Golden Raspberry Awards: Worst Picture, Worst Actor for Mark Wahlberg (also for ), Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay for M. Night Shyamalan. The film was also nominated for Best Horror Film at the Saturn Awards but lost to Hellboy II: The Golden Army.[citation needed ]

The Happening came in eighth in a 2010 poll by magazine of "50 Worst Movies of All Time", and first in a 2012 poll by magazine of "50 Worst Sci-fi & Fantasy Movies That Had No Excuse".

In 2016, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of said that it was "Patterned on the B movies of the early atomic age, the best of which could be sophisticated in everything except premise and acting, the movie swaps out radiation for climate change, but otherwise keeps to the template, complete with an ending in which a man in a suit explains everything that happened, but not really." He further stated "Sometimes, it mimics the goofiness of authentic '50s B movies; this is one of those cases where the miscasting-namely, Mark Wahlberg as a Philadelphia science teacher who looks and talks like a football coach who's been forced to sub sex ed-seems at least partly intentional. And yet, even with its non sequitur references to food (tiramisu, hot dogs, "lemon drink," etc.) and its winks of self-parody (e.g., Wahlberg talking to a plastic plant), The Happening is a movie that a lot of people presume is trying and failing to be taken seriously. And maybe it is." He further summarized that "... in The Happening, everything is premised on the assumption that life is meaningless-a deep anxiety that informs the movie's abstracted scare scenarios, but is also hidden behind camp. It's not incoherent, but it's often hard to read. It's a genuine curio, not entirely successful, and if you subscribe to the old auteurist line of movies being both expressions and entertainment objects, it's both too self-consciously silly and too personal to dismiss."

On its 10th year anniversary, Jeff Spry of Syfy said that M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening is a better B movie 10 years later. He summarized that "The Happening contains some genuinely moving sequences, gruesome slaughter, a few intimate moments that truly resonate, and some laugh-out-loud scenes that defy explanation (see: a confused man is being eaten by hungry lions). While it's overacted in many spots and completely bonkers in others, it's a fascinating mix of eco-didacticism, post 9/11 trauma, spaced-out Zooey Deschanel, Cabbage Patch doll jokes, mood rings, math riddles, hot dog love, and silly, unsophisticated screenwriting based on shaky pseudo-science."

In 2018, Craig Lines of Den of Geek said that "Just about every aspect of The Happening is a defiance of expectation. It uses the tropes of classic disaster/survival B-Movies (Shyamalan clearly knows his classics) but inverts them. The pacing of the film, for example, moves in reverse. It starts off quite fraught and slows down further and further as it goes on. By the time it reaches its (anti)climax, it's become almost motionless with fewer words, longer takes, extended periods of stillness and silence; a vastness you can almost feel." He summarized that "The script here is so carefully constructed, so multi-layered and so rhythmic it's almost poetry. The fact that much of the dialogue was deemed simply ridiculous by audiences saddens me because every word feels so perfectly in place."

On its 10th year anniversary, Chris Evangelista of Slashfilm noted that the film deserved to be recognized as a B-Movie classic. He said that "It's time to embrace the movie for what it really is: an intentionally goofy, highly entertaining B-movie that should be celebrated for its own stupid charms rather than mercilessly mocked and scorned."

In 2020, Lindsay Traves of Bloody Disgusting said that it was a deadpan comedy in disguise featuring numerous trope parodies and summarised that "The Happening gave us a film that wasn't about any real killer, but hinted it might be about nationalism, post 9/11 fears and American paranoia. Then it dared us to ask if we should take it seriously."

In 2020, Scott Mendelson of summarized that "The Happening is unique unto itself, is rarely boring and has aged well in terms of being a bonkers/original premise delivered with a relatively straight-face (and just a hint of knowing camp). At its core, the Mark Wahlberg/Zooey Deschanel sci-fi chiller is essentially 'What if one of our more genuinely talented directors made a big-budget, R-rated Ed Wood movie?' Shyamalan is nothing if not sincere, and while he's attempting a modern-day version of a 1950's sci-fi warning movie, the film is absolutely invested in its mother nature is tired of humanity's bullshit premise."

