Figurations of Fungi:
An Exploration of Ethology, Emergence, and Expression in Creative Practice
By
Holly Schmidt

BFA, University of Calgary, 1997
BEd, University of Calgary, 1999

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTERS OF APPLIED ART
in
Media Art

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2010

© Holly Schmidt, 2010

Schmidt ii

ABSTRACT
This paper explores creative practice as a form of embodied, situated, and material
research that generates the potential for change. It examines the work of philosophers
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as well as contemporary feminist theorists Moira
Gatens, Genevieve Lloyd and Rosi Braidotti. Their philosophical position on bodies,
compositions and emergence counters the dystopian views of catastrophe and death that
are so pervasive in posthumanist discourses.
Holly Schmidt articulates an engagement with ethological practices that seek to
deterritorialize the disciplinary boundaries of art and science. These practices take up
the composition of bodies, their speed and slowness, and ability to affect and be affected.
Ethology involves creative actions that recompose relations. In meeting that complexity,
Schmidt suggests there is potential to recompose contemporary technoculture while
developing new ways of making and being in the world that meet the complexity of
global issues.
Schmidt looks to the figuration of fungi as a form of expression for its rich potential to
create other possible worlds. Being neither plant nor animal fungus has created much
debate and confusion in the history of taxonomic classification. It is the many ways in
which fungi evade the logic of Western classification and organization that suggests it is
a figuration worth exploring. Fungi are explored through Schmidt’s creative engagement
with a variety of communities. Schmidt’s work varies, as does her medium of
expression, which includes the spatial practice of walking, with the relational practices of
coordinating social events, and the architecturally influenced practices of building forms
for interaction.

Schmidt iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………ii
TABLE OF
CONTENTS………………………………………………………………...……………iii
LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………..………………..iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………...v
1

INTRODUCTION……………………………………..…………………….........1

2

VANITAS………………………………………………………………………....4

3

ETHOLOGY……………………………………………………………………....8

4

COMPOSITIONS………………………………………………………………..19

5

EMERGENCE………………………………………………………………….. 27

6

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………..35

WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………37
APPENDIX 1: VISUAL DOCUMENTATION…………………………………………40

Schmidt iv

LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1. Balthasar van der Ast, Still life with Fruit and Flowers (1620-1621),
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam…………………………………………………..….. 40
Fig. 2. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Jena Walk (Memory Field) (2006),
Culture Department, City of Jena, Germany…………………….………….…40
Fig.3. Polona Tratnik, Microcosmos, (2002) Mestna galerija Nova Gorica (New City
Gorica Gallery) City, Slovenia………………...………………..….……………41
Fig. 4,5. Donna Franklin, Fibre Reactive (2004), BioDifference SymbioticA, Perth.….41

Schmidt v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge both of my advisors Henry Tsang and Dr. Joy James
for their support throughout my time at Emily Carr. I appreciate the rigour and intensity
that you brought to this experience and feel my work has grown tremendously as a result.
I would like to thank you most of all for staying with me as my research moved in radical
and unexpected directions.

No acknowledgment would be complete without recognizing the effort and
support of my parents. I thank you for emphasizing the importance of an intellectual life
while giving me the practical skills to make something of my thoughts. My brother
deserves a nod for always pointing me in the right direction as I navigate the world and
for simply agreeing with me from time to time. My aunts deserve heaps of praise for
their enthusiasm, encouragement and unwarranted flattery. My cousin deserves more
than a mere acknowledgement for participating in my wild schemes and making my fungi
dinner an incredible experience.

To my partner for making sure that I went to bed at a reasonable hour, that the
dishes got done and the cat was fed. Your exceptional flexibility, patience and creative
ability made all of my research possible.

Schmidt 1
Introduction
Creative practice is a form of embodied, situated, and material research that
generates the potential for positive change. In thinking with philosophers Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari as well as contemporary feminist theorists Moira Gatens, Genevieve
Lloyd and Rosi Braidotti, I have engaged deeply with their non-dualist, antianthropocentric concepts of bodies, compositions and emergence. Through this
engagement I have come to approach creative practice as a form of research that allows
for the rational investigation of the imagination. This is with an understanding of the
imagination that stresses the reality of the mental, as the imagination is seen as the
awareness of our own bodies in relation to other bodies. In keeping with this
understanding, I have taken up Deleuze’s approach of figuration in my creative practice.
As Braidotti describes,
The notion of ‘figurations,’ the quest for an adequate style, as opposed to
‘metaphors’, emerges as crucial for Deleuze’s use of the imaginations as a
concept. Figurations are forms of literal expression which represent that
which the system had declared off-limits. There are situated practices that
require awareness of the limitations as well as the specificity of one’s
locations. They illuminate all the aspects of one’s subjectivity that the
phallogocentric regime does not want us to become. This kind of
philosophical creativity operates a shift of paradigm towards a positive
appraisal of differences, deviances, or anomalies, not as an end in
themselves but as steps in a process of recomposition in technoculture
(Braidotti, Bio-Politics 170).

Schmidt 2
I see my creative practice as one of the situated practices described by Braidotti. As an
artist that works along the boundaries of art and science, I am aware of the limitations
and specificity of these contexts. My interest lies in the composition and re-composition
of these domains through a positive exploration of the differences. The continual
recomposition of technoculture, as the interaction between politics, technology and
culture, is critical due to the complexity of current global environmental issues and the
increasing pressure to develop new ways of making and being in the world that meet this
complexity. Rather than indulge dystopian views of catastrophe and death that are so
pervasive in posthumanist discourses, I am interested in the pragmatic orientation of
these theories that move towards difference and embrace change instead of fear. I have
chosen along with Braidotti and others to focus on the generative forces of life.
To do this I engage in ethological practices that deterritorialize the disciplinary
boundaries of art and science. Deleuze first introduced the concept of an ethological
approach in response to seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics.
Among many twentieth and twenty-first century theorists, Gatens, Lloyd and Braidotti
took up this text in their writing on ethics. It is through the work of these contemporary
theorists that this paper engages with the work of Spinoza. Deleuze picks up on ethology
as the scientific study of animal behaviour but transforms it into a distinct philosophy.
Deleuze’s ethological practices take up the composition of bodies, their speed and
slowness and ability to affect and be affected. An ethological orientation is monist as it
sees all bodies in the process of becoming on a plane of immanence. A body can be
anything but is only something in relation to other bodies. In this sense, bodies are
continually in the process of composition, decomposition and recomposition. Ethological

