Exploding universe 0.0
2021
Lion´s mane mushrooms, secretary desk, dried mushrooms from Herbarium Collection, Machine Learning generated images printed on paper, among others.I'm concerned about how we make sense of the world, how we acquire knowledge , how we represent it and store it. I try to approach my own methodology, as well as the (always in progress) work shown as something similar to a complex system, in which the links between the parts suggest hidden or indeterminate variables that impede us to analyse it with precision. In such a manner, I am interested in the process of getting to know something acknowledging the improbability of fully knowing everything about it. For this project, I use Fungi as a proxy to reflect upon such concepts. Fungi is present everywhere, under the ground, in our bodies, in the air, etc. Despite this, what is known about such organisms is nothing in comparison to other Kingdoms such as animals or plants. Going further, and generally speaking, the more we discover about who we are and what surrounds us, the more we realize about the infinity of aspects that continue in the territory of the unknown. For this stage I started growing several kits of Hericium Herinaceae and observing this process, also known as Lion’s mane. Simultaneously, I gathered visual data (12,567 images) from the fungi database of the University of Michigan Herbarium and trained a machine learning model with this image dataset, which was able to generate similar but unique images as the ones used as input.