Lauren Siry on Cesar and Lois
Thinking Like a Mushroom, 2019, fungus growing on the book Great Dialogues of Plato
[Image description: A pinkish-orange mushroom that looks like a flower grows on top of a weathered copy of the book Great Dialogues of Plato.]
A bouquet of pink, fleshy mushrooms bursts through the spine of a book splayed wide open inside a glass case. Under the shadow of the fungal bloom, the title “Great Dialogues of Plato” remains visible. Thinking Like a Mushroom (2019) is a multi-media artwork by Cesar and Lois, featuring a fungal organism converging with Plato's philosophical text on the human experience of love, beauty, immortality, and knowledge.
The fungus consumes and contaminates this piece of human-centric literature, regarded as one of the most influential texts in the Western world. In an accompanying audio meditation, the two-person artist collective Cesar and Lois describe how microbiological organisms communicate, defining this communication as “fungal intelligence.” Headphones emit the soothing sounds of sedated voices layered together in a hypnotic flow. “Think with us. Think with us. Think like a mushroom.” The artists guide the listener to visualize themselves as a root-like fungal system beneath the cool dark soil of a forest. Participants are prompted by the rhythmic voices to transport information about the environment through a complex system of roots. In much the same way that fungal spores disseminate, soothing words germinate ideas of how human and non-human beings feel and communicate, revealing overlapping links of intelligence between the two.
Cesar and Lois create living sculptures with technological components as part of a broader exploration of power dynamics in nature and human society. The collective was founded by Lucy H.G. Solomon, a California-based artist, professor, and co-founder of the League of Imaginary Scientists (LOIS), and Dr. Cesar Baio, a Brazilian artist, professor, and researcher.
While the fungi in their work represent non-human intelligence, the historical texts represent inherited knowledge. Throughout history, European-centered literature has promoted the notion that humans are superior to the natural world. In a virtual interview, Cesar and Lois acknowledge that their academic backgrounds were heavily influenced by binary thinking, which establishes a hierarchical structure that marginalizes nature. [1] This concept is more common in Western philosophies. According to the nature-culture dualism, humans are not intrinsically connected to nature because they have a higher level of consciousness. While humanity is civilized, nature is primitive. Consequently, the dualistic perspective positioning humans as dominant and nature as inferior distances humanity from the natural world and leads to its exploitation.
Degenerative Cultures, Geo-engineering edition (detail), 2020-2021, AI digital microbiological network on monitor
[Image description: A circle, made up of small green and yellow squares, against a black background. The yellow squares connect to create a branching form across the circe.]
Cesar and Lois are interested in the collective characteristics of fungal and slime mold networks. The multi-brain organisms can learn, adapt, and solve problems efficiently as a collective, rather than receiving commands from a singular brain. Decentralized networks do not have a central point of control, so there is no hierarchy; nutrients and resources are distributed equitably throughout the chaotic and interconnected organism. Microbiological networks, such as fungi or slime-mold, have been used across many fields as insightful metaphors. In the scientific community, they are regarded as metabolic superheroes that decompose the organic and synthetic substances harming our environment. Various contemporary artists, including Jenna Sutela, Anicka Yi, Philippe Parreno, and others, collaborate with fungi to reimagine technological networks for communication. Cesar and Lois believe that the interconnected collectivity of fungal networks can propose renewed concepts of society and knowledge systems that enable closer relationships between humanity and nature.
Degenerative Cultures, Geo-engineering edition, iterations 2018-2021, AI digital microbiological network on monitor, plexiglass dome with Physarum polycephalum growing over book, thermal printer with readout of the slime mold’s tweets, 79 x 39 x 39 in.
[Image description: A digital tablet, a receipt printer, and a transparent dome sit on a white surface. The tablet’s screen displays a green background with yellow lines. A long receipt hangs from the printer. The glowing red dome covers an open book.]
In a 2020 text for The International Journal of Community Well-Being, Cesar and Lois suggest that Western imperialistic desires for capital, conquest, and colonization continue to influence modern society and devastate the environment. [2] In agreement with Cesar and Lois, ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood implicates these binaries as part of the environmental crisis, arguing that nature/culture dualism is a dangerous "foundational delusion of the West," born of "the old dominant narrative of human mastery and centrality" and further compounded by modern city living, which reduces human engagement with nature. [3] In response to the climate crisis, Cesar and Lois aim to imagine new forms of communication across all living and technological systems through a series of poetic, multi-media installations and scientific publications that blur the boundaries between micro-biological, social, and technological networks. Their work strives to “decolonize knowledge,” a movement to undermine the historical mechanisms of knowledge production that are dominated by Western, human-centric ideologies.