Schmidt 3
practices involve creative actions that compose and recompose assemblages in a move
towards sociability and community. In my research, these practices vary as the mediums
of expression vary. I work with the spatial practice of walking, along with the relational
aesthetics of social dining, and the architecturally influenced methods of building form.
In these practices, I have turned to fungi as a form of expression for its rich
potential to provide glimpses of other possible worlds. Being neither plant nor animal,
fungus has created much debate and confusion in the history of taxonomic classification.
The Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, baffled by spores or “seeds” that displayed both
plant and animal characteristics under the microscope, placed certain fungi in a category
termed chaos (Ainsworth, 23, 251). It wasn’t until much later that these organisms were
separated into the kingdom of fungi but still these organisms continue to generate
questions that challenges the very definition of an organism. It is the many ways in
which fungi evade the logic of western classification and organization that suggests it is a
figuration worth exploring.

Schmidt 4
Vanitas
In the initial stages of my research, I created small scale ‘architectural models’ of
imaginary cities out of dough. In the mornings I mixed multiple batches using water,
salt, cream of tartar, oil and flour. I kneaded the dough while still hot from the stovetop,
and then wrapped it in wax paper to take to my studio. It was soft, pliable, and creamy in
its colour and texture. From this mixture emerged cities comprised of tall towers,
industrial parks, bridges, walkways, stairs and docks. I populated these environments
with plastic figures used by hobbyists and architects in their scale models to evoke
different narratives of evacuation. The need for evacuation was at first ambiguous and
then obvious as the dough started to mould and the city decompose.
This series began with an initial experiment where I sculpted a city scene ten
inches in circumference. I placed a jar over top of the city, covered it with a dark cloth
and placed it by the radiator. Over the next week, white cottony fuzz began to grow
swallowing up the bridge and moving over the buildings like a fog. I took photographs
with a macro lens, which made this tiny world seem infinitely large. From the lens I
could see strands reaching out from the surface of the mould. These strands became
darker and denser over the weeks to come as the mould colonies flourished.
In the midst of this body of work, I spent the summer in the Netherlands where I
visited the Rijksmuseum and encountered an expansive collection of Dutch still life from
the seventeenth century. Many of these paintings depict skulls, hourglasses and fading
flowers as vanitas, symbols of superficial appearances and vanity. A particular vanitas,
Still life with Fruit and Flowers by Balthasar van der Ast depicting a lush scene of fruit
on a platter caught my attention [Fig. 1]. The grapes, apricots and apples appear to be

Schmidt 5
from a nearby orchard with leaves and branches still attached. The table on which the
platter sits is covered with a fine cream cloth. A porcelain vase of flowers sits to the right
of the platter. A few of the flowers including a yellow tulip are laid out on the table.
From a distance the scene is a pleasurable view of ripe fruit and flowers but when one
moves in closely one can see that a range of insects and other creatures appear to have
overtaken the table. A spider hangs from the dark recesses of the bouquet. A grouping
of three shells appears to be alive as a hermit crab emerges from one golden coloured
shell. The fruit to the front of the platter is covered in drops of water, while to the back
an apple is forming dark spots and an insect has eaten the leaves.
This scene, like all vanitas, is intended as a reminder of the transience of life. It is
a caution, a warning about succumbing to the pleasures of life and surface appearances.
It is a reminder of one’s mortality and the importance of looking towards life in the
hereafter not this present earthly realm. In many ways, I feel that the models I created
carried these overtones of the transience of life but not in the same sense as the Dutch
still life tradition. In my narratives, the forces of life emerging into the highly planned
and controlled urban environment initiated catastrophe. The people in the scenes appear
to be both the perpetrators and the victims of the decomposition of the world. In many of
these works this breakdown was captured with real time video feeds on computer
monitors. The live broadcast of this slow destruction created a sense of irony as the
world is being monitored in the event of its downfall, so slow it can barely be seen at all.
Upon reflection, these scenarios of catastrophe are deeply unsatisfying. They do
have the intensity I felt when I saw the first signs of mould growth in my first
experiment. They produced sensations of fear and anxiety for some and for others a

Schmidt 6
sense of irony or humour, neither gesture being particularly satisfying. To understand
this insight better, I turn to Rosi Braidotti’s critique of the humanist orientation towards
death as an examination of the limits of the human.
No reason other than the sterility of habit justifies the emphasis on death
as the horizon for the discussions on the limits of our understanding of the
human. Why not look at the affirmative aspects of exactly the same issue?
Speaking from the position of an embodied and embedded female subject
I find the metaphysics of finitude a myopic way of putting the question of
limits of what we call life. It is not because Thanatos always wins out in
the end that it should enjoy such conceptual high status. Death is
overrated. The ultimate subtraction is after all only another phase in a
generative process (Transpositions 40).
As Braidotti outlines, psychoanalytic thought posits the impossibility of the human
subject to imagine life without it. In my models, there is the potential for human
destruction by the forces of the mould growth and its generative processes. These models
posit a world without humans that generates a fear of the emergent forces of life, hence
my dissatisfaction. Along with Braidotti, I share a greater interest in the affirmative
aspects of life and the potential to explore the limits of humanist thought through those
aspects. I also share with feminist scholars, Braidotti, Gatens and Lloyd a passion for the
work of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari in that they place emphasis on the notion of the
“subjectless subject,” who is continually becoming in relation to other subjects on the
plane of immanence. These scholars and this body of thought affirm the generative force
of expression of mould, the great decomposer.

Schmidt 7
The dark spots on Balthasar’s apples express the positive forces of the earthly
realm, rather than the melancholy of transience reinforced by the power of commercial,
governing and religious bodies of the enlightenment. As the saprobic fungi feeds on the
once juicy apples, it produces nutrients for the growth of other bodies. It is an
affirmation of the generative capacity of fungi and it’s power to shift between the
modalities of living and non-living.
I left behind my cities in search of modes of practice that would affirm new ways
of making and being in relation to the figuration of fungi.

