Mushroom Virtual Reality with Nanotopia
Alisa Nappa
What happens when you make mushroom music and generate virtual reality with mushroom signals? We sit down with nanotopia to dive into an alternate reality to explore the weird world of mushroom signals and the explorative landscapes they create.
Here are links to audio and video research and explorations - their work in bringing nonhuman bio-electrical activity into VR
Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis:Sentience
Audio/Visual and communication research with fungal mycelium
Specifically Ganoderma lucidum
Residency at SUNY Buffalo’s Coalesce Centre for Biological Art
https://youtu.be/5AHe19pmYeA?si=IxcSUt-lAlpZgaav
VRDays Rotterdam presentation with Euromersive
Sharing our research on the Resonite VR platform
https://youtu.be/Xxi4YGlm53g?si=zpzLvIMiJGMhum7p
Visual tests- connecting Mycelium and human touch
https://youtu.be/pQhgD6tXSFA?si=6XXjlGAuYJgOO0qg
Connecting Human EEG and Fungal bio-electrical activity
https://youtu.be/V8iAWSLHUAQ?si=hhlhjOU8P8mQypxr
Nanotopia’s Midnight Mushroom Music Archives
https://soundcloud.com/nanotopia
Nanotopia’s fungi into Eurorack and beyond on bandcamp
https://nanotopia.bandcamp.com/
Follow the Sentience project - connecting humans with the shared environment/fungi
https://www.symbiosis-dysbiosis.com/
Sign up for our podcast giveaway here. Our next winner will be selected on April 24, 2024 and contacted via email.
TRANSCRIPT
Unknown Speaker 0:12
Welcome, welcome. You are listening to the mushroom revival podcast. I'm your host, Alex Dora. And we are absolutely obsessed with the wonderful, mysterious, wacky world of mushrooms and fungi. We bring on guests and experts from all around the world to geek out with us and go down this mysterious rabbit hole and try to figure out what the heck is going on with these mushroom friends. And so today we are going to be diving into mushroom music. And we have some guests from Vancouver. Is that right? Toronto? Toronto. Okay, sorry, my bad. But But equally, Canadians. So how y'all doing? Right. Thank you. Great. Can you give a brief introduction about yourselves and the work that you're doing? And yeah, I'm actually I'll just say, because I always feel the need to add.
Unknown Speaker 1:09
I'm kind of Canadian just from living here for as long as I have. But I'm originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, and grew up in a larkspur core in Madera. So it's kind of where some forest like living with a redwood forest in our backyard, stuff like that. And then New Mexico, and then Andre and I met in New Mexico and Taos in the land of enchantment, yes. And ended up here in Toronto, for you know, kind of at the time work reasons and stuff like that. But at that time, nano topia was kind of starting to form. It was more a studio I had in Taos, in an incubator. So a colleague would joke around that it was my nano pod. And so I opened a studio in Toronto called Nano pod hybrid studio, and out of there, Gru Nana topia with Andre and I certainly collaborate and
Unknown Speaker 2:14
can and so to collect collectively and individually, we are Nana topia as a performance entity. And, obviously the Canadian Yes. The to Canadian Yeah. And so, music is sort of like the common the common ground, sort of, like between us, but you know, when, when we met,
Unknown Speaker 2:36
we actually found that our fathers were both very similar and introduced us to lots of sort of, like cosmic music, like Tangerine Dream.
Unknown Speaker 2:46
And then to meet and stuff like that. And so in each of our respective houses growing up, we're exposed to a lot of,
Unknown Speaker 2:55
I'd say, consciousness, expanding music, music that would sort of take you on a journey, so to speak. So
Unknown Speaker 3:04
for a lot of our collaborations, and I think this does will sort of like sink into when we speak about VR later.
Unknown Speaker 3:13
For for the, for what we've been doing artistically together very often we want to create a sense of an experience. And during that experience to work taking somebody somewhere. It's it's almost like the weather whether you're going into a forest at night or whether you're on a train somewhere, but taking up absolutely taking you somewhere. So that you know if you close your eyes, you know, you can, you can hear sounds and just imagine that you're truly somewhere else. Usually you're heading towards the Oort cloud is what I say.
Unknown Speaker 3:50
Absolutely. So, it seems like you have a mystical background with music. How what was your first introduction with mushrooms?
Unknown Speaker 4:00
For me, well, okay, that was a long time ago.
Unknown Speaker 4:05
And there's been a couple I will say like reconnections maybe. And
Unknown Speaker 4:12
so having madrone Canyon, pretty much part of my backyard, which it's beautiful, lush, pretty dark, too, because the redwoods it's, or at least it used to be Admittedly, I haven't been there a long time. Just very dense forest. And my mother, would what I recall, always be very frightened that I was going to I guess, eat a mushroom there was Amanita in death angels. I do remember white mushrooms, and always don't touch them. They're deadly. And I didn't really understand that. I just knew her voice like it. She was scared Don't touch them. So I had kind of that in mind until maybe my teens and then exploring, of course, psilocybin and then
Unknown Speaker 5:00
Later
Unknown Speaker 5:03
I guess my reintroduction would be quadriceps and starting to become super fascinated with how bizarre like that there are medicinal, but then just other avenues that quarter steps take different species. And I'm
Unknown Speaker 5:21
really diving into that and wanting to create my own work based off of that.