Degenerative Cultures, Disappearing Islands edition (detail), 2020-2021, Physarum polycephalum growing over the book De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) by Marcus Tullius Cicero
[Image description: A copy of the book De Natura Deorum spread open against a black background. Yellow, organic tendrils grow across the text.]
In Degenerative Cultures (2020-2021), Cesar and Lois create systems that allow microbiological networks to interact with humans via the internet. The project has been developed in multiple countries, including, Brazil, America, England, and Singapore. In every iteration of Degenerative Cultures the yellow, web-like slime mold Physarum polycephalum decomposes the pages of a printed Western philosophical text. The yellow slime mold obliterates writings by European scholars such as the Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero and French philosopher René Descartes, concealing words that for generations have kept humanity philosophically distanced from nature.
Degenerative Cultures, Floresta Amazônica edition (installation view), 2020-2021, AI digital microbiological network on monitor, plexiglass dome, Physarum polycephalum growing on book, thermal printer with readout of the slime mold’s tweets, 79 x 39 x 39 in.
[Image description: An installation in a dark space. On the left, a screen shows a digital image of yellow pathways against a green background, adjacent to which is a black column with white text. On the right is a transparent dome, glowing red, covered in condensation. Underneath the dome lays an open book.]
Presented on a single pedestal in a dark room, Degenerative Cultures consists of a slime mold-infested book enclosed in an illuminated glass dome, a receipt printer, and a tablet computer with an algorithm activated by the physical mold growth. A hovering camera affixed to the glass captures the growth pattern of the slime mold culture and communicates its movement to the adjacent computer screen interface. Cesar and Lois write custom computer programs to convert the real-time physical growth of the microbiological network into a set of data points that are displayed on the computer screen tablet in yellow digital pixels.
Each exhibition is the result of a collaboration between Cesar and Lois and scientists who identify a climate issue specific to that exhibition location. The artificial intelligence program searches the web for texts related to the local climate crisis, focusing on words of dominance, superiority, and colonization. Cesar and Lois instruct the artificial intelligence to remove the predatory terms and reconstruct the text on a Twitter thread, @HELLOFUNGUS. As the slime mold grows on the surface of the book, the AI program is triggered to remove words continuously until the Twitter feed and the receipt printout become unreadable. The receipt printer emits an endless stream of receipts, humming and spewing fragments of text. The slime mold intelligence penetrates the intangible networks of the internet and appropriates the words of Western philosophers as a means of communicating with humanity.
Cesar and Lois describe their practice as “'fungal colonization of human knowledge systems,” borrowing Imperialist language of dominance. Fungi colonize human language and technological communication systems, disrupting power hierarchies that marginalize nature. As a result, nature is reframed as the colonizer and humanity as the colonized. The French Martinique philosopher Édouard Glissant proposes in Poetics of Relation (1990) that the colonized or disempowered should appropriate colonial culture, embracing "creolization" as a way to accelerate differences. [4] Cesar and Lois embrace this approach by facilitating a chaotic fusion of language, knowledge, and technological communication systems to repair the philosophical disconnect between humanity and nature.
Degenerative Cultures, Cloud seeding edition (detail), 2020-2021, Physarum polycephalum growing over book by Rene Descartes
[Image description: A closeup of the corner of a page of a book by Descartes. A complex web of yellow lines covers the left side, overlapping with part of the text.]
In the Brazilian iteration of Degenerative Cultures: Floresta Amazônica (2020-2021), the slime mold decomposes a text by René Descartes, causing the artificial intelligence to search for and destroy texts about human colonization of the Amazon rainforest. Throughout 2019, we were faced with images of the Amazon rainforest engulfed in flames as the billowing black clouds of smoke consumed our phones, televisions, and computer screens. This was a result of the Brazilian government encouraging the clearing of Amazon forests in order to cultivate agriculture and build capital. A large portion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by the Amazon Forest, which cools the Earth. As a result of its destruction, global warming and the climate crisis have accelerated, making it all the more urgent to challenge human exceptionalism rooted in Western notions of dominance. Brazil's burning of the rainforest for agricultural crops is just one example of the unsustainable growth of the human population and economy that is exploiting nature. Cesar and Lois create complex connections between the written words of Western ideology and our present environmental condition that implicates our past.
