How’s it going, Fun guy?
Aluminum, Acrylic, Electrical Devices, Fungi
8 x 8 x 12 in.
06:00 min, color, mono sound
This work combines a portable installation and a video documentary recording my attempt to treat fungi as a friend—taking them to experience human activities while collecting their bioelectronic signals as "comments." Research suggests fungi possess a form of "language" expressed through bioelectronic patterns. The project asks: what if we approached them not as objects of study, but as conscious beings capable of their own responses?
The installation is an octagonal aluminum shell with a hemispherical transparent top, housing living Pleurotus Djamor (pink oyster mushrooms). On the front, an OLED screen displays real-time waves of the fungi's bioelectronic signals, visualizing their activity as I take them on outings—putting headphones on the mushroom to listen to Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, knitting them a scarf to keep warm, visiting Harvard Art Museums, watching movies, hiking.
All data generated during these experiences is processed and presented in the video. The work proposes a speculative method for encountering fungi as beings with their own subjectivity, while acknowledging the vast gap between our ways of knowing. Yet as the video's ending suggests, it may be impossible for humans to truly think as non-humans. The fungi, ultimately, do not care about us.
In this project, humor is not used as an aesthetic effect or to make the work more accessible; it functions as a methodological device. The exaggerated performance—placing headphones on fungi, knitting them a scarf, taking them to museums or on hikes—stages an intentional mismatch between human-centered behaviors and non-human modes of existence. The humor emerges precisely from what the audience already knows: fungi have no ears, no vision, no sensory apparatus comparable to ours. Laughter arises at the moment this knowledge collides with the artist’s sincere, even meticulous, attempt to “care” for the fungi as if they were human companions. In this sense, humor operates as a cognitive rupture that exposes the limits of anthropocentric logic rather than reinforcing it.
While the performative gestures appear naive or absurd, the bioelectronic signal acquisition, data logging, and visualization are implemented with scientific seriousness. This tension allows the work to oscillate between ignorance and rigor: the performance openly admits the impossibility of translation, while the apparatus insists on measurement, mediation, and analysis.
The failure of communication is not a flaw but the work's conclusion—a contemporary Tower of Babel. Despite rigorous technical apparatus and genuine effort to bridge the divide, the experiment cannot escape human-centered logic. This sense of destiny, of inevitable misunderstanding, becomes the work's final gesture: releasing the fungi back to nature, admitting the limits of translation, and recognizing that some forms of kinship resist our instruments and intentions.
An essay about this work is under review by ISEA 2026.
In Gallery