Unknown Speaker 5:27
And so, yeah, I just really, that was around 2008 2009 I just started going full on into researching and I mean, anybody that's really interested in mushrooms, I think can really understand like, it's so there's so many and there's so many still that have yet to be discovered or, like, I don't even like to really say discovered or refound or something or, but, um, yeah, that's
Unknown Speaker 5:58
kind of, for me how I got into it, I guess I think too, like, as, as we're starting to develop things from like, look further and where we're starting to, I guess, begin sort of mushroom music. It also coincided with finding out
Unknown Speaker 6:18
a lot more about about the forms of life extremophiles
Unknown Speaker 6:24
in the deep bottom of the ocean, things like that. And, you know, it's like,
Unknown Speaker 6:29
growing, growing up, you know, born in the 60s and growing up and having early, very early remembrances of the Moon Landing stuff like that,
Unknown Speaker 6:39
that it's what you're exposed to in childhood is kind of, I feel what really propels you sort of sort of as an adult. But I also remember to though, you know, in a way, what we know now and through conjecture of what we know now is sort of like the realization that a lot of what you grew up with,
Unknown Speaker 6:57
it just isn't necessarily true. So for example, with regards to the possibility of life, you know, beyond our planet being told, Oh, well, life can exist on this planet because they would have to breathe acid or or roller or the gravity is so great, it would be squashed you know, things like that. And then you look at things that exist under at the bottom of the ocean, you go, Okay, well, you have crustaceans that are in water that's hot enough to melt you know, soft metal. There's very, very high acid content. There's, there's almost very little free oxygen. We now know that extremophiles like tardigrades can survive the vacuum of space, and then to finding out about the conjecture of panspermia, all right, yeah. Well, so I mean, as far as getting into mushrooms, when it comes to music, or looking at them in that way, it really kind of started for me. And then, briefly, the horror of Andre was with fizeram polycephalum, like slime molds and mixing my CDs, and
Unknown Speaker 8:04
I'm keeping them or trying to keep them within a Petri dish. And but
Unknown Speaker 8:12
at the time, and the person who introduced me, to this had suggested, perhaps I view that as a way I could collaborate with an alien species. And that I just
Unknown Speaker 8:24
really thought at the moment, they said that I was like, Oh, my God, you know, that's so cool. And from there, it expanded into mycelium, because
Unknown Speaker 8:36
it also coincided with like, later, after our working with like quarter steps, and creating soundscapes for this body of work that we called an unnatural history.
Unknown Speaker 8:50
Like the Fukushima disaster, like that happened, the big tsunami, and I started really questioning the materials I was working with, because a lot of my work was very, like hands on, in working with metal and glass, and sculpting those materials that are also like they're extracted and just how, what glass I mean, glass seems maybe fairly harmless, but the energy to work with it is pretty extreme. And I mean, I love just the immediacy of working with melting glass and sculpting and stuff like that.
Unknown Speaker 9:30
But I really started questioning materials and looking at alternatives and for alternatives and that's where, like I started sculpting. We're thinking of mycelium like the, you know, the sawdust that you're growing these gourmet mushrooms in at the time
Unknown Speaker 9:46
as maybe a material that could be worked with and then I kind of found
Unknown Speaker 9:53
I say Ecovative it could be it's like evocative or eco positive. I'm not really sure
Unknown Speaker 10:00
probative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, ative.
Unknown Speaker 10:03
And through working with that,
Unknown Speaker 10:07
I started wondering about the sound too. And because we're here with the Pfizer forum, we're a part of that research was trying to get the slime molds, which love oats, like oat flakes is their primary source when I don't know if you're familiar, but you know, when people are researching things with that, was trying to get them to make a connection, like to trigger a light, like an LED or to trigger a sound. And so from there, I really started thinking more about
Unknown Speaker 10:46
that. And of course, though, I'll say the slime mold would never go in the direction you would want it to, which is also very fascinating to me. It would circumvent, you know, how can I get that out without, you know, this is me anthropomorphizing it, but wanting to this person wants me to jump these lines here. And so I, there was a certain term I wasn't familiar with yet. And that was bio data sonification. And
Unknown Speaker 11:16
I started, like, I was Googling but I didn't know you know, like people listening or mushrooms making sound. And at that time, there wasn't, nothing would come up. And a Google search for something like that. Not even anything really about plants.
Unknown Speaker 11:33
And I found, we started well, I kind of stumbled upon Leslie
Unknown Speaker 11:43
Garcia and Paloma Lopez,
Unknown Speaker 11:46
who are these great artists and researchers in Mexico. And they were, I think they'd worked with Adam Matzke on making a phyto chip or something like this. So anyways, that was really exciting hearing their sounds. And that's where I found the term bio data sonification. So suddenly, I had a search term, which really opened up a lot. As far as locating equipment that might work. For us to be able to kind of derive sounds from we weren't really sure how that was going to work out.
Unknown Speaker 12:26
I think for us, our real magic moment was was the first time we had sort of constructed
Unknown Speaker 12:33
a bio sonification module and and hooked it up.
Unknown Speaker 12:37
Because, you know, we're used to as electronic musicians working with sometimes random voltages,
Unknown Speaker 12:45
things that are optic optically triggered,
Unknown Speaker 12:48
and just sort of inviting sometimes like chant chance elements. And to me, the real magic was when we had everything hooked up. And
Unknown Speaker 12:59
there was the the initial excitement now, to be fair, we're taking the bio data and we are sort of quit it has been quantized. So that it has been adapted to a Western scale. But But that said,
Unknown Speaker 13:18
regardless of the quantization, that the thing that does not change is if there is a an intrinsic sort of pattern in the bio data that will come through. And what we did find with it sort of extended listening, is we started to hear patterns, we started hearing repeated patterns. And then was also very, very interesting as well as that we started noticing when we started doing various installations, especially when we're at the University of Toronto, we noticed some really interesting phenomena where we could have a lot of sonification taking place in real time. And then just one person steps into the room and it they're there 12 or more feet away, and it just suddenly abruptly stops. And what we're using for for certification, it's it's in direct contact with with the mycelia. It's galvanic related. So there's so there's, it's there's nothing about proximity to the, to the to the actual technology we're using. Yet when Andre is there was a moment actually it was with the Ontario Science Center and Moca Toronto. They were in partnership for some bio art of type of residencies that were taking place in you'd have a studio at MOCA so we would have like, Open Studios once a month. And we had one and there were a number of people in the room. And that that was really interesting.