Schmidt 8
Ethology
As I walk through this old growth forest, I am seeking out fungi. I stray off the
pathways and into denser woods. Crouching low, I keep my eyes to the ground while
nudging the needles on the forest floor with my foot hoping to find a mushroom beneath.
This is one of many walks or forays that I have undertaken recently. Initially, I went out
with a naturalist from the local Mycology Society who delivers interpretive tours. He
usually meets participants at different parks where he leads them into the forest to look
for the many varieties of fungi growing there. The participants are diverse coming with
different interests and forms of knowledge. The naturalist provides information such as
the common name and the species type while pointing out the distinct form, colour and
structure of each fungus.
I always listen attentively on these tours, mentally mapping where each of the
fungi discussed are growing. Later in the week, I return and walk through the forest
looking for the fungi recently under discussion. At first I brought a guidebook to help me
identify the mushrooms. I would photograph them, look them up, and try to locate the
significant features of their form. I even collected samples, creating my own small
herbarium in my studio.
Many of these practices were developed in the eighteenth century as a response to
the perceived abundance of variety in nature. Naturalists turned their focus to a “truth-to
nature” approach that sought the “types” and “characteristics” underneath the
irregularities found in nature. The skill of a naturalist was in their ability not to be
distracted by the uniqueness of the particular specimen at hand rather they were to
discipline themselves to seek only what made the specimen an idealized representation of

Schmidt 9
that type (Daston and Galison, 67-70). These systems of classification describe the
perceived forms and functions of bodies. But these systems, as Michel Foucault points
out in regard to the human sciences, do not merely “describe but also serve to organize
bodies, their powers and capacities” (Gatens, Spinozist Lens 163).
The organization of powers and capacities is important to consider in relation to
all bodies, not only human bodies. These systems of biological classification not only
describe organisms, they also impose hierarchical relations that ensures the supremacy of
humans. The force of this anthropocentrism impacts the perceived possibilities of
relations between all bodies. For this reason, I turn to the anti-juridical tradition of
philosophers including Foucault, Deleuze, and Spinoza. For them, “What defines this
tradition is a commitment to thinking against a fundamental proposition of humanist
philosophy, namely, that sociability requires the organization of an individual’s natural
affects by a power that transcends the natural condition…” (Gatens, Spinozist Lens 164).
In their view the juridical stance posits a world comprised of two planes “first, a plane of
immanence, second, a transcendent plane which functions to organize and socialize the
first” (Gatens, Spinozist Lens 165). Following Spinoza, Deleuze argues for the “univocity
of Being” on a plane of immanence. For Spinoza there is no transcendent being:
“including God as a transient cause, final causes, the teleology of nature or history, a
transcendent morality, and so on” (Gatens, Spinozist Lens 165). In this monist view there
is only the plane of immanence and its continual becoming.
It is this philosophical shift from dualism and the logic of Western thought that
seeks to categorize and classify bodies according to form and function that is critical to
the formulation of my research and the different modes of practice I take on. In

Schmidt 10
acknowledgment of Foucault, I believe that ways of knowing are bound up in ways of
being. It is through practices of the self that the self makes and remakes the self. By
inhabiting the practices for naturalists, I was aware that I was making a certain kind of
scientific self. This set of methods emerged in the eighteenth century but are still present
in contemporary practice as I observed in my recent forays into the forest. Science
historians Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison identify a type of scientific self that values
organization based on idealized forms and fears the sheer variety and abundance of the
world. It is also a self that sees the laws of nature as expressive of the laws of God or
some other transcendent cause (67-69). By inhabiting the practices of naturalists, I
adopted a dutiful fascination in the abundant forms of fungi and their classification
embedded in this scientific self, all the while, becoming increasingly aware of the many
ways this organism evades classification and confounds Western logic. My engagement
with these practices was the undoing of this scientific self.
I was strongly drawn instead to the ethological approach put forward by Deleuze
as a contemporary way of thinking Spinoza’s plane of immanence. “Ethology is first of
all the study of relations that of speed and slowness, of the capacities for affecting and
being affected that characterizes each thing” (Deleuze, Spinoza 125). For Spinoza, the
physics of bodies is a synchronization of particles where the motion and rest of those
particles holds a body together as an individual body. Each body has different capacities
to affect and be affected that are always in flux as a body is always in the process of
becoming. For this reason, ethology is anti-anthropocentric in that it does not privilege
human bodies over other bodies. For Deleuze, “A body can be anything; it can be an
animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a

Schmidt 11
collectivity” (Deleuze, Spinoza 125). With this definition in mind, ethology is the study
of relations between bodies in all of their complexity.
Perhaps most important from my perspective as an artist is that ethology supports
a view of thought that is embodied. Spinoza was critical of Descartes’s separation of
mind and body, arguing that “the body cannot determine the mind to thinking, and the
mind cannot determine the body to motion, to rest or anything else….’”(qtd. in Gatens,
Spinozist Lens 166) According to Gatens’s and Lloyd’s interpretation of Spinoza’s
concepts of imagination and reason, the mind is the “idea” of the body while the object of
the idea is the body. This is a radically open body, however, as they go on to describe
that the body of Spinoza’s philosophy was not self-contained: “In being aware of its
body, the mind is aware not just of one material thing but of other bodies impinging on
that body. It is aware, that is of its own body together with other bodies and other bodies
together with its own” (Gatens and Lloyd 14). Based on this philosophical orientation
ethology is an embodied approach to the relations of bodies. It could not be otherwise.
In Deleuze’s discussion of ethology he references studies done by early twentieth
century zoologist, J. von Uexküll, that seek to describe animal worlds based on their
power to affect and capacity to be affected. Deleuze suggests that these studies are the
precursors to the contemporary field of ethology, which studies animal behaviours across
different species and is ultimately quite different from the ethology Deleuze outlines. One
such study of Uexküll’s focuses on the life world of the tick. Uexküll describes a scene
in the countryside where,
This eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpost with the help of only
her skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes

