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

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.