Unknown Speaker 14:52
So like the mycelium is covered. It's totally contained.
Unknown Speaker 14:59
In I mean
Unknown Speaker 15:00
It's not airtight or anything like that. But it's in this containment, it's completely covered.
Unknown Speaker 15:06
The electrodes are threaded through in there and everything's playing, people can see, you know how everything's hooked up. There's no, you know, sleight of hand going on or anything like this. And I was talking about how it responds to different people in a space. And that's something, you know, that I know is being researched. And at the time, in particular, and it wasn't too long after that, suddenly, the music stopped liking me just abruptly. And so all everyone in that space, looked over to the doorway, which also is interesting, because it was evident to all of us to something must be somebody. And there was this person standing there. And they probably felt really awkward too, because suddenly everybody, you know, like, the music stops, like the record scratch and we're all looking at them. And they came in, and they moved around the space that I think they felt awkward to because what everybody was, it wasn't so much them. But we were wondering what, why did the mycelium like, why did the music just end abruptly like that. And so the moment they left, the music started up again. And there was a couple in there, that freaked out and they left immediately, like they literally ran out because they were like, This is too weird, because how, what's going on. And it was really interesting to observe. And that is something that we have
Unknown Speaker 16:31
observed quite a bit like either in shows where there is an installation component and will generally do a performance or something. And
Unknown Speaker 16:43
like, it doesn't always get really frenetic. Even if there's a big crowd, it kind of feels like, but we're not really sure, you know, like, I mean, in a way it's conjecture. But I feel, too, I mean, I can touch the terrarium. And immediately, of course, The Sound alters and things like that. And so we've been really fascinated with that. And also what that can bring for us, with installations, maybe on an educational, if I can put it that way, like level of how we interact with guests. And
Unknown Speaker 17:16
people being entirely blown away by
Unknown Speaker 17:22
just like that.
Unknown Speaker 17:24
We found people like people just breaking down in tears, because they have a really profound experience, or I think right now that we're we're seeing and feeling that we're living in very difficult times where we're very stressed out, we're very scared. And I think people are searching for a genuine
Unknown Speaker 17:48
kind kind of connection and a, like a kind of kind of spirituality. And I think as one of the first tenants of that sort of quest, it's
Unknown Speaker 18:00
being able to think sort of like beyond yourself, like outside of yourself. So first and foremost, I think about
Unknown Speaker 18:08
our, you know, our connection to nature. And
Unknown Speaker 18:14
how we're so removed or so removed from it, in fact that most people, you know, think of nature's that other thing over there, like, oh, when the weather that's what, it's the weather or what's happening in nature, oh, I live in a city. And well, city technically is still part of nature, like it's it. We live in a very complex ecosystem. And I think what's sort of very interesting looking at mushrooms and mycelium is that
Unknown Speaker 18:41
well, that there are a lot of exciting possibilities for mushrooms to be able to remediate and sort of heal the environment, but also to just in terms of a greater collected sort of sense of connectivity. Thinking about the what's what's now been called, like the worldwide web. And the humongous fungus like some of the the, the, you know, the oldest and largest living organisms on the planet are ultimately fungus. I guess. So. Have you read the book The Secret Life of Plants?
Unknown Speaker 19:18
If familiar, yeah. Yeah. For people who never read it that this reminded me of
Unknown Speaker 19:24
one of the stories in the book about the
Unknown Speaker 19:27
I haven't I haven't read it in a while. So I might put your the story a little bit but something like this guy with a machete goes to a cabbage plant or a line of cabbage plants and he hacks a cabbage plant up and they hook up all the cabbage plants to the sensors. And the cabbage plant right next to the one that got chopped up. You know, the signals were going crazy.
Unknown Speaker 19:49
But then the guy returned to the cabbage plants like a couple weeks later or something and the cabbage plants reacted to him, you know, even being like 20
Unknown Speaker 20:00
heat away or something like that. So it was similar to your story of like, the person walks in the room and the music stops.
Unknown Speaker 20:07
You actually, when we were I'll just quickly I want to add that because you made me think when we were installing, I did the mycelium wash and don't at the Ontario Art Center, and the I mean science center that was part of the Mocha partnership with them.
Unknown Speaker 20:27
So for that it was a geodesic dome, and the negative spaces were filled with mycelium. But there was also because it was the Martian dome. That alien was the living mycelium inside. So sounds were playing. And in order to set up, there's a union crew that has to you know, do that for you. And so there were two panels that were I had not desiccated, that were completely grown within
Unknown Speaker 20:58
these struts. And
Unknown Speaker 21:02
it was really funny because you could we it was really clear at that moment. So we had anyways, we had the sense we just hooked them up. And there's like these low drones playing and stuff like that. And one of the workers went over to what they wanted to do was drill these little corner kind of wires to make sure
Unknown Speaker 21:24
the mycelium panels that weren't grown in place wouldn't drop out, because there's a lot of kids through there and stuff. So she was just about to drill in, and the thing went off the rail. And she immediately remember turned around was like, I didn't touch it. I didn't do anything. I didn't drill it. But they were all like, whoa, like what just happened, you know, but after that, every time she'd approach she couldn't like the thing would just if it was hooked up. It was like the mycelium somehow recognized her. I don't know, chemically, or something, or maybe the vibration of how she moved like, so that it was really interesting. And we would talk about it, but she was also very wary, the mycelium after that, because it It was wild, like, you know, yeah, I'm serious, like I come from a cultivation background. And
Unknown Speaker 22:20
yeah, be curious to hook. You know, if you have a mushroom farm out there, and you're growing, you know, on a large scale, I'm curious, I'd be curious to see kind of experimenting with, you know,
Unknown Speaker 22:34
feeding different supplements to to the mushroom blocks, or like, orienting them in certain ways or like doing just orienting your farm and, you know, adding certain things or subtracting and see how the mushrooms respond. are they liking it? Or they not? I don't know, if it, you know, I'm anthropomorphizing it a little bit, but like it, I think that would be cool to kind of tighten our communication, or our perceived communication with this species. Whereas now, you know, it's, we have quite a big gap with our communication.