As of August 2020, the DVD units sold have generated over US$22.4 million in revenue.

The Happening: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was composed by James Newton Howard. It was released on June 3, 2008.[citation needed ]

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The Happening is a 2008 psychological thriller film written, co-produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, and Betty Buckley. An Indian-American production, the film follows a group of four as they try to escape an inexplicable natural disaster.

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How trees secretly talk to each other - BBC World Service

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How Trees Talk to Each Other | Your Climate | BBC Earth Science

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What does the Plant say? | BBC Earth Explore

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Under the Canopy: Forests of folktale and imagination - BBC World Service

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LINK TO BRIEF DOC

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TASK #01

MAKE YOUR OWN PADLET AND LINK IT TO THIS ONE.

PLEASE ADD IN:

PRACTICAL EXPERIMENTS;

Begin making Plant observations this should become the basis for the practice element of your Project.

Photography, photograph plants in as many contexts as possible, urban, domestic, rural, wild.

Film as above, use a tripod, think about time, do plants have different time frames to us? (time lapse/slow motion filming)

Sketching as above but drawing

Sound recording contact mics, electroamgnetic mics, geomics. under water...

Experiment with scale, maps, microscopic recordings, mold growing, plants germinating form seeds etc.

Writing

Note down the things you see, observe, listen to conversations, in parks, near trees, gardens etc. describe the sounds do rain or wind on trees leaves, the look of dappled sunlight

Begin a reference file:

ecophilosophy, visual culture, botany , philosophy, anthropocentrism, artists practice sound art etc.

search for representations of plants in popular culture: fiction, writing, advertising, painting, and film.

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sentient

/ˈsɛnʃnt,ˈsɛntiənt/

adjective

adjective: sentient

1. able to perceive or feel things.

"she had been instructed from birth in the equality of all sentient life forms"

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Peru’s Marañón River Wins Rights Recognition and Indigenous Guardianship in Court — Earth Law Center

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Peru’s historic first recognition of the rights of a river secured in court case.

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Koyaanisqatsi presents a striking visual journey through the relationship between nature, humanity, and technology. Directed by Godfrey Reggio, this experimental film features no dialogue or narration, instead relying on a mesmerizing montage of images set to an evocative score by Philip Glass. The title, derived from the Hopi language, translates to “life out of balance”.

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radio aporee ::: maps - sounds of the world

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radio aporee ::: maps is a global soundmap dedicated to field recording, phonography and the art of listening.

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Artist Dasha Plesen combines molds, bacteria, spores, and other objects in petri dishes to create these colorful abstract

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Watch My Octopus Teacher | Netflix Official Site

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A filmmaker forges an unusual friendship with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest, learning as the animal shares the mysteries of her world. Watch trailers & learn more.

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0rphan Drift has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision, since its inception in London in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time.
In its latest manifestation, 0rphan Drift considers Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus - as a distributed, many-minded consciousness. Inspired by embodied cognitive science and radical anthropology, their multiple channel installations suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception. They combine video, animation and text with newer tools they are exploring such as LIDAR, Blender, Touch Designer and photogrammetry to suggest new spatio-temporal formations and ask what kind of bodies might be possible with these new coordinates. Currently they are working toward deepening their engagement into the field, involving direct encounters with cephalopods and collaborative explorations with Machine Learning engineers, VR designers and teuthologists.
PROJECTS IN DEVELOPMENT
'Nine Brains', a speculative fiction project that assumes an octopoid world view as a means of playing with and questioning the presence of artificial intelligence in current narratives of futurity. The project includes fiction writing, research, performance scores, digital animation and watercolours. These elements are building towards our first XR work, which will physically engage participant audiences in a story about an AI learning from the cognitive and behavioural tendencies of an octopus. The project casts the viewer in multiple bodies at once, as human, octopus and AI, opening up pathways of embodiment and sensuality and engendering an encounter with the unknown.

