Projects
Immersive Explorations || Fungal Networks
Immersive Explorations || Fungal Networks
This project aims to explore immersive art technologies and the potential to reveal and creatively engage with mycelial networks that lie beneath the fantastical fruiting bodies of mushrooms and fungus that we see in the world around us. Exploring immersive and assertive technologies and their ability to reveal those fungal networks through new collaborative artworks.
The diverse, beautiful and sometimes disturbing variety of mushrooms, toadstools and fungus surround us in our everyday lives. What we are able to see are the superficial fruiting bodies of a much larger, expansive mycelial network, hidden beneath the visual spectacle. This network serves to exchange nutrients and minerals across species reflecting a complex ecological system.
Explore
£5,000
Aims of the Project
My aim is to explore the use of immersive technologies, investigating how such networks can be revealed and engaged to develop new possibilities for creative intervention and sharing of understanding. I am particularly interested in revealing that which lies beneath our daily existence and discovering the potential of extended reality to create engaging, responsive and reflective artworks, offering new audiences a means to engage with hidden networks of communication and symbiotic relationships.
I want to expand my practice to incorporate immersive technologies, to provide a new way of experiencing art beyond the visual, to learn how to use immersive and assistive technology to open up creative activity and engagement to people with different communication methods and processes.
How can I understand the different applications of immersive technology and how these can assist in revealing communicative and symbiotic relationships? Fungal networks are often employed as a rich metaphor, I hope to discover a route to reveal actual connections through the use of immersive technology, creating artworks as fruiting bodies that are both reflective and responsive in function and form.
Initially I will explore binaural audio, extended reality and mixed reality.
Meet the artist
Sarah Males
Lead Artist
she/her/they/them
Sarah’s practice aims to engage people with place, specifically with natural, built or cultural heritage. Sarah uses mixed media depending on location and aim of each site specific project. She is very interested in local networks and nexus of communications, exploring these using different 2D/3D media and spoken or written word. Sarah collaborates with different community groups to celebrate what is important and relevant to them at a specific point in time. Most recent work has included a celebration of local woodlands, creative research and reflections of local reservoir, looking at social and cultural history offering public participatory events on site.
Other than video and photography, Sarah has little experience of using digital technologies in participatory arts projects. She is seeking to expand my practice through research, mentoring and experimentation at this stage of my artistic development. Underpinning her socially engaged practice is a valuing of the interconnections between people and place and Sarah believes immersive technology could add another dimension to her artwork, potentially offering new means of creative engagement to celebrate and explore these connections.