Unknown Speaker 23:11
And I read on your site about how you also use EEG and PPG data from guests to influence the experience. I'm not familiar with those two things. So can you kind of describe how Yeah, type data and how you influence the experience? So the PPG is like, Well, okay, so, for
Unknown Speaker 23:37
this VR experience, that I've been working on, over, like, it kind of grew out of the pandemic restrictions and
Unknown Speaker 23:49
presenting, being invited to present with the Gupta Institute held a new nature climate science exchange in spring of 2020. And
Unknown Speaker 24:00
so from that, you know, and because restriction to pretty much like, been in place for, you know, several months
Unknown Speaker 24:09
that, you know, it hadn't been planned to be essentially a week long zoom meeting, we, the whole idea was we would go somewhere anyway, so we were speculating about what this new nature might be. And there were technologists and scientists and artists involved. And
Unknown Speaker 24:27
I became really curious, I've always been really curious about, like, virtual reality and
Unknown Speaker 24:33
being able to, I mean, we create these worlds of sound and sculpture, but then being able to literally have people come right in to this virtual world via headset. And, but because it's very, like, I'm just gonna like you mentioning even the Western tonal scale when thinking about
Unknown Speaker 24:58
like decolonization.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
Just stuff like that, right? But
Unknown Speaker 25:03
VR is very human centric. And I started thinking, wouldn't it be wild if we could bring the bio data into a virtual situation? How in the world would we do that? I don't even know, at the time and
Unknown Speaker 25:19
and what would it be doing? Like, what could we hook that data up to? So with the EEG part like
Unknown Speaker 25:27
brainwaves, and working initially with open BCI, and then muse, which is a company, like they make a muse, it's called the Muse headband. I don't know if you're familiar, and they have an app. And they have a couple different types of headband. So it reads, your brain activity, the different like Alpha Theta Waves, beta waves. And it also, depending on the headband, it will read your heart rate. And there's also the emotive bit.
Unknown Speaker 26:02
I don't know if you're familiar with that, but that will, it reads your kind of cognitive state. So it's picking up PPG data and stuff like that. So it's like a galvanic, it has a galvanic aspect. So it can read humidity levels, blood oxygen levels, and essentially, kind of, you can
Unknown Speaker 26:25
also guess somebody's mood from that, like, their emotional, it's like an emotion capture device. So my idea was,
Unknown Speaker 26:34
to, how can we show like Andre mentioned kind of a disconnect of that we are part of this organism earth or this intervene? And the whole holobiont You know, that if we had microscopic vision, and we could hear, you know, like, we had certain types of hearing and even vision, you know, maybe more cones or whatever, in our eyes? How much would that really freak us out? Actually, if we could see all the, like, the entanglement and everything in between us, so that, well, I'm kind of trying to go there with the with the VR experience, I felt
Unknown Speaker 27:16
that might be a way of showing our connections, you know, with within a forest situation, the mycelium being kind of the voice for the forest. So hooking up its bio data streams in real time, we're connecting.
Unknown Speaker 27:33
We're connecting it to materials and geometries. So like meshes within the space. And people's brainwaves like the data, how we're working with the data. It's very similar looking. So and what I mean by that is it it kind of correlates with brainwave frequencies numerically like, and so we are, of course, averaging like we're, you know, going in there with a number of people and going to average out like
Unknown Speaker 28:04
fatal waves, and let's say alpha waves. And so when you go through the space in a special avatars that we've created, so you're a human in the space, and you're moving through this environment to different levels, ultimately going within the mycelium network and meeting the mycelium entity, which it's very exciting, actually. And there's lots of music that's happening in real time from the mycelium. And on a performance level, we would be outside of the experience as well performing, like and doing Foley and stuff. But the your brainwaves connect, like there's certain, you know, like, let's say if it's I'm moving my hands up and down right now, of course people can't see that. But
Unknown Speaker 28:51
your brainwave activity, it's like if you've seen a heart rate monitor, it does. There are spikes and lower levels and things like that similar with the bio data streams from the mycelium. So let's say when
Unknown Speaker 29:05
I'll say like, you know, 15, between 15 and 20 hertz, and maybe this data is coming in and this note level from the mycelium. When those correspond, you're starting to connect, like with the fungus or with that forest. So you start to see all the microbes and things like this that you're connecting with. And
Unknown Speaker 29:28
things are moving, like so far, what we've been doing over the past couple of weeks, actually, because it's been a really long journey on this particular VR project. But it's really exciting. I am working with a neuroscientist and creative developers and things like that on it, and we were all in there about two weeks ago, and we started laughing because we were all for the longest period of time, just quiet. Watching what listening to the mycelium News.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
It, watching it like interacting and moving all these things, but also how our, because of our state of focus, we were seeing things move and react as well with the mycelium. And so it was almost like, things started breathing together like we were.
Unknown Speaker 30:19
It was really cool, just like this deeper level of immersion, because of the commonality of the same experience, but also the immediacy of the biofeedback almost like entering into, like, a state of harmony with each other. Yeah. You're synchrony. You're synchronizing, you're harmonizing. So and yeah. So just just so I can wrap my head around this. So obviously, you know, people going to the room affected mycelium, and they produce this music, which is a direct biofeedback from mycelium, which ended up itself is crazy.
