Fungal Networks and Spaces of Consciousness: Interweaving Nature, Technology and Art

A glowing forest

How does consciousness arise, and where might it already exist—beyond ourselves? My interest lies in slow, often invisible processes of transformation and in the interplay between art, science and design. I’m drawn to systems in motion, and to the integration of different ways of knowing.

How did I end up with fungi? A defining experience for me was walking through a completely dark forest when I noticed that the deadwood around me was glowing. I thought it must be phosphorus, but it was actually bioluminescent fungal mycelium. I began collecting and observing rotting wood and soon came across the idea of the Wood Wide Web. This term describes the underground network of mycorrhizal fungi that not only connects plants but redistributes resources between them and the fungi themselves.

What was once considered a simple exchange of nutrients is now increasingly understood as a form of communication. Trees warn one another, support saplings or die altruistically, releasing nutrients into their surroundings.

Experiments III, Exhibition view «Other Intelligences», HEK, Basel 2025. Photo: Susanne Hartmann.

The forest as superorganism

The more we understand the Wood Wide Web, the more blurred the lines become between individual species. What if a forest is better understood as a single superorganism rather than a group of separate, individualistic life forms?

The idea of distributed intelligence, where thinking is not located in a single centre, has shaped my work since the project Morphogen. I explored music as a universal language and connected it with rhizomes, topologies, and natural processes. Mycelium is structurally decentralised and functionally interconnected. It offers more than a biological example. It can also serve as a model for thinking — one that questions colonial knowledge systems rooted in dualism, control, and individualism.

Everything is connected

I once read that the largest organism discovered on Earth is a 965-hectare fungal network in Oregon. How can we be sure that all living things on Earth—and perhaps beyond—aren’t connected through something like a fungal rhizome, just like the Wood Wide Web?

The more we zoom out from the small to the vast, the more we realise that subjects are linked to one another, and to objects as well. The forest and the sapling, the bacterium and the human body are all part of a greater whole.

I imagine consciousness existing on many levels. Each island of awareness is surrounded by a larger one, and that by another still. If we begin to see a forest, a planet, or an ocean as conscious, what might that mean for how we treat them?

Lieutenant Paul Stamets, Star Trek.

Star Trek: Predicting the future since 1966 

The pseudoscience of Star Trek takes inspiration from real scientific ideas and pushes them beyond what is considered plausible or acceptable in research settings. Its creators imagined a world governed by its own logic, unrestricted by accuracy or status quo.

Such speculative thinking appears to have encouraged researchers and engineers to take the ideas seriously, using them as starting points for real technological and scientific developments. Science is constantly revised by better science; what once seemed like magic is later explained by physics, and ideas once dismissed as impossible are eventually reconsidered through new perspectives.

In Star Trek: Discovery, the crew uncovers a literal mycelial network that links everything in space, much like the Wood Wide Web. They develop a unique propulsion system to travel along what Lieutenant Paul Stamets describes as «the veins and muscles that hold our galaxies together.»  His character is named after the real-life mycologist Paul Stamets, who is also known for his advocacy of psychedelic mushrooms.

The spore drive, developed by Lt. Stamets, is powered by connecting his body and consciousness directly to the system. He navigates the ship using only his thoughts. The drive functions as an interface with the vast fungal network, placing him in an altered state of consciousness.

Experiments III, Photo: Fidel Gomez Sanchez.

Cosmic thinking

The machinery of the universe is still far beyond what we can comprehend. But what happens if we begin to see everything as conscious—or even alive?

I exchanged thoughts on this with Alejandro Nolla, a colleague from Cuernavaca, Mexico, with whom I studied in Basel in 2012. His work often features egg-shaped beings that appear as conscious, unknown life forms. They are part of the universe and feed on the universe itself.

We realised that while the visual language of our work differs, our shared interest is clear: we want to understand consciousness—individual and collective—and compare it to the structure of the cosmos.

In 2022, while travelling through Oaxaca, Mexico, I visited mountain villages where psychedelic mushrooms are legally consumed. In these communities, the legacy of shamanic culture enables deeper understanding through ritual and connection to collective awareness.

I’ve come to think of this as the mycelium of the ancestors. In my work, mycelium becomes a metaphor for a kind of thought that doesn’t begin in the individual, but in the in-betweens.

Pink Oyter Mushroom,  Photo: Susanne Hartmann.

Life as entanglement

The Wood Wide Web contradicts the Western view of nature as a collection of autonomous, competing individuals. The idea of a forest as a cooperative, communicative system clashes with thinking grounded in separation and hierarchy: subject/object, human/nature, culture/wilderness.

Donna Haraway speaks of «entanglements»—a reality defined not by separation but by coexistence. The biologist Lynn Margulis proposed the theory of endosymbiosis, suggesting that eukaryotic cells emerged through the merging of simpler organisms. For example, our mitochondria were once free-living bacteria. This supports the idea that life is based on cooperation rather than competition.

Mycelium follows this logic. In fact, Margulis suggested that it might not simply be part of life, but its underlying structure. The deeper one engages with these systems, the more similarities begin to appear. The branching networks of mycelium resemble neural networks, and they also mirror the structure of the cosmos. Clusters of galaxies act as nodes, connected by filament-like gas structures through which matter flows.

Experiments III, Exhibition view «Other Intelligences», HEK, Basel 2025. Photo: Fidel Gomez Sanchez.