Schmidt 12
apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell.
The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of
all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her
post and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate
enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an
organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the
warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of
touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head
in the cutaneous tissue of her pray. She can now slowly suck up a stream
of warm blood (qtd. in Agamben 46).
For Deleuze, there are three affects of the tick outlined in this description, the tick’s
perception of light, smell, and temperature. The tick’s world is “A world with only three
affects, in the midst of all that goes on in the immense forest” (Deleuze, Spinoza 124). As
philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests, for Uexküll, there are a number of environmentworlds or Umwelt acting in relation to others like a musical composition that make up the
forest: “There does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a
forest-for-the park ranger, a forest-for-the hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for the
wayfarer, a forest-for-the nature-lover, a forest for-the carpenter, and finally a fable forest
in which Little Red Riding Hood loses her way” (Agamben 41).
Uexküll’s studies are a deep exploration of varied perceptual worlds rather than a
single objective world filled with hierarchically arranged plants and animals. His studies
involve a kind of “thinking with” these organisms or as he phrased it “excursions into
unknowable worlds.” It involves the process of “getting inside of it” that scientist,

Schmidt 13
Evelyn Fox Keller describes in the work of geneticist Barbara McClintock. She did “not
try to separate herself from her objects of study – corn cells to stay more “objective.”
She imagined herself more ‘among them’ herself reduced to their size, perhaps a way of
becoming one of them” (Fox Keller 300). McClintock’s process is similar to Uexküll’s
because their approach is deeply embodied and material as they open themselves to the
world.
The forest of my walks shifts from the forest-for-the-naturalist to the forest-forthe-ethologist. The guidebook stays at home and the sketchbook comes out. I am
prepared for a kind of deep engagement with the perceptual world or Umwelt of the
fungus. Even though most of the fungi that I will encounter are deep below ground, I
continue on my excursion into its world, defying the dictum that to see is to know.
The fungus is in the dark soil where daylight never reaches. It does not require
the sun to sustain itself like a plant does, rather it seeks out that which is carbon based to
sustain itself. Comprised as a single cell walled strand it has no mouth to grasp with, no
eyes to see its way, and no ears to hear my footsteps above. Acting as a large external
stomach, it releases enzymes into the soil, breaking down organic compounds to feed
upon. As the acids break down, the compounds are absorbed through the cell walls. It
continues to grow, branching and forking at its tip, sending out thread-like tendrils called
hyphae. When these hyphae reach a critical mass they become an interconnected
network called a mycelium. It is an expansive surface with very little volume, a highly
sensitive biochemical membrane.
To summarize its affects — the first has to do with its ability to seek out or sense
carbon; the second is to grow towards carbon and away from disturbances of the soil by

Schmidt 14
dividing and branching out to create a mass; and lastly to be permeable to the passage of
nutrients between the soil and its body. Simple enough, but Deleuze reminds me that a
body is never separate from its relations in the world. “What does it “take” into its
world? Every point has its counterpoints: the plant and the rain, the spider and the fly”
(Deleuze, Spinoza 127).
The fungus described above bears fruit, commonly known as the pine mushroom.
The fruit rises above ground, its form changing as it matures. Its thick white stalk and
cap are partially buried in the needles of its counterpoint- the pine tree. The mycelium
network has grown towards and around the roots of the pine. Penetrating the epidermis
of the cells in the tree roots, it connects with the cortex providing greater access to water
and other nutrients. In return the mycelium feeds upon the carbohydrates or sugars of the
tree. The membranes of the root open up to the hyphae of the mycelium, passing
nutrients back and forth. Similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the wasp and
the orchid, the rhizome and the tree are bound together in their relations (Deleuze and
Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 10). The mycelium-becoming-tree and the tree-becomingmycelium are bound in continual deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The
mycelium moves both towards and away from the tree.
The mycelium is all surfaces with little volume. It is as radically open to the
world as is Deleuze and Guattari’s “subjectless subject.” It is a kind of cartography that
they propose for the mapping of individual bodies on the plane of immanence. The
longitude being the sum of all the material particles that come together in relations of
speed and slowness, while the latitude is the affects it is capable of at any given moment
and the degree of power in that potential (Gatens, Spinozist Lens 168). With this

Schmidt 15
mapping, bodies are individuated even though they are in constant relation to one
another. These bodies come into composition with one another, often forming larger
assemblages: “An organ may be seen as a body, made up of a great number of simpler
bodies, that is, in turn, part of an individual human body. Such modal existences may, in
turn, constitute the extensive parts of broader social and political assemblages that will
have their own characteristic intensive capacities” (Gatens, Spinozist Lens168).
Deleuzian cartography individuates bodies and assemblages of bodies, making
ethological experimentation with the composition, decomposition and recomposition of
bodies on the plane of immanence possible.
From my ethological experiments in the forest, a project emerged, an interpretive
walk that strays from the path of the naturalist. It is a walk that draws people into the
underbrush and the world of fungi. It is open to people of all backgrounds, interests and
ages.
In the past, I have worked with walks as a form of practice that actively involves
people in the act of creating and recreating the work. For participants the experience
involves walking through urban spaces in an attempt to connect non-linear narrative
fragments that attempt to synchronize the historical past of a place with the current
moment. In these experiences there is always a sense of dissonance between the
described historical moment and the sights, scents and audible vibrations of the present.
Architectural historian and theorist, Jane Rendell suggests that walking as a form of
critical spatial practice is powerful because,
Through the act of walking new connections are made and remade,
physically and conceptually, over time and through space. Public

Schmidt 16
concerns and private fantasies, past events and future imagining, are
brought into the here and now, into a relationship that is both sequential
and simultaneous. Walking is a way of at once discovering and
transforming the city; it is an activity that takes place through the heart
and mind as much as the feet (Rendell 190).
As Rendell suggests walking is an embodied practice that engages in movement through
time and space. It is a form of practice that has been put to powerful use by many art
movements historically such as the surrealists in their search for chance encounters, or
the dérives of the Situationists who played with the psychogeographical contours of the
built environment. In contemporary spatial practice, artists such as Janet Cardiff and
George Bures Miller have created sound walks for various locations around the world.
These walks are deeply affective as they use a binaural sound recording method that
places Cardiff’s voice as the narrator “close” to the ears of the listener [Fig.2]. The
background sounds are recorded on site so there is a blending between the current
moment and the recorded moment that according to Cardiff and Bures Miller creates a
new world (Cardiff and Bures Miller). While their walks emphasize affect over potential
encounters, all of these practices historically have taken the physical movement of a body
from one place to another as their medium of expression.
It is the rhizomatic impulse, in its pursuit of multiple trajectories and connections
that makes these practices deeply attractive to me. As we move through the forest, I
share my ethological experiments, drawing people into the forest from the perspective of
various fungi. I have a loose idea of where the walk will go through the forest but also an

