Performing Mycelia-preview

Midnight Mushroom Music

Mycelia premiered as the opening performance for A MAZE. / Berlin festival 2021 in VRChat. A meta-immersive living mycelium musical entanglement. Nanotopia is known for hooking up fungi with electrodes and circuitry to record its various biodata and translating this biodata (often in real-time) through synthesisers both analog and digital. In 2020 Tosca Terán was an invited participant in the New Nature Climate Science Exchange hosted by the Goethe-Institute, curated by Samara Chadwick. Through this exchange with other like-minded artists, technologists and scientists Tosca presented a proposal towards bringing living fungi biodata into a VR environment, creating a macroscopic experience of human and nonhuman entanglements within a forest environment. Working project title: Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis. After the presentations Tosca and digital technologist Sara Lisa Vogl connected and later began work on the Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis project. Bringing in Neuroscientist/coder Brendan Lehman, Photogrammetric/new media artist Allison Moore, VR world builder Jason Stapleton, Sound designer Penelope Walcott, AR collaborator Peter Henderson, and early involved Arduino robot builder Lorena Salomé. Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis is generously funded by the Goethe-Institute Montreal, Canada Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council with sponsorship from bHaptics and ARTIVIVE. Tosca and Sara Lisa thought it would be fun to participate in the A MAZE. / Berlin festival but knew the Sym/Dys project was far too large not to mention myriad COVID19 restrictions plus, looking at VRChat as a platform et viola! a Mycelia mood board branched out. Sara Lisa was introduced to the Meta Crew South Africa while working for SXSW and felt that this amazing group of creators might be interested in working on a Mycelia world - and they were!! Concept for Mycelia was, of course, to bring living mycelium bio-sonification into VRChat with reactive audio aspects via a live human & nonhuman electronic music performance. Sara Lisa had been learning how to work with a Sports Pole in VR and thought she could add to the performance with an interpretive full-body tracked dance as spores above Tosca's avatar. Living mycelium and human performances have taken place for A MAZE. / Berlin The Venice Film Festival 2021- VR Expanded and the Raindance Film Festival where Mycelia won the Spirit of the Festival award. nanotopia will be releasing the Mycelia performances soon. Here is a preview! xoxox Happy New Year 2022!