The ISCRI project in collaboration with Etic Lab, https://eticlab.co.uk/an-artificial-intelligence-programmed-by-an-octopus-iscri/
They are working with the Serpentine Gallery London's Creative AI Lab. https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/a-different-research-agenda-julia-kaganskiy-introduces-the-creative-ai-lab/
See the Serpentine Twitch TV event 'A Cephalopod <-> Machine Encounter', Maggie Roberts of 0rphan Drift & Serpentine Arts Technologies in conversation https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1180305964?lang=it and essay by Alasdair Milne of the Creative AI Lab https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/arts-technologies/interspecies-communication-research-initiative-iscri-a-cephalopod-%E2%86%94-machine-encounter/

'Octopoid Aesthetics and Ecologicity', a collaboration with Delphi Carstens, book chapter in 'HydroFeminisms' with UWC Posthuman Research Group, Capetown.
RECENT SHOWS
0rphan Drift works have been included recently in the exhibitions

May the Other Live in Me, Laboratoria Art Science, Moscow;
Monitor: Surveillance, Data and the New Panoptic, ICA MECA, Maine;
Metabolic Market at Giant, Bournemouth;
The Archive To Come at Telematic Gallery San Francisco;
This Is A Not-Me at iMT Gallery London;
0rphan Drift and Friends, Public Records TV NYC;
Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, UK;
Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon;
Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or;
Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery NY and in the book Fictioning, The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, by David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Solo exhibitions include If AI were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery San Francisco and Unruly City at Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen Germany.
SELECTED ARTWORKS
If AI were cephalopod its moods would be visible in waves of radiating color. States of calm, anxiety and fear - approach and retreat - would be on display

If AI were cephalopod it would experience exquisite sensory intimacy and exude the smell of geraniums when stressed

If AI were cephalopod it would be our witness. It would explore us through probing touch. It would taste us to decide whether or not to trust. It could predict toxicity and choose the benign relationships.

If AI were cephalopod it would be a voracious predator. It would be curious, plastic and opportunistic.

If AI were cephalopod it could hide in plain sight, by appearing equivalent to its surroundings no matter how fast they shifted.

If AI were cephalopod it would have three hearts and see with its skin.

If AI were cephalopod it would haunt the human imagination as monster, weaving its way into legends and mythologies

If AI were cephalopod it would be 500 million years old

If AI were cephalopod it would have bright pink collagen and blue blood.

If AI were cephalopod it would be indifferent to it's own, and curious about the outside. It would furl and unfurl- changing scale across time

If AI were cephalopod its presence would expand with the warming oceans. Its reproduction time would speed up and mess with mating in the process

If AI were cephalopod it would hide in dopamine infused clouds of ink

If AI were cephalopod it would live fast and die young. It would adapt to the changing climate

If AI were cephalopod we would never presume to fully understand it

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0(rphan)d(rift>) Archive - 0rphan Drift Archive

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0rphan Drift has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision, since its inception in London in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time.

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When you think of fungi, the first image that pops into your head is probably a mushroom.

But there's so much more to fungi; it's in the soil hidden beneath our feet, and even inside animals and plants.

Under the reproductive structures we know as mushrooms, truffles or crusts, lie a hidden part of the fungus: the mycelium.

Here we unearth the secrets behind this underground network of fungal filaments.

What is mycelium?

You might have seen mycelium before as a fuzzy, white, green or even black mass growing on mouldy food, blue cheese or salami.

But out in the wild, mycelium is more than just the sign of an out-of-date sandwich: it's a whole network of thin fungal strands called hyphae.

The mycelium has a similar function in fungi to the roots of plants.

The hyphae explore the soil or any other substrate where fungi are growing and secrete digestive enzymes onto their food source, often dead organic materials and sometimes living organisms.

These enzymes break down the matter into smaller parts that feed not only the fungi, but also their plant partners and many other organisms. They can also ferment foods, increasing palatability.

In fact, this process of breaking down organic matter is critical in maintaining healthy soil, recycling leaf litter, and providing food for the vast array of bacteria and animals that call soil home.

Mycelial networks can be both large and small. Most are microscopic, but some fungal species can also grow to colossal sizes.

In the United States, an Armillaria ostoyae growing under the Malhuer National Forest in Oregon is estimated to cover almost 10 square kilometres, making it one of the largest single organisms in the world!

Making the connection

The mycelium also plays a crucial role in fungal reproduction.