Schmidt 17
interest in what may emerge and how that changes the cartography of the group and the
potential lines of flight to come.
Like many walks initiated by artists, the visual is not primary. The forest is a
highly sensory environment with a rich array of scents, textures, and sounds. As a group,
we stop to listen for frogs and other amphibians. We may hear some or we may not.
Both the sound and the silence present a significant entry point into the world of one of
the most primitive fungi, the chytrid. In discussing the chytrid fungus on the walk, its
world might sound something like this…
A zoospore with a whip-like tail slides through the murky pond water. It seeks out
the soft permeable skin of a pacific chorus frog. Embedding itself into the skin cells of
the frog it feeds upon its keratin proteins. Overtime, it matures into a static plant-like
form that produces more zoospores, which are expelled on to the surface of the frog’s
creamy underbelly. Some of the zoospores swim away while others seek out keratin from
their birthplace. Eventually, the chytrid seal off the permeable skin suffocating the frog.
The zoospores swim away seeking another source of keratin.
This fungus is a smaller body that comprises a larger body and even an
assemblage. This form of chytrid originally lived in close relation with the african
clawed frog, which was exported worldwide for use in pregnancy tests. With the frogs
came the fungus. This zoospore shifted the composition of bodies in entire ecosystems
around the world.
There are multiple entry points into the forest and into the worlds of various
fungi. These worlds overlap creating a composition of affects like the musical score
described by Uexküll.

Schmidt 18
I believe that encounters in the forest with fungi, even those that can’t be seen,
can be transformative for people. Artist Brandon Ballengée, when discussing the ecology
fieldtrips and study days he’s organized for the public, has also noted this transformative
effect. Ballengée describes himself as an ecological artist or bio artist who is working as
a primary research biologist. His work over the last decade has been the study of the
deformation of amphibian populations in North America and Britain. According to
Ballengée, what makes his work unique from a typical field biologist is that he involves
the public in his work by taking them out with him to conduct surveys. This participatory
side of his practice is a way to engage people in the sciences: “It’s a way to get them to
interface with an environment in a way that they wouldn’t probably normally interface
with by catching tadpoles and taking the time to really look at them and hold them and
kind of engage with a different life form” (Ballengée Interview). His practice is hybrid in
that it combines art and science as it draws people into discourses about the environment.
His walks create new relations between bodies while deterritorializing the disciplines of
art and science.

Schmidt 19
Compositions
The Mycology Society hosts a number of events in addition to their interpretive
tours and forays, such as the annual mushroom show and the “Survivors’ Dinner.” The
mushroom show is a popular event attracting a wide range of people. Members of the
society collect mushrooms for identification and display at the show. Speakers are
invited to lecture on a range of topics for both the amateur and specialist mycologist. An
outdoor kitchen is set up for cooking demonstrations. Highly prized mushrooms such as
the pine mushroom, otherwise known as the matsutake, are tossed up in a wok with garlic
and oil while a line of people with paper cups in hand wait to get their mouthful. There
are numerous signs everywhere telling me that mushrooms can be poisonous and nothing
should be eaten without proper identification. This reminds me that the name of the
Survivors’ Dinner is partly in jest and partly a sign of respect for the potential affects of
mushrooms.
Something these amateur mycologists understand is that bodies exist in relation to
one another. These relations are dynamic and mobile producing continual variation on
the plane of immanence. An ethological approach concerns itself with the composability
of these relations, as well as their longitude and latitude. These relations can cause
various affects that can increase or diminish a body’s affects.
Bodies of all sorts are in constant relations with other bodies; some of
these relations are compatible and give rise to joyful affects which may in
turn increase the intensive capacity of a body; others are incompatible
relations which give rise to sad or debilitating affects which at their worst
may entirely destroy a body’s integrity. A third sort of relation occurs

Schmidt 20
when two bodies encounter one another in a non-reciprocal manner such
that the more powerful body captures the less powerful. Such encounters
enhance the capacities of the more powerful body at the expense of the
powers of the weaker body (Gatens, Spinozist Lens 169).
Gatens goes on to suggest that eating is a quintessential example of relations where one
body is enhanced at the expense of another (Spinozist Lens 169). While the consumption
of mushrooms does not destroy the fungus, mycologists understand that mushrooms that
serve as sustenance at one time may, at another time, be poison. In the case of some wild
mushrooms, people have eaten them for years only to dine on them one evening and have
an extremely adverse reaction. As relations are dynamic, the compositions between
bodies shift and change, toxins from the mushroom build up in the body, a threshold is
reached and the body reacts to the mushroom as poison.
The affects of fungi on the human body have a central place in many cultures
globally as mushrooms have been utilized for culinary, medicinal, and spiritual purposes.
Early ethnomycologists such as Richard E. Schultes studied the use of psilocybin
mushrooms in the shamanic ceremonies of indigenous Mesoamericans. These
ceremonial practices based on the hallucinogenic affects of certain mushrooms are
thought to have an ancient lineage tracing back to the Aztecs and Mayans (Stamets,
Psilocybin 11-12). By altering consciousness, the mode of human being is also changed,
extending the powers or capacities for the body to produce and be affected by these
visions. In many ancient cultures these visions were thought to be revelatory or
transformational in their affect. Medicinal mushrooms also hold a significant place in
many Asian cultures. In Japan, China and Korea, the reishi mushroom is revered for its