Unknown Speaker 30:52
But then you have the sensors hooked up to people to regulate their mood, or I mean to sense their mood and things like that. And is that data influencing the VR experience? So every VR experience is completely customized? Yeah, heard that. Yes. So yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So you, you transformed, but it's, it's absolutely based on your Brainwave. So, and your
Unknown Speaker 31:21
kind of emotional state. And that's, I mean, we're working right now. We're more with the brainwaves like that data and getting that in there. And with the mycelium.
Unknown Speaker 31:32
And so yeah, you will connect, I mean, you it was being called for a while there symbiosis dysbiosis. And now, we're referring to it as sentience.
Unknown Speaker 31:45
But it's still a bit of the symbiosis, like you're
Unknown Speaker 31:49
creating, it's like opening up, I don't want to say it's creating this, because
Unknown Speaker 31:55
it's just to show your connectivity. So you go through these five stages of transformation,
Unknown Speaker 32:02
with the avatar, and the other people that are in there. I mean, it's for three to five people to go in together. And you're kind of working together to it's also can be called entrainment when people start talking, and, you know, like, it's interesting to learn more about this, too, as I've been doing this research and working with the neuroscientist, is when you start talking with somebody, you know, and you're like really vibing or whatever, you'll you might say, hey, you know, we're really thinking on the same wavelength. And literally, it's like you are, because your brainwaves are starting to, I guess correlate like you are, you're sinking. And so that's what we're creating to with the mycelium in there is that you're reconnecting, if you like with this virtual forest, so you're seeing your connectivity, like the whole idea is to see how you're a part of this whole
Unknown Speaker 33:02
world. And it's interesting to in a way, because it's like virtual, which seems a bit
Unknown Speaker 33:10
for me kind of visual, yeah, like a conundrum. But it's one way to really visually, you know, and sonically have people in a space.
Unknown Speaker 33:22
The mycelium is also, you know, in the installation aspect there as well. So there's that aspect, like, you know, you're literally sitting in the space with the living mycelium, and then you're going to this virtual environment, and your brainwaves, your emotional state, and the mycelium bio data are all creating like this really unique experience, while you're also able to connect with the people that are in there with you, or you might not, you know, sometimes there's people that go through VR environments that I mean, I don't really foresee this happening. But you never know. There's that want to kind of, or
Unknown Speaker 34:03
the kind of wanting to see how things break, or can I destroy this thing? Or can I harm this thing? So that might be more of the dysbiosis? And other things will happen to you? Or Yeah. Do you think that we're in a virtual reality right now?
Unknown Speaker 34:22
Every now and then I kind of wonder and joke about it. Tosca loves to conjecture that and I'm going to lalalalala I don't I can't hear like,
Unknown Speaker 34:31
I'm open to the possibility but it also kind of frightens me at the same time. It doesn't really frighten me. I don't, it would be wild. I mean, I have wondered, you know, eventually we'll if we survive as a species long enough to even get there. Will it be a loop? You know that we are creating an artificial intelligence that it eventually becomes what we are and then it's I don't know
Unknown Speaker 35:00
Like, that's a whole other, you know, it's just really funny because what you're describing is such a mirror to our present physical reality right now.
Unknown Speaker 35:11
And getting like a little bit metaphysical, like we, that
Unknown Speaker 35:18
I can't remember the phrase that you that you use kind of like that biofeedback.
Unknown Speaker 35:24
Biofeedback is happening just in our everyday life, you know, and I hear people all the time, say, you know, the universe presents the same patterns over and over again until you learn your lesson. You know, and, and we shape our reality. And, you know, if we're focused on one thing that will appear in our reality again, and again.
Unknown Speaker 35:45
And since our brains can only kind of see or process only a fraction of reality, if we're focused on one thing, we're just going to, yeah, our eyes or our mind is just going to be fixated on that. Yeah, and in similar to your VR experience, like your whatever's happening in that VR is based on how you're feeling and what you're focused on. And, and it's kind of the same thing in our everyday life, you know, it's like our, our physical reality is shaped by how we're feeling and what we're thinking about and what we're feeling and it's just like, kind of a funny mere, like, it seems very high tech and
Unknown Speaker 36:31
alien, you know, are futuristic, or like, so distant from our reality. But on one level, it's, it's very similar. Yeah, just,
Unknown Speaker 36:43
it's like having to create this reality to bring people into that into the similar state only.
Unknown Speaker 36:52
We can't see on a microscopic level. So at least in the VR space, we can, it's like somebody said, it's like, being on mushrooms without being on the mushrooms. Were you but you're with the mushroom? Yes. And I think a lot of people don't entertain just raw creativity, or conjectures sort of, on a day to day level. And I think, oddly enough, if you present an idea to somebody that it's fairly, not very abstract at all.
Unknown Speaker 37:27
It's somehow not as enticing as something that just really really weird, so to speak. So first, so for example,
Unknown Speaker 37:35
mushrooms fungus, it's like,
Unknown Speaker 37:38
there's a lot of people that don't know that it's its own kingdom, for example. And
Unknown Speaker 37:44
there is exactly as is used the word alien, it is very, it is very alien. So
Unknown Speaker 37:51
oddly enough, one thing we found when, with with this kind of interaction with with the various installations we've done, etc, and with with the music
Unknown Speaker 38:02
is some people for for some people, this is just like, okay, their imagination is turned on to 100 Suddenly, just just because it is just so like, the premise of it is just so weird. That in a way that makes it almost not much more enticing. Oddly, is contradictory as that may seem.
