𓍊𓋼𓍊Home   𓍊𓋼𓍊Info   𓍊𓋼𓍊Acknowledgments

Myceliate: Encouraging Los Angeles to Think Circular
CalArts’ Pando Days Project / 2023 


Our project work comes out of our Creating Ecolibrium class, which brings together students from across CalArts to consider what's happening with the climate, climate optimism vs. climate doom, and how to think about the work designers, artists and culture workers can contribute to different futures. This semester, students from graphic design, music technology, costume and set design, creative writing, experimental animation, music composition and performance, and photo/media came together in class with a focus on thinking in systems, regenerative practices, and circularity. 

This cycle, interests and opportunities coalesced around questions about waste, community resilience, food security, building materials, water use, and soil/terra health. We looked back to look forward, connecting with MycoHab around the possibility of establishing a bio-based materials lab  with a community engagement mission, to invite Angelenos to examine, imagine and expand circular and regenerative practices where we live, work, and play. How can care and repair be anticipated and embedded in cycles of making? What if we could turn waste into raw material that embodied both carbon AND a mindset shift? What if our buildings fed us? What if we could take materials like palm fronds or movie sets that have nowhere to go but the landfill and use them to feed mycelium to grow shade structures for public schoolyards? How do we make a conceptual machine where in goes waste and out comes community benefit... and actualize it with a biocycling lab that can literally do just this? Some of the projects proposed consider applications of bio-based materials with mycelium, some ask to us think about mycelium as metaphor in terms of nutrient exchange, education, and resource sharing. 

Recently in The NY Times, Brooke Jarvis reflected on a Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine paper "cautioning that the world at large was facing 'a psychological condition of ‘systemic uncertainty,’ in which 'difficult emotions arise not only from experiencing the ecological loss itself, but also from the fact that our lives are inescapably embedded in systems that keep on making those losses worse. Climate change, in other words, surrounds us with constant reminders of 'ethical dilemmas and deep social criticism of modern society.' In its essence, climate crisis questions the relationship of humans with nature and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.” She goes on to talk about how human well-being has been historically linked to "participation in a healthy ecocultural context." Regenerative thinking, action, and systems are a real antidote. 

You'll see in the individual project descriptions what this group of CalArts artists are sporing, growing, incubating, simulating, and myceliating... and we will share photos as these continue to progress in laser cut boxes, plastic bins, and organic debris piles, in biomimetic simulations, MaxMSP patches and Dall-E experiments, out of soil and up trellises, with mushroom paper and photosynthetic leaf printing. 

Ultimately, we are positioning ourselves to move forward with a small lab with MycoHab advisory support. The goal is to learn which specific Los Angeles waste streams we can transform and regenerate into specific Los Angeles assets... that, with the right backing, could grow into a scalable bio-cycling production model, engaging and changing Angeleno minds about how we use our resources. 

Our hope is to create a different kind of physical, psychosocial, symbiotic, regenerative dialogue between us and our partners from the natural world. 🍄