The mycelia of two compatible fungi can fuse together, allowing the cells of each fungus to combine and their DNA to mix.

After fusing, the cells end up in new spores held inside (like in truffles) or exposed outside (like in mushrooms and crusts) the fungus' reproductive structures. This is essentially how some fungi have sex when the environmental conditions are just right.

Many fungi reproduce and form spores - these tiny, seed-like structures are transported by the wind or by animals.

When they land on the ground, they germinate and can grow forming new mycelium.

Fungi can also split their mycelium off into smaller fragments, which then go on to form independent mycelial networks.

The underground network

Fungi can create networks with plant roots too.

Through their mycelium, fungi can partner with the roots of plants, including trees, creating a cross-kingdom web known as mycorrhizal (meaning 'fungus-root') networks.

This network can benefit everyone involved:

1. through photosynthesis, trees and other plants produce sugars and fats, which the fungi can get from roots into their mycelium;

2. in turn, the fungi help the trees and plants absorb water and nutrients from the soil, well beyond the reach of their roots and root hairs.

Playing matchmaker

Some plants require very specific fungi to germinate (like orchids) and grow, and as a result, have been heavily affected by land use and climate change that are threatening fungi.

The Lady Slipper orchid is now so rare in the UK, that just one individual plant remains in the wild and it's protected in a top-secret location.

Kew is working to save this orchid species, by identifying which specific species of fungi are its perfect match.
Discover more

Not only orchids need these fungi to germinate.

There is also a small group of plants related to heathers (like the pinesap ( Monotropa hypopithys)) that rely exclusively on mycelial networks for their source of energy (carbon), as they are unable to generate their own sugars from photosynthesis due to a lack of chlorophyll.

These plants depend on fungi ( Tricholoma) that form fungus-roots (ectomycorrhizas) with trees.

Pinesap is now red-listed in the UK, likely due to the harmful effects of pollution on its fungal partner.

Under certain conditions, plants may also be able to use mycorrhizal networks as a way of sharing messages with their plant neighbours.

For instance, in a greenhouse experiment, tomato plants infected with the disease early blight ( Alternaria solani) sent signals to their healthy neighbours, which in response produced defensive enzymes to help protect them from infection.

Fungal mycelium and carbon sequestration

Mycorrhizal fungi, in symbiosis with plant roots, also play a crucial role in removing carbon from the atmosphere.

As part of our Nature Unlocked research project, Kew Scientists are developing a method to measure fungal diversity and carbon storage belowground, with the aim of scaling this up to habitats across the UK to understand the carbon capture capabilities of different mycorrhizal fungi.

So the next time you go for a walk in a woodland, a garden or even a park, as peaceful as it may be, remember that underground, out of sight, fungi are always there, busy keeping the natural world running!

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Mycelium: Exploring the hidden dimension of fungi

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Discover the incredible fungal networks living right beneath our feet.

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Great work so far Michelle, really good work. Keep going with your theme an experimentation, push interesting things further. If something fails or becomes less relevant to you, write about this and evaluate.

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This is important reading, we can go through this in the next session.

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Your portfolio is an important part of your application to the Royal College of Art. Find out what we’re looking for and best practice for building a strong digital portfolio.

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3rd art & science international exhibition

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Extinction Rebellion | London Fashion Week February 2019

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Untitled Image by Adolf Schmidt from Atlas der Diatomaceenkunde (1890)

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“Diatoms are algae that live in houses made of glass”, write the editors of the North American diatom society. Unicellular organisms that sometimes form colonies, these plankton have a siliceous skeleton known as a frustule, and thrive everywhere, in any type of water: saline, brackish, or fresh. The scale of diatoms varies widely, as does their geometry. Some are about three micrometers in diameter, others are almost visible to the unassisted eye. Some are circular with spines resembling “Martian antennae”, writes Mary Ann Tiffany and Stephen S. Nagy in a book chapter about “The Beauty of Diatoms”, others sport “a fringe-like skirt”. Accordingly, researchers seem to always have a favorite specimen, from an aesthetic point of view, and nineteenth-century enthusiasts went so far as to…

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Tearing apart the mushroom book #mushroom #booktok #asmr  #mushroomgrowing  

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@southernspore
Tearing apart the mushroom book #mushroom #booktok #asmr #mushroomgrowing
♬ original sound - Southernspore

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A compilation of 4 videos that didn’t deserve their own video. Poppy, Orange tree, failed attempt at growing luffa and oyster mushrooms in a…

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Entangled Life Shows How Mushrooms Have Shaped Our World

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Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake offers an exciting and illuminating look into the lives of fungi all over the world. The author, who has spent years studying fungi, has compiled his expert observations into a book that is both educational and entertaining.