Does the universe think?

Quantum entanglement is a key topic in contemporary physics. Researchers are developing quantum computers and gradually uncovering how everything in the universe might be fundamentally connected. Some theories suggest that consciousness is not merely a product of neurobiology, but a phenomenon that may itself be entangled.

Animism, a concept found in many Indigenous knowledge systems, imagines the world as full of life and spirit. For a long time, it was dismissed as primitive belief. Yet today, even scientific disciplines are beginning to engage with these questions—entering theoretical spaces once considered irrational.

Before a residency trip to Mexico, I spoke with the technician at my neurologist’s office, the one who always runs my EEGs. As someone with epilepsy, I go for scans twice a year. It’s a fascinating process that helps neurologists document and interpret my states of consciousness.

She supplied me with electrodes, as I was interested in the bioelectrical activity of plants and fungi. The numerical readings from a tree reminded me of rituals in Mixe culture, an Indigenous people living in the hills of Oaxaca. Like the Mixteca and many other groups, they regard many things as ensouled. The river has a spirit, so does the mountain, or a lightning strike.

These cultures have their own calendars and numerologies, with sacred numbers and inauspicious ones. Numbers can be offered to spirits during rituals—for healing, for hunting, or to strengthen the nagual. In Rituals and Numbers, I juxtaposed these number systems with the bioelectrical rhythms I recorded from a tree.

Experiments III, Exhibition view «Other Intelligences», HEK, Basel 2025. Photo: Fidel Gomez Sanchez.

Experiments III, Exhibition view «Other Intelligences», HEK, Basel 2025. Photo: Fidel Gomez Sanchez.

Experiments III

In Experiments III, the bioelectrical impulses of fungi are measured and translated into light via an amplifier circuit with LEDs.

At the top of the scaffold structure, mycelium blocks host growing mushrooms. Their EEG signals are sent through fibre optic cables. The piece brings together the materiality of the (essentially bionic) World Wide Web with that of the Wood Wide Web. The electronics run on a battery-powered amplifier with copper plug-in electrodes. Thanks to this self-contained setup, the measurements remain free of signal interference.

Fungi speak slowly. It can take up to twenty minutes before the amplitude of a signal becomes visible in their rhythms. That’s why the light is usually either on or off—only occasionally flickering.

At the base of the structure, fungi grow in a different phase. Mushrooms have been called the architects of life, playing a crucial role in ecosystems and providing a foundation for countless other organisms. Fungi think. They can remember, recognise shapes and geometries, and adapt to their surroundings.

Over several weeks, I cultivated mycelium cultures that continued to grow into specific forms over the course of the exhibition. I started with spores on agar-agar and purified the cultures across several rounds. First, delicate hyphae formed, which then developed into thicker threads—the mycelium. Once strong enough, I transferred the cultures to petri dishes with nutrients, and later into hand-made glass vessels.

I was curious what shape consciousness might take and let the mycelium grow into those forms. The design of the glass dishes was inspired by motifs that emerged during the process like my own drawings from a previous series titled Identity, elements of Mexican shamanic culture, and input from an AI system.

The decision to include these references in the work was also an indication that such perspectives may be just as scientifically relevant. In the past, I often worked from within scientific frameworks. Today, I’m trying to open them up and explore a symbiosis between different models of knowledge.

For me, mycelium has become a symbol for how we might rethink the world: not as linear or separate, but as a living, interconnected web. In the space between art, technology and nature, new forms of consciousness can begin to take shape — quiet, slow and full of meaning.

Glossary:

Agar-Agar
A jelly-like substance made from algae, used in laboratories to grow fungi or bacteria.

Animism
The belief that not only humans, but also animals, plants, or objects possess a spirit or consciousness.

EEG (Electroencephalogram)
A method for measuring the electrical activity in the brain.

Endosymbiosis
The theory that complex cells evolved through the merging of different, simpler organisms.

Epistemology
The study of how knowledge is formed and how we come to understand things.

Filaments / Galaxy Clusters
Large-scale structures in the universe, where galaxies are connected in a web-like pattern.

Hyphae
Fine fungal threads that form the basis of a mycelial network.

Interface
A connecting point or surface where humans and technology interact.

Mycorrhiza
The symbiotic relationship between fungi and plant roots, where both benefit from the exchange.

Mycelium
The underground network of fungal threads that connects fungi with each other and with plants.

Nagual
A concept from Mesoamerican cultures referring to a spiritual force or alternative self.

Neural Network
A network of nerve cells in the brain, or a computer model inspired by this structure.

Phenotype
The visible characteristics of a living being, shaped by both genes and environment.

Purify
To cleanse or filter something—such as a fungal culture—to remove unwanted elements.

Quantum Entanglement
A phenomenon in physics where two particles remain connected, even when separated by vast distances.

Rhizome
A model for non-hierarchical, decentralised structures—found in nature and in theory.

Spores
Tiny reproductive units that allow fungi to spread and form new mycelium.

Superorganism
A large system made up of smaller units that functions as one living entity—like a forest.

Topology
The spatial structure or layout of a system or network.

Wood Wide Web
The underground network of fungi and plant roots that enables trees to share nutrients and information.

World Wide Web
The global digital network used to access websites—often compared to the Wood Wide Web as its technological counterpart.