Unknown Speaker 38:24
I'm curious if people I don't know, if you to have experience with, with lucid dreaming at all, but I've only done it maybe 10 times in my life. And it's always like a really great fun experience. And
Unknown Speaker 38:44
I'm curious if people that are really good at Lucid Dreaming will be able to go into that VR experience and are like really good meditators or people that can really, like have control over their mood and state and can switch very quickly. You know,
Unknown Speaker 39:00
like I read all the time, how they, you know, I think it was Tibetan monks, that they hooked up these brainwaves. And they've been meditating their whole life, and they're able to like flip on parts of their brain instantaneously. And, yeah, I'm just curious. There was an experiment, I think, Oh, I'm probably gonna get this wrong. Was it mm DMA or? It was in New Mexico, it was a totally legitimate experience. I think there's even a documentary that came out and this was in the mid 90s. I think it was taking place. I actually knew people that were part of the the testing that was taking place in Albuquerque, and there was a Tibetan monk that
Unknown Speaker 39:45
also took part and how for that person like for the monk, it was no, they didn't it was no different than being in a deep meditative state where everybody else had to be strapped to the chair because
Unknown Speaker 40:00
they felt that they were flying away or leaving their bodies. And
Unknown Speaker 40:04
it is really interesting. So that a colleague, that's a neuroscientist worked for the people that make this headband Muse and part of their, I guess training for being able to work with the headset and create the app for meditation states, they had to be able to go into what they're calling it a focused state pretty quickly. And so
Unknown Speaker 40:28
while I mean, they said, you know, they're kind of out of practice. But it is interesting to see, and that I am really looking forward to it, I'm hoping I mean, everybody's mind is, has this different activity.
Unknown Speaker 40:44
Like your theta, and delta are more in your dream and creative realms. But for whatever reason, when I'm in VR, and I'm talking a lot, you, you would think my alpha waves are going off the chart, but it's usually my fate of waves are showing, like great activity. But of course, in the moment, I'm drawn to looking at that, that stops. Um, so. And that's typical with even meditation, right? In the moment, you're like, oh, then it's like you're pulled out of it?
Unknown Speaker 41:18
What would What do you see as the future of this work that you're doing? Like, where do you hope this would evolve in say, 10 years?
Unknown Speaker 41:28
The sentience or? Well, in general, I am, I am actually kind of in a long distance collaboration with Dr. Valeria Lusaka, Nora. And that's really exciting. And I've started kind of joining every now and then the earth species
Unknown Speaker 41:51
group that are looking at
Unknown Speaker 41:54
different communication, and how that might work there. They're looking more at, like animal models and things like that there are some plant enthusiast in there. But as far as our like, we're
Unknown Speaker 42:11
I just really, I, you know, I can say that, I think it's really important that even for myself,
Unknown Speaker 42:20
I feel very removed living in Toronto from an which is ridiculous, because of what we just said, are from nature, if I don't want to view it outside of myself, but what I mean more by that is just being really close to mountains being close to the ocean, and force like being like, right there.
Unknown Speaker 42:40
And so that, I guess, to creating these spaces, I do find myself wanting to hang out quite a bit when I go into the virtual forest, because the light, the sounds, everything that's happening in there. It's not hyper realistic or anything like that, but it's just it's a very pleasant kind of situation. And I guess I'm,
Unknown Speaker 43:05
I think that we have to, as a species, really kind of connect with each other in positive ways, and be open to dialogue. And that's different. And people having different views, and just,
Unknown Speaker 43:21
you know,
Unknown Speaker 43:24
if I think like, stop hating on each other, and it fell,
Unknown Speaker 43:29
I think, be a hoot. Somebody was saying that we met a couple years ago, like be more mycelial.
Unknown Speaker 43:39
Yeah, I don't know, like, what you might have to say to that. In the future. Like, I mean, just thinking of work, and being able to present it and have more conversations about it, and our place, within this whole will thing. In general, I feel we're largely reactive to things we're not, we don't see ourselves as participants in things.
Unknown Speaker 44:07
If we do react to things that tends to be we tend to react negatively, that we don't have a discourse, we don't we don't have a dialogue. And
Unknown Speaker 44:17
what I've seen with our work is a dialogue, a dialogue just happens about the work but the nature of the work, a dialogue happens about what people have experienced. Definitely, there's an internalized dialogue that every for every one of what just happened, you know, kind of thing. So
Unknown Speaker 44:36
in a time when it's very difficult to be optimistic about a lot of things. This is in a way like like a ray of sunshine for me, just a little bit that you can engage with people.
Unknown Speaker 44:48
And, and you can just in almost in a childlike way just sort of conjecture, you know, it's like, well, you know, what, what if and yeah, and maybe this is the aliens that have come to
Unknown Speaker 45:00
Earth that will unite all of mankind. Are they? They started at all right? Yeah. So July having a human experience? Exactly. So for people that are like curious to kind of follow in your footsteps and tinker around with this,
Unknown Speaker 45:18
I'm pretty sure that just just the sensor probes that you can, you know, clip onto plants and flutes and, and mushrooms and stuff like that. I've seen him around a lot, and on Tiktok, and things like that, are those pretty easy to buy? And are they pretty user friendly for people? Yeah. So, I mean, I'm often like we've taught so many workshops, like cheese free years,
Unknown Speaker 45:45
where we are usually either breadboarding or we're showing people how to solder or we're working with. Always off Sam Kusumoto is schematic. Thanks, Sam.