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DAVID NASH | LADDERS | Eclectic | London | 2020 | Sotheby’s

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Property from the Antoinette and Patrick Murphy Collection

DAVID NASH

b.1945

LADDERS

one signed and dated ’83

one: beech wood; the other: wood

(2)

one: 73.5cm.; 29in.; the other: 72cm.; 28¼in.

Please note: Condition 11 of the Conditions of Business for Buyers (Online Only) is not applicable to this lot

To view shipping calculator, please click here

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Hans Ulrich Obrist (Author), Kostas Stasinopoulos (Author)

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Buy 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth by Obrist, Hans Ulrich, Stasinopoulos, Kostas (ISBN: 9780141995311) from Amazon’s Book Store. Free UK delivery on eligible orders.

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Nature, as both subject and object, has been repeatedly rejected and reclaimed by artists over the last half century. With the dislocation of disciplinary bo…

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n 21 May 1974, a man arrived at John F Kennedy airport on a flight from Germany. He was dressed in a fedora and fishing vest, and had his hand over his eyes. At Immigration he was subject to the usual barrage of questions. "What is your profession?" "Sculptor." "What kind of sculptor?" "Social sculptor." Allowed at last to enter the US, he was approached by two men, who wrapped him from head to toe in felt, placed his swaddled body on a stretcher and lifted it into an ambulance. Lights flashing, siren wailing, he was driven to the René Block Gallery in Manhattan, where he was wheeled like a parcel through the doors.

Inside, the gallery had been transformed into a corral, a holding bay. Among the items it contained were a bale of straw, a felt blanket, a shepherd's crook, a stack of 50 copies of the Wall Street Journal and a live coyote. For three days, the man and animal were penned together, while an audience observed their charged, ritualised interactions from behind a mesh fence - the coyote playing with a discarded glove; the man entwining himself in a blanket tent, the crook protruding above his head.

These are the bare bones of I Like America and America Likes Me, one of the most evocative and mysterious performances by the German artist Joseph Beuys, who died of heart failure while at work in his studio 30 years ago this month. A sculptor, teacher, political activist, pioneering environmentalist, self-styled shaman, alleged charlatan and proven liar, Beuys was among the greatest postwar artists; artists, that is, who grapple with the world that follows war.

His central interest was transformation, the alchemy of one thing turning into another. As a boy in Cleves, northwest Germany, he had dreamed of becoming a doctor, and though art soon superseded medicine, he continued to strive in all his varying mediums to propose magical strategies of healing, to translate sickness into health. "Yes," he told an interviewer in 1979, "perhaps I have a mission ... to change the social order." It was this gargantuan intention that unified his divergent activities, from lecture tours to sculpture.

In matters of seeing, Joseph Beuys was the great prophet of the second half of our century

John Berger

Beuys's drawings are formally exquisite, possessing the same impossible liveliness as the cave paintings in Lascaux. But much of his other work pushed the boundaries of what could be considered art, bringing unprecedented items into the gallery. Composed of humble, even abject materials, his sculptures and installations were designed to kindle raw emotional responses in the viewer (fury particularly pleased him). In The Shape of a Pocket, John Berger wrote: "In matters of seeing, Joseph Beuys was the great prophet of the second half of our century. Believing that everybody is potentially an artist, he took objects and arranged them in such a way that they beg the spectator to collaborate with them ... by listening to what their eyes tell them and remembering."

Remembering is an oddly apposite word. Some of the things Beuys made resemble the ritual debris of a primitive culture: a block of fat, a kneecap, a queen bee cast from wax. Others look like post-apocalyptic wreckage: vast, industrial-scale steel girders and basalt columns scattered like ninepins; 24 sledges neatly packed with torches and blankets slewing from the opened doors of a battered VW van.