In light of the fact that modern society is heavily mediated by the internet, the collective explores the possibility of fungi and slime molds infiltrating human knowledge systems in ways that transcend physical colonization. The interactive algorithm rewrites texts depending upon the growth and engagement of the slime mold network. Twitter users who retweet or mention @HELLOFUNGUS on the social media network contribute to the degradation of texts, causing the digital fungus to search for and degrade more online texts. Cesar and Lois define the fusion of non-human and human intelligence as “Ecosystemic Artificial Intelligence.” An intricate web of communication between micro-biological slime molds, artificial intelligence, and humans further complicates the hierarchies that separate humanity and nature.
Degenerative Cultures, Disappearing Islands edition (detail), 2020-2021, receipt print-out tweet of Cicero’s text before the slime mold’s degeneration
[Image description: A receipt printout that reads, “@HelloFungus. We alone have the power of controlling the most violent of nature’s offspring, the sea and the winds. Cicero.”]
In Degenerative Cultures: Disappearing Islands (2020-2021), exhibited at the Aesthetica Art Prize exhibition in New York in 2021, the yellow veins of slime mold consume Cicero's De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), a philosophical dialogue on Western religious beliefs written in 45 B.C.E. In an illuminated glass cupola, Cesar and Lois enshrine the contaminated manuscript like a religious relic. A soft glow emanates from its ominous red light as the book succumbs to the fungal colonization. The fungal tweets from the artificial intelligence disregard the rules of grammar as it omits language, seemingly mocking Cicero’s affiliations between humankind and the divine. One tweet reads:
These are the gods and mankind, who assuredly surpass all things in excellence, since the most excellent of all things is Thus we are led to believe that the and all the things are Thus we are led to believe that the and all the things that it contains were the sake of gods and
Humanity’s relation to divinity has been strengthened for thousands of years through texts central to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Religion has rendered books the most influential object in human history until the internet emerged and accelerated communications. Cesar and Lois work with fungi to decompose a symbolic human cultural artifact, metaphorically decomposing humanity's connection to the divine.
The slime mold elicits non-linear compositions and poetic associations that are analogous to the web of tendrils extending throughout the book, forming new links in every direction in order to establish a wider collective network of connections. A digital tweet and a printed receipt of an uncanny language reveal a poetic openness that liberates human language with boundless possibilities to merge and transform with a nonhuman intelligence. The receipt, a symbol of the Capitalist market that reinforces inequality and unsustainable growth, is reinterpreted as a document of poetic diction. Value is relocated in the ecosystemic artificial intelligence, the collective communication between the book, fungi, artificial intelligence, and the human retweeting. As the title implies, Degenerative Cultures literally and metaphorically degrades and corrupts the culture and language that birthed human-centric thinking. The piece produces a platform for the organic and digital fungal intelligence to merge and construct a new communication system. Nature, oppressed and colonized by human culture, subverts the hierarchies of power and welcomes an alliance with human and artificial intelligences.
Entanglements of language, text, and poetic visual symbols blur the power distinctions between humanity and nature; non-human and human-intelligence; colonizer and colonized. Cesar and Lois suggest we decompose language and the elements of knowledge before we can compose and reconstruct a new perspective that includes all life forms. The introduction of a digital fungus-like intelligence to the Twitter platform represents a poetic dismantling of knowledge systems on a modern global scale. Cesar and Lois poetically contaminate Western ideology to decolonize knowledge and allow a new value system to emerge.
Lauren Siry is an artist, independent curator, and art consultant based in London, England.
Notes:
1. Virtual interview with the author, February 21, 2022.
2. Lucy HG Solomon and Cesar Baio, “An Argument for an Ecosystemic AI: Articulating Connections across Prehuman and Posthuman Intelligences,” International Journal of Community Well-Being, vol.3, no 4, 9 Nov. 2020, pp. 559-589.
3. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London & New York: Routledge, 1993).
4. Édouard Glissant and Betsy Wing, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: Univ. Of Michigan Press, 1997).