Schmidt 21
powers of promoting human health, longevity, wisdom and happiness (Stamets,
Mycelium 233). The relationship between fungi and human health has been cultivated
through the processing and preparation of food in Asia for centuries. Some grains such
as rice are deliberately infected with Aspergillus Oryzae or koji in fermentation processes
to create foods such as miso and sake. These fermented foods are thought to be
important in disease prevention and the maintenance of a healthy ecology inside the
human body. The interrelations between humans and fungi are varied, complex and
dynamic.
These wide ranging affects and compositions among humans and fungi further
illuminates the potential for ethological experimentation over a biological approach that
organizes and controls affects. According to Gatens’s reading of Deleuze,
Ethology reveals the compossibility or ‘composability’ of individuals
whose natures agree, in at least some respects…Individuals who
collectively combine their powers have selected out from nature that
which they may unite harmoniously, rather than engage combatively, in
order to form a more extensive body with new powers. Such selections
exhaust the scope of human freedom precisely because they involve
becoming the cause of one’s encounters with others and thus of acting
rather than being acted upon. As Deleuze writes, “[i]t is no longer a
matter of utilisations and captures, but sociability and communities
(Gatens and Lloyd 102).
In the instances above cultures have sought out harmonious relations with fungi. Many
of these relations, such as shamanic rituals, involve combining with fungi to create a

Schmidt 22
more extensive body with new powers. This ethological perspective that seeks out
affirmative encounters sits in distinct opposition to the posthumanist discourses
referenced by Braidotti, that posit a view of human omnipotence afforded by technology
and its counterpoint which is the fear of the unwieldy generative forces of mutation
through bodies such as viruses, bacteria, and yes, even fungal spores. (Braidotti, BioPolitics) I believe this fear of generative forces drives biomedical explorations to
continue to identify, manipulate and control microorganisms. This attempt to control can
be seen in mycologist Paul Stamets’s research into the agricon fungus, found in the old
growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. He submitted samples of the fungus to the
American Defense Department’s Bioshield program for testing. The agricon fungus
turned out to have a powerful resistance to the smallpox virus, which is feared for its
potential use by terrorists. Stamets filed a patent on the agricon extract and is now
attempting to produce it for commercial sale to governments around the world (Stamets
Interview). While I respect Stamets’s work as a mycologist, I find his research efforts
into agricon problematic as it emphasizes the utilization and capture of organisms for the
purpose of combative rather than harmonious relations. For me the importance of
ethology is its orientation towards sociability and community and away from utilization
and capture. A Deleuzian cartography does not attempt to predict relations between
bodies or more complex assemblages such as the state in an attempt to control them.
Rather it embraces the generative forces of life in all its uncertainty. Ethological
experimentation engages with this uncertainty and seeks out what could always be
otherwise when there is the freedom to think and therefore exist differently.

Schmidt 23
In this way the ingesting of mushrooms can be seen as an ethological experiment
in the composition of bodies. To dine on a mushroom is to share in the fruit of the fungus
and the nutrients it has absorbed through the soil. It is also, as the Mycological Society
would suggest, a way of coming into composition with those that share interests and
pleasures. To eat mushrooms is a way to sustain the body but also to animate the senses
and create an awareness of human and fungus relations. My interest in the act of
ingesting mushrooms in the company of others brought about a purely fungi composed
meal of ten small courses for ten diners. A chef from Quebec who recently recovered
from a near fatal fungal infection designed the recipes. They include dishes such as
miso-braised shitake, lobster mushroom salad, and a porcini mushroom terrine. His
participation is a reminder of both the joyful and sad affects of fungi in relation to the
human body. The emphasis of the dinner is on the act of sharing food in a convivial
manner that emphasizes the relations between.
The performative act of dining has a long lineage in art and cultural history.
Many artists have focused on the production, preparation or consumption of food as a
performative act. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests,
As a sensory experience, taste operates in multiple modalities – not only
by way of the mouth and the nose, but also the eye, ear and skin. How
does food perform to the sensory modalities unique to it? A key to this
question is a series of dissociations. While we eat to satisfy hunger and
nourish our bodies, some of the most radical effects occur precisely when
food is dissociated from eating and eating from nourishment. Such

Schmidt 24
dissociations produce eating disorders, religious experiences, culinary
feats, sensory epiphanies, and art (2-3).
In the 1930s the Futurists based their culinary performances on the sensory aspects of
eating. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests, they separated food from sustenance through
various means of sensory disassociations. One recipe “White and Black” called for an
empty stomach for “a one man show on the internal walls of the Stomach consisting of
free-form arabesques of whipped cream sprinkled with the lime-tree charcoal
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 7). ” The stomach became the canvas for the food and digestion
the process of drawing. Other performances involved the mixture of contrary sensual
experiences such as the “Tactile Dinner Party” where diners were asked to place their
heads into a bowl of salad thereby activating the skin on their faces. Salvador Dali chose
to focus on the more visceral processes of masticating, digesting and excreting making
the interior of the body the main focus of the experience. As Dali claimed, “All my
experiences are visceral. I hold visceral impulses to be the supreme indicators.” (qtd in
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 8). For Dali, eating was an embodied experience where the gut
moves the head to thinking in true Spinozist fashion.
Work with food as a medium was revisited in the 1960s and 70s in various
“happenings” and events. Perhaps one of the most notable occurrences was the
establishment of a small corner restaurant called Food in SoHo by artists Gordon MattaClark, Tina Girouard, and Caroline Goodden in 1971. Food was always in flux and so
was the menu. Different artists cooked on different days, each bringing their own flair to
their work. One of Matta-Clark’s more famous dishes was the Bone Dinner comprised of
oxtail soup, roasted marrow bones and frogs legs. Once the meal was complete, the

Schmidt 25
bones were washed and strung into a piece of jewelry for the diner (Kennedy 1). In many
ways the restaurant was a utopian enterprise where people could eat for little money
while getting fresh local food with an artistic edge. According to Gooden,
Though we consumed food, Food consumed us…It was a free enterprise
which gave food away much too freely…but the joy is the idea. The idea,
as an idea, worked. It was beautiful, nourishing, vital, stimulating new
concept, which was a living, pulsating hub of creative energy – and piles
of fresh parsley (qtd in Kennedy 2).
The energy of Food came out of the social situation and the people it brought together as
much as the food itself. This notion was not lost on contemporary artist, Rirkrit
Tiravanija best known for his gatherings where he served Thai curries under the banner
of relational aesthetics in the 1990s. Critic Claire Bishop describes Tiravanija’s works as
a hybrid between performance and installation. Tiravanija typically transforms the
gallery space into a social space where a kitchen is set up and people are invited to spend
time with the artist. In this context, the food becomes a vehicle for social interaction.
The limits of Tiravanija’s work is also identified by Bishop as she questions “what types
of relations are being produced for whom and why?”(65) She argues that Tiravanija’s
work creates situations where artists, dealers and other like-minded “insiders” come
together to enjoy one another’s company rather than to produce any kind of social or
political transformation.
I believe Bishop’s questions are fair and take them into consideration in the
creation of my own dinner. From an ethological stance, bodies are always in relation and
the emphasis is on sociability and communities. My dinner involves people from an art