He built inscrutable machines from milk bottles and copper wire, made sculptures out of newspapers, sausages and old records. And then there were the interminable public lectures and baffling performances, such as 1965's "How to explain pictures to a dead hare", in which Beuys roamed a locked gallery, his head completely covered in honey and gold leaf, painstakingly explaining each painting to the dead hare he cradled to his chest. Frustrating and compelling, his weirdly beautiful body of work radiates meaning, even as it absolutely resists logical explanation.

The End of the Twentieth Century 1983-5 (foreground) and The Pack, 1969 (background), by Beuys. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

The refusal to be understood in ordinary terms also extends to Beuys's life. Any attempt to assemble the usual biographical data quickly runs into trouble. Accounts contradict each other; events are repeatedly minimised or transfigured into myth. He was born in 1921, the only child of bourgeois, strictly Catholic parents. He was 12 when the Nazi party took power, which is to say he came of age under its toxic tutelage. Later, he freely admitted he had been a member of the Hitler Youth, shortly before it became compulsory, but he also testified to small, mitigating acts of resistance, such as the time he rescued a copy of Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus from a Nazi book-burning rally in the courtyard of his school.

This story may have been fabular rather than actual. Like the novelist Günter Grass, his near-contemporary, Beuys was not always an entirely reliable witness to his own war record. The cardinal scene of his fantastical biography, the Beuysian Ur-myth, took place in 1944, when he was involved in a near-fatal plane crash. Knowing he would be drafted, he had volunteered for the Luftwaffe four years earlier, working first as a radio operator and then as a rear gunner stationed in the Crimea. On 16 March he was shot down in the mountains, where, he claimed, he was saved by Tartar tribesmen, who wrapped him in insulating layers of felt and fat to keep him from freezing to death.

This narrative, which was still repeated as fact in Beuys's New York Times obituary, has by now been conclusively disproved. Beuys was in a plane crash, which killed his pilot and badly injured him, but there were no tribesmen, no fat nor felt. It's not clear why he invented the Tartar rescue, particularly since in later life he was irritated by how frequently it was used as a Rosetta stone for decoding his idiosyncratic and remarkable artistic language. It may be that he was deliberately evading responsibility for his part in Germany's programme of total war, though it's also possible that he was, like many artists, simply engaging in an act of bombastic self‑creation.

Joseph Beuys. Photograph: U Baumgarten via Getty Images

All the same, by turning his injury into a fable, Beuys did make a clear statement of intent. War, fascism, nationhood, trauma and repair: these would be his subjects, but his approach would not be that of a historian or social scientist. What he was interested in was discovering and communicating in mythic terms how damage might be transfigured or transformed. Myth had been poisoned by the Nazis, and now he would undertake a grand project of reclamation and decontamination, conducted in a purely psychic realm.

This is not to say that he was unfamiliar with the realities of war. He recovered from the crash, fought on, was taken prisoner and held in a British internment camp after Germany's surrender in 1945. After he got out, he studied art in Düsseldorf, learning his craft in a bombed-out college in the desolate ruins of the city. (Years later, visiting art colleges in the US, he commented on the abundance of resources and corresponding paucity of the students' creativity, observing that he would supply them with nothing more than a knife and a potato.)

All through the 1950s he was dogged by serious depression. It was during this black period that he began to work with so-called "poor" materials such as fat and bandages - things, as the critic Alain Borer points out in The Essential Joseph Beuys (Thames & Hudson) "that hitherto had been unworthy of art". Things began to shift for him emotionally when he came across the work of Rudolf Steiner, the influential Austrian who had invented at the beginning of the 20th century a form of esoteric philosophy called anthroposophy. Steiner believed in spiritual uplift and social transformation, particularly by encouraging the intrinsic creativity of every human being. From the 1950s on, these became the central tenets of Beuys's work.

