in collaboration with Allie ES Wist

(2022)

full-color print, 94pp
printed by Publication Studio Hudson

Sensory Kinship for the Third Kind is an ongoing artistic research project that considers the potential of multi-sensory engagement with mushrooms and their mycelium. We are interested in exploring how we can sense mushrooms, and speculating as to how mushrooms themselves sense the world. Our sound and smell exercises, as well as text scores and poems, have been presented as workshops, a short film, and this field guide.

We are in a pivotal moment of re-consideration and re-definition of our relations with fungus. Propelled by new research, fungus has made its way into public consciousness as an ingredient and a design material. This new kind of commodification means that fungus has often emerged as an aesthetic ecological signifier. What might it mean to forge a kind of kinship with mushroom that goes beyond their usefulness to humans? How can we playfully attempt new kinds of relationships with mushrooms?