Schmidt 26
and science context surely but also people like the chef who developed an interest in
fungi only after his unfortunate encounter. In many ways this could be the same group of
people that might partake of a museum exhibition on fungi. But where the museum
exhibit is didactic in its form of expression and institutionalized in its mode of operating,
the dinner offers the potential for dialogue on a more intimate scale. My concern is that
relations are productive, that they open up to the flow of expression through the food and
the diners in relation to one another. It is not as Claire Bishop suggests to produce
consensus or even dissensus but rather to create the potential for emergence in all of its
uncertainty. The dinner operates in a rhizomatic fashion never knowing where a line of
flight will emerge.

Schmidt 27
Emergence
With my first experiment growing mould, I became rather enthralled with this
organism, which I had always been told was repulsive and dangerous. I built a dark room
especially for the creation of the dough cities and the documentation of their
decomposition. I photographed the advancement of the mould with a macro lens. By
bringing the photographs together in time-lapse sequences, I tried to synchronize the
speed and motion of the mould with my ability to see, register and understand it. My
curiosity about what I was observing was strong enough to inspire me to attempt
mushroom cultivation, and further mould growth including slime mould.
Cellular slime moulds such as Dictyostelium discoideum challenge the very notion
of an “organism.” This mould, which is actually no longer classified as a mould or fungi,
is comprised of individual cells, or amoeba, that feed on bacteria. These cells are
dispersed throughout an area, and once the area is devoid of bacteria, the cells aggregate
into a multicellular organism. This organism then moves towards an area where food is
more readily available. Once it takes on the form of a fruiting body it becomes static.
Spores are dispersed and the life cycle begins again (Bonner 8-10). The mould’s power to
exist as separate individual cells and then aggregate as a multicellular organism implodes
typical notions of what a body is and its potential affects. The mould raises questions.
How does each cell communicate with the other cells? How do they know when to
aggregate? How does it move as an entire entity towards food in a strategic manner
without a “head” or “brain”?
Slime mould aggregation was a problem that scientist Evelyn Fox Keller began to
investigate, along with mathematician Lee Segal, in 1968. In an article called “Slime

Schmidt 28
Mould” she describes the paradox of sameness and difference exemplified in this
organism and how its “rich ambivalence” sustained her interest throughout her career.
Fox Keller and her colleague rejected the standard explanations provided for cell
aggregation. Most of these explanations suggested that there must be “founder cells” that
were somehow different from the other cells and therefore capable of initiating
aggregation. Finding no evidence for this difference they developed a mathematical
model showing it was possible for the cells to self-organize.
We showed that clusters of amoeba would result from the collective
dynamics of a population in which a change in external conditions (in this
case, depletion of the bacteria that served as their food source) induced a
change in state, and indeed, the same change in state, in each individual
amoeba. Our account of the onset of differentiation in at least one kind of
biological development offered a way to resolve the paradox (how does
highly structured difference arise from similarity?) that so sharply divided
genetics from embryology (Fox Keller 299-300).
Their findings were not of interest to biologists at the time because they did not fit within
the paradigm of twentieth century biology. Since this initial model there has been much
advancement in complexity theory with regards to evolutionary biology. Attention is
being paid to concepts such as saltations, a term used to describe huge leaps in
complexity that appear to come from networked interactions producing self-organization.
These leaps could explain some of the dramatic changes that occur in evolution that are
not as a result of mutation or inheritance.

Schmidt 29
Recently, microbiologist Carl Woese has posited that twentieth century biology is
in the midst of a paradigm shift.
Twentieth century biology was structured according to a linear Newtonian
worldview. Linear thinking is not the kind of thinking that’s needed to
study evolution. It doesn’t help you understand the nature of systems.
Molecular biologists were so set about linearity that when the gene came
along, they took the gene to be the be-all and end-all of basic biology.
That comes out of thinking in terms of particles and linear interactions…I
see evolution as the quintessential non-linear dynamics problem (qtd. in
Keim).
For Woese, the emphasis should be placed on the dynamics of communities of cells
rather than each individual cell. In so many ways this discussion of slime mould and the
emergence of complexity resonates with ethology. From this perspective bodies are
understood in relation so the emphasis is on the complexity of networked interactions
rather than linear causality. The orientation of twentieth century biology offers a space of
experimentation that is primarily about prediction and control through genetics whereas
dynamic systems suggest something more akin to ethological experimentation, where
there is only emergence.
It is emergence that fascinates. I identify strongly with Fox Keller when she
describes how slime mould has been a “touchstone” throughout her varied
multidisciplinary career. In this figuration, I am continually drawn in by the potential for
emergence in this complex body that is both singular and plural.

Schmidt 30
One of the dominant questions that arises about slime moulds is how do these
cells communicate with one another? In thinking with Deleuze and Guattari I would
suggest that a communication-based model is inadequate to describe what is happening
between these cells, rather, I would focus on expression. For Deleuze and Guattari
expression is not “in a language-using mind, or in a speaking subject vis à vis its objects”
(Massumi, Like a Thought xxi). Nor is it confined to an individual, an assemblage or an
institution. According to Brian Massumi’s interpretation, subjects, bodies, objects,
institutions are the results of expression’s movement. They are the conduits of
expression: “Expression is always on the move, always engrossed in its own course,
over-spilling individual experiences, nomadically evading responsibility. It is selftransporting, serially across experiences. ‘There is a self-movement of expressive
qualities’ that momentarily crystallizes into actual objects and associated subject
positions: ‘expressive qualities are auto-objective’”(Massumi, Like a Thought xxi).
It is expression that moves from one cell to another and possibly on to a third.
Expression is restless always sending out probe heads seeking where to move next much
as the slime mould cells in their move towards bacteria. These probe heads moved on
and through Keller in many ways throughout her career. A prime example is the moment
in which her work on gender in the sciences brought her to revisit the dismissal of her
early slime mould research. In this moment she was able to articulate the impact of
gender bias in the way results were interpreted and understood. She was able to explicate
how theories of domination with singular causal effects were favoured over more
dynamic solutions (Fox Keller 301-302). This seminal research would act to
deterritorialize the sciences.