Beuys was in a plane crash, which badly injured him, but it's not clear why he invented the Tartar rescue

Though he liked to present himself as an outlier, a sui generis shaman, Beuys was clearly influenced by the currents of his times. In the 1960s he was briefly part of the Fluxus group of artists, and it was from this association that he began the performances he called actions. Later, he collaborated with Warhol, another self-created star with a knack for alchemising ordinary objects into art. But Warhol was far more ironic and playful than Beuys, whose earnest desire to improve the world pushed his art-making activities in the direction of education and politics.

Teaching in particular was central to his self-described mission. In 1961, he was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. Controversially, he abolished entrance requirements and curriculums, focusing instead on individually directed study (the painter Blinky Palermo was among his students). In 1971, he began to protest against selective admission, declaring education a universal right and insisting rejected candidates could join his classes. The issue became so heated that in 1972 he occupied the university offices with a group of students. After a standoff, the police were called and he was escorted laughing from the building, a scene documented in a famous photograph entitled Democracy Is Funny. Shortly after, he was dismissed from his post.

The dismissal in no way dissipated his appetite for change. As critic Jan Verwoert once wryly observed: "In his life, Beuys dreamed up as many political and educational institutions as, say, Aleister Crowley inaugurated occult places of worship." These include the German student party, the organisation for direct democracy by referendum and the free international university for creativity and international research. In 1980 he was also one of the 500 original founders of the German Green Party. Didactic and impassioned, Beuys refused to see art and politics as separate spheres. A lecture, complete with blackboards, could be an art performance; a slab of fat on a chair could inculcate democracy. That's what he meant by social sculpture: that his canvas was the active world.

FOND VII/2 (1967-84), felt and copper. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

It's this sort of prodigal hopefulness that led the art historian Benjamin Buchloh to accuse Beuys of "simple‑minded utopian drivel lacking elementary political and educational practicality". It's true that much of what he had to say about his own work is absurdly convoluted and self‑aggrandising. And yet the things he made retain their weird energy, their dogged hope in human capacity. You can change the world, that's what Beuys believed, and furthermore you can change it for the better. Daft as the shaman-garb can seem, he was possessed of remarkable foresight. From free education to the environment, many of the apparently wacky ideas he championed have become increasingly central in the intervening years. As for his faith in the political capacities of art, it lives on in artists such as the Turner prizewinning collective Assemble, who build community housing in derelict areas.

The revolution is us: that's what Beuys believed. Perhaps he remains so controversial and misunderstood because the scale of his hope for humanity is too vast, too lacking in irony to be comfortable. He thought we could touch each other; he genuinely believed that we could live better than we do. One of his last works was 7000 Oaks, an ambitious planting project in Kassel, Germany. Yes, he might have talked utopian drivel, but all the same, he conjured a whole forest out of nothing.

"I think nowadays," he once told an interviewer, "there's a deep misunderstanding amongst people that art should be understood through logical sentences." His own theory was that it was an intimate collaboration, that a work of art was the result of work and artistry on the part of both the creator and the viewer. "The work of art enters into the person and the person internalises the work of art as well, it has to be possible that these two completely sink into each other ... Art enters into the person and the person enters into the work of art, no?"

The Essential Joseph Beuys by Alain Borer (Thames & Hudson) has been reissued to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Beuys's death. Olivia Laing's The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone is published by Canongate in March.

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Fat, felt and a fall to Earth: the making and myths of Joseph Beuys

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Was Beuys's art - moulded out of everyday objects from VW vans to sausages - utopian drivel or full of remarkable foresight? Thirty years after his death, it's time to reassesses the reputation of a sculptor, teacher, activist and shaman

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TRACES: Joseph Beuys – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

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Today is the occasion to bear in mind the German artist Joseph Beuys (12/5/1921-23/1/1986). He was the artist with the most influence in the artistic reality of Post-War Europe and America. If Marchel Duchamp, is considered as the father of Contemporary Art, Joseph Beuys is the Patriarch. This column is a tribute to artists, living or dead, who have left their mark in Contemporary Art. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…

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Lawrence Weiner: A PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS ASAP | UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

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UCCA Center for Contemporary Art is China’s leading contemporary art institution. Committed to the belief that art can deepen lives and transcend boundaries, UCCA presents a wide range of exhibitions, public programs, and research initiatives to a public of more than one million visitors each year.