Unknown Speaker 45:57
And so Sam, he's a mono if you're not familiar, designed the MIDI sprout, and there's little offshoots of that, like their spat electronics, which is fantastic. Their board is really great. And it's accessible, you can get it as a kit. Here I am, you know, plugging them but you can get it as a kit or already made and it also has broken out the control voltage gates and trigger information. So you can immediately like if you have a Eurorack kind of setup, where even like there's ways you can connect that through a digital like VCV rack to Ableton stuff like that. And it comes with electrodes. We usually make our own electrodes like I'm using like wire or even worked with fine needle a glass needles to try and get them in the Haifa. But there's also the industrial Jason limb of Instow created the Scion, which is a beautiful module. That is a Eurorack format but yeah, people can find electricity for progress is Sam. And spout electronics, I think is on tindy and Etsy and stuff like that. Yeah, that's super helpful. I have a two part question that I'd love to hear some some live music from from the mycelium. But
Unknown Speaker 47:23
Part A is if people wanted to add in kind of the PR element. Is there any good resources? Or are you are you to kind of paving the way with that, and you kind of had to figure it out on your own? Really? I will say paving the way with that.
Unknown Speaker 47:42
I know that more people are trying to well, what they're doing with EEG as far as I mean, I think we
Unknown Speaker 47:53
kind of were breaking ground with that. I don't know. I mean, I know that open BCI then made the galley, which is out of range for everybody. I don't know. Yeah, unfortunately. But um, mute, the Muse headband, the muse to some people have been purchasing to be able to move aspects of their avatar and things like that. But as far as I, I mean, there are now more people researching EEG, but bringing the non human element or you know, like slime molds, or mushrooms or things like that. I have not, I think we're pretty much paving the way for that.
Unknown Speaker 48:35
Well, part two then would be where can people experience this? And do you have events coming up? Where can people you know, tap into your work? Yeah. Right now, if people I mean, we have my Celia is still something that's connected, but it's not like a live real time thing anymore. It's in VR chat. And it is beautiful world. If anybody you know, has a PC VR headset and wants to go and look it up. In VR chat, they can experience my Celia and hear a playlist playing of our all the performances that took place and read about the fungi and bio data and everything like that in the space and there's special avatars we created. You can be a liking or different things like that.
Unknown Speaker 49:25
But for this newer one sentience that's taking place in resonate XR, which is a nother kind of community social VR platform. And they could look up nano topia, send me a contact because it probably won't be at a festival until either later this fall or definitely next year.
Unknown Speaker 49:50
And as far as events go, we will be out in Vancouver in May. Doing a 40 spatial blend this has to do with sentience to like we're we're
Unknown Speaker 50:00
Getting, I don't even know what this 4d spatial software is about, but we're going to have a performance there on May 25 At six o'clock at lobe, Vancouver.
Unknown Speaker 50:12
Cool. Well, we'll have this published before then. So any anyone traveling through Vancouver or lives there? Yeah. Yeah, that seems like I wish I was going. That seems like a fun, fun thing to do.
Unknown Speaker 50:25
Yeah, let's, let's hear it. Yeah. Let's get into it. Yeah. Okay. So you don't want to go to the mic.
Unknown Speaker 50:32
Again
Unknown Speaker 50:37
it's not me choose. Okay. Yep.
Unknown Speaker 50:42
And so you're explaining before we went live, you have a whole terrarium behind the camera that has mycelium just mycelium any mushrooms
Unknown Speaker 50:58
you're muted, but I can I can lip read. Yes. There's mushrooms are there Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 51:05
Okay, sorry. Yeah, it's a lot of mushrooms.
Unknown Speaker 51:10
You just muted again. Can you hear the music? I can use the music? Yeah, no, no. Yeah. Okay, great.
Unknown Speaker 51:19
I'm going to enter a poor Mark faiz a little bit but I'm curious. You know, there's studies that show that music affects the growth of mushrooms, right? People playing like heavy metal or whatever in gross spaces. I'm curious the experience like the biofeedback from the mycelium hearing the vibrations of its own music. I was actually going to say I was going to add
Unknown Speaker 51:46
that so the terrarium has ganoderma lucidum growing in it that I cultivated while we were in Vancouver, setting up for symbiotic mycelium rooms that would kind of grow and thrive over a seven month period in the Art Gallery at greater Victoria. And
Unknown Speaker 52:09
so it's really interesting and I hooked it up with so it would have fresh air being pumped into it and a co2 airlock. So the co2 can escape.
Unknown Speaker 52:23
And the moment it was, I guess I you know, we obviously weren't there for the whole seven months, but it was thriving and growing and fantastic. And as the first time I placed I tried to experiment with soil also in there so it can grow up through the soil.
Unknown Speaker 52:39
Anyways, so they disconnected it, you know, and everything for my instructions. But I realized later like, oh, no, you know, what are they going to do with the container like the whole, you know, it takes them a certain amount of time to ship it. So anyways, they got it here. It looks kind of dried out. It was still in the seal terrarium. And I've left it in there. And when we connected it in like what I was talking about what the EEG and everything the other day after I you know took the headset off like it was a really long like, we were in there for five hours. I took the headset off everything. I look over the terrarium and it's raining in the tournament like it's the terrarium has fogged over.
Unknown Speaker 53:23
And it's kind of starting to do that right now. And I think it's like it's hearing like that whole seven months was kind of like playing music to itself. In a way. There was a log that people we found this dead down beautiful logs. So people had these gold sensors on it so people could place their hand on that and create kind of a duet with the fungus there'd be these percussion. But all of that ended for Lake Central on time. So I I see it as a really positive thing that the terrarium starts completely fogging over it is totally
Unknown Speaker 54:05
condensation is happening in mass like right now. Like that's why I wanted to bring it up. So it's whenever we'd have this playing in the room.
Unknown Speaker 54:13
Um
Unknown Speaker 54:15
rain happens in the terrarium like a completely it there is some kind of interesting biofeedback happening. And yeah, I think it's, it's beautiful. I think there's definitely some sensitivity to
Unknown Speaker 54:31
freaking frequencies just at the threshold, the lower threshold of what we can hear and we we did a music performance,
Unknown Speaker 54:40
although there wasn't bio sonification at that, that then we've launched installation. What was the Yeah, I guess Okay, sorry. But in particular, the there was living sculptures on the wall.