Schmidt 31

For Deleuze and Guattari this deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the
social field is a continual series of struggles.
Another thousand tiny struggles. For re-articulation of this kind to
eventuate, for anything new to arise in the social field, established forms
of content and expression must give themselves. They shed functions, like
so many seeds in search of new soil, or like branches for the grafting. It is
of their cobbled-together nature to do so: to disseminate. And it is the
constant nature of their sheddings to mutate as they disseminate
(Massumi, Like a Thought xx).
The force of expression moved through Fox Keller in ways that were transformative of
her discipline and ultimately the world. In this sense, I see Fox Keller operating with an
ethics of emergence. For Deleuze and Guattari an ethics of emergence does not take a
universalizing moral stance rather it articulates an ethical aesthetic stance that allies itself
with change.
It is a basically pragmatic question of how one performatively contributes
to the stretch of expression in the world- or conversely prolongs its
capture. This is fundamentally a creative problem...To tend the stretch of
expression rather than trying to own it, is to enter the stream, contributing
to its probings: this is co-creative, an aesthetic endeavor (Massumi, Like a
Thought xxii).
In my own practice, I enter the stream and performatively contribute to the stretch of
expression through the act of making. In sharing what I make and the activities involved

Schmidt 32
in the making, expression moves through me. These actions could be a singular
expression or an atypical expression that will create a series to come. As Massumi
writes,
Deleuze and Guattari use the exemplary nature of singular expression to
show that even the most ostensibly personal expression [such as a letter]
may be directly political, in that it envelops a potential collective. For
example, the subject of literary expression, to the extent that it is
effectively creative, is not the individual author but a ‘people to come’
(Massumi, Like a Thought 27).
Ethics is in the co-creation of self. To enter the stream, to be open to the force of
expression, to express, is to potentially transform. In this sense critical judgment is not
about the product of the expression it is about its creative force, it’s potential and how
one contributes to that potential.
For many bio artists or ecological artists their work exists in the form of
visualization. It exists somewhere between science-based imaging and performance art
documentation. Artists such as Polona Tratnik, who works with the microbiology of the
body, have found ways for people to encounter life forms rather than documentation. For
her 2006 project Microcosmos, Tratnik set up a bathroom, including a toilet, sink and
bathtub and contained the space under a large glass cube [Fig. 3]. She introduced the
necessary conditions to grow and make visible microorganisms associated with the body.
Another contemporary artist, Donna Franklin worked with biologists at SymbioticA to
cultivate fungi on textiles [Fig. 4, 5]. These textiles were used to form a living dress also

Schmidt 33
exhibited under glass. Both of these artists are working with the generative forces of life
in ways that draw people into relation with these forces.
My interest from an ethological perspective is to experiment with these potential
relations. In other words, 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

Schmidt 34
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).

Schmidt 35
Conclusion
I can’t help but join Fox Keller in thinking of fungi as a “touch point” in my
creative practice. As a figuration or literal expression of that which the system declares
off-limits, it has much to offer. By coming into composition with fungi initially through
the practices of enlightenment, naturalists seeking the underlying principles of nature and
later through the ethological practices inspired by Spinoza, I have entered the stream of
expression. Fungi, as all bodies, are a point of emergence and by engaging in an ethics of
emergence, I work towards positive change. Creative practice is but one of the thousand
tiny struggles that can alter the social field.
I share with many contemporary ecological or bio artists a rather pragmatic desire
to generate and sustain positive relations between bodies in a move towards community.
To gather around matters of concern in an attempt to create new ways of making and
being that can meet the complexity of current global issues. It is an approach that
involves creative practice in an act of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the
boundaries between disciplines. It is also an act that recognizes the contingency of
human experience and the present moment.
As a creative practitioner, I believe it is critical to counter the forces that reduce
the complexity of relations in order to maintain human dominance. Human technological
omnipotence bolstered by perpetual fear and anxiety about the potential unforeseen
consequences is not productive. I agree with Braidotti’s assessment that the
recomposition of technoculture has never been more important than in the present
moment. The courage to enter the stream and extend the stretch of expression, to

Schmidt 36
recognize that it could be otherwise is needed now. My practice embraces the generative
forces of life, sociability and community in all of its uncertainty.

Schmidt 37
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Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. 2002. Stanford:
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Ballengée, Brandon. Interview by Nicola Triscott. The Arts Catalyst. Web video. Jan. 12,
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Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October Fall. 2004: 51-79.
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Bonner, John Tyler. The Social Amoebae. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009.
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Braidotti, Rosi. “Bio-Power and Necro-Politics: Reflections on an Ethics of
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
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Schmidt 38
Fox Keller, Evelyn. “Slime Mold.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Ed. Sherry
Turkle. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. 297-305. Print.
Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present.
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Expression After Deleuze and Guattari. Ed. Brian Massumi. London: Routledge,
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12, Feb. 2008. 02. Web. 12, Feb. 2010.
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Intelligent Agent 5.2 Dec. 2005: n. pag. Web. 20, Sept. 2008.

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Rendell, Jane. Art and Architecture: A Place Between. New York: I.B Tauris, 2006.
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Stamets, Paul. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Berkeley:
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Aug. 2005. Radio.

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Appendix

Fig. 1. Balthasar van der Ast, Still life with Fruit and Flowers (1620-1621), Courtesy of
the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 2. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Jena Walk (Memory Field) (2006), Culture
Department, City of Jena, Germany. Courtesy the artists and Galerie Barbara Weiss,
Berlin.

Schmidt 41

Fig. 3. Tratnik, Polona, Microcosmos, (2002) Mestna Galerija Nova Gorica (New City
Gorica Gallery) City. Image courtesy of Polona Tratnik.

Fig 4,5. Donna Franklin, Fibre Reactive
Researched and developed at SymbioticA and exhibited at BioDifference
Exhibition 2004. Image Photo: Robert Frith. Courtesy of Donna Franklin.