Myco Research Station

Myco Research Station

With Myco Research Station, my intent is to bring bodies together in dynamic compositions. For this reason, I am working with architectural forms that draw people into composition with an organism that is formed through the symbiotic union between yeast and bacteria, known as kombucha.  By bringing this organism together with a built form, I am attempting to “build the insensible.”  For Massumi, building the insensible involves creating mildly disorienting or even shocking affects in order to confound the senses.  As Massumi suggests in relation to architecture, the built form is not a static end in itself, rather, it is a processual event:

How can a built form build form?…Only by continuing the process of form emergence on a different level, in the register of the embodied experience of the people who use the building.  In other words, by building into the architecture forces of perception that interact in ways designed to trigger experiential events (Digital Architecture 2).

I am cognizant of these forces of perception as I construct forms with a DIY aesthetic and semi-functional structure.  These structures are more akin to the tinkering of the hobbyist than the modern master in their haphazard construction and open curiosity.  They are actively uncertain.

In Myco Research Station, a box-like form at the top of my structure creates the dark space needed for the growth of kombucha.  Inside the box, there is a multitude of kombucha growing in transparent glass vessels, feeding on tea and sugar.  The yeast and bacteria of kombucha come together to form a flat disk like shape that floats in the tea and will continue to grow to the size of the vessel.  Small LED lights interspersed among the vessels illuminate this dark space.  A mirror on the roof of the cube makes it possible for people to stand inside the structure and to look up into the cube through an opening.  A mirror on the roof of the cube reflects the kombucha in such a way that it can be seen in each vessel.

People standing inside the structure interact with the kombucha through their vision. I say this recognizing that vision is never separate from the other senses.  Seeing is also tactile so people see the kombucha with “fingery eyes.”  The mirror plays with forces of perception.  Light and surfaces fluctuate between form and deform.  Ultimately the form of the structure crystallizes from moment to moment through the generative forces of the kombucha and the dynamics of perceptual experience.

I believe this is significant in not only revealing the contingency of the world but also the contingency of human experience.  As Massumi describes, “[i]n a word, experience is our virtual reality.  It is something we have.  It is a transformability that has us, and keeps on running with us no matter how hard we try to stand still and no matter how concretely we build.  It is our continual variation.  Our becoming.  Our event: the lightning whose thunder we are” (Building the Insensible 17).