Unknown Speaker 54:53
And we have these massive, massive subwoofers in a very tiny space. I mean, we were really shaking the room.
Unknown Speaker 55:00
and Trotsky has done a lot, a lot of growing. And
Unknown Speaker 55:05
just seeing the next day. Oh, yeah, the mushrooms had. Luckily, the gallery was okay with it. They grew into the wall, like they started completely pulling going into the like, and things were sprouting. And so I mean, I know that can also be like a sign it's wanting to get out, you know, it's wanting to spore and move on. But it was interesting how it was just starting to become part of that wall.
Unknown Speaker 55:33
Kind of, I just read an article that researchers are decoding the language of whales. And not only be being able to understand their language, but to be able to respond, as well. And I, I know,
Unknown Speaker 55:54
what's his name? You brought him up? In the very beginning? And that's
Unknown Speaker 56:00
Andrew automats. Yeah, yeah. And his paper about, you know, decoding the language of mushrooms. And I would, I would love to be able to get there in the future have
Unknown Speaker 56:11
to one day communicate with fungi and slime molds and pretty much all of nature, you know, and to just create more of that symbiosis sound as a I believe sound is how we're
Unknown Speaker 56:26
gonna get there. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 56:32
Well, I'm this is, yeah, I'm super excited. And I would love to join one of your events one day. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 56:42
We'll we'll have your, you know, your website and all your information out there.
Unknown Speaker 56:50
I haven't asked this question in a while. But if,
Unknown Speaker 56:55
if mushrooms had the microphone, and could say one thing to the whole human race, in English, not beeps and boops.
Unknown Speaker 57:04
But what would they say?
Unknown Speaker 57:08
Get it together?
Unknown Speaker 57:11
Yeah, I don't want to be to like love each other. I think that it's like, soon.
Unknown Speaker 57:18
Maybe would be one word. Soon. I don't know. What do you think? You look like you. You just sent an email via paragraph? Oh, well, well,
Unknown Speaker 57:29
part of me wants to just be funny and think that it would sound like The Big Lebowski. But But no, I think in a way.
Unknown Speaker 57:39
When I think small bit.
Unknown Speaker 57:44
It's, it's, it's almost like when we have to thinking beyond our experience. So we're thinking like, thinking beyond what we can hear beyond what we can see.
Unknown Speaker 57:56
And there's also like, like, like, like a temporal sense is like, what is the temporal reality of of fungi? Like, what? What is their relative and timescale given how long they live? How ancient they are? Also, to just, as far as I know, like, on an apple in terms of evolution, I don't think there's a whole lot of change there. So did it become the perfect as it has it been the perfect organism all this time? Like, who knows kind of thing? So I don't know what it would say. But
Unknown Speaker 58:30
I guess to me, what is kind of a very convenient truth and
Unknown Speaker 58:37
the elephant of the room whenever one talks about mushrooms is mushroom trips.
Unknown Speaker 58:42
I had an amazing mushroom trip when when I turned 50. And ultimately, the biggest part of it to me was just that incredible sense of interconnectivity with everything. There was no beginning No, and it opened up the possibility to that later understanding about micro biomes and stuff and even the composition of ourselves as entities. It it opened my mind to to sort of accepting that as as a kind of as a kind of reality. So I don't know, it's like, to me, it's a very, it's a very convenient truth of experience, like, what would it say?
Unknown Speaker 59:23
You're all connected, we're all connected. We're all and in a way to I have to conjecture in a way what what initially scared me about quadriceps was this idea of a quadricep controlling another entity, but it's sort of like
Unknown Speaker 59:41
when one is having a psychedelic experience. Is it just chemical? I don't necessarily think so. I actually can conjecture that briefly. You might actually be experiencing the mushroom consciousness.
Unknown Speaker 59:56
Why not?
Unknown Speaker 59:59
I'm all for
Unknown Speaker 1:00:00
are being controlled by mushrooms. I feel like I already am. And most people listening to this podcast you're already infected. So it's way too late for you.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:12
Well, thank you, y'all for coming on. And sharing this mushroom music. And there's just such a fascinating field that I'm super excited to watch it develop in all different ways just beyond, you know, making music for people making these VR experiences, but potentially figuring out how to communicate or just furthering our research of what is going on. How are they interacting? Why are they doing the things that they're doing?
Unknown Speaker 1:00:42
Yeah, I think there's just a lot of juicy information there. Yeah, so
Unknown Speaker 1:00:46
and thank you everyone for tuning in and tuning in for another episode, wherever in the world that you are listening from. And we couldn't do it without you. So just really thank you for the support. We don't have a Patreon or any way that you can directly monetarily support but we do have a website, mushroom revival.com. We have a whole line of functional mushroom products from tinctures, to capsules to powders and gummies. We also have a bunch of free ebooks on there that you can download for free and read up a ton of blogs, from recipes to things about psilocybin to ecology about mushrooms, and all of our podcasts are on there as well. And my newest book, The Little Book of mushrooms is on there as well. It's like a cute little coffee table book was 75 different mushrooms with a bunch of beautiful paintings of all the different mushrooms in there as well. And if you want to further support, leaving a review goes a long way. And equally just like telling people about not only the show if you've learned something cool about this episode or another episode, spread the word your friends, your family, a random stranger that you meet on the street. Just tell them how stoked you are on mushrooms and just life in general. I think we need more people stoked about life and nature in this world it'd be a better place. So
Unknown Speaker 1:02:16
keep being stoked about life and spreading that love to everyone around. So with that, as always much love and may this force be with you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
