Karoline Winzer

The mushrooms you see on the surface are only half the story. Under the ground lies an interconnected web of fungi called mycelium, which forges underground networks that allow trees to communicate. This collaboration is vital to soil and forest ecosystems and collectively forms what has become known as the “wood wide web”.

Merging touch, sound and digital technology, MYCELIUM is an interactive experience designed to help participants understand how the mycelial network works and why it is important. Using a human circuit, the project aims to foster cooperation and positive forms of interacting with one another while leaving a lasting understanding of the concept.

ICONIC shows the audience how arbitrary visual systems are by misinterpreting icons in a comical way.

Present day viewers step forward in time as they attend Hidden Figures, an exhibition taking place in the year 2643. In this time period, the world has undergone an ecological crisis and an event called The Great Digital Blackout, where solar flares caused all digital footage between 1990 to 2400 to be lost, the grid to collapse, and the technology itself difficult to reproduce.

Because iconography works due to a shared visual language between members of a society, as both the visual dictionary and the digital photographic evidence are lost, so are the icon’s original meaning. So, when an archaeologist stumbles upon an unexcavated area of what once was London, they have to piece together the behaviour of 2000s humans using nothing more than artefacts and pictograms. Interpreting these according to their understanding of the 2000s era, its mysterious technological wisdom, and the ecological crisis that ensued, they are taken by their findings, and present what they believe life was like in the 2000s at this exhibition.

Inspired by the out-of-context style of the British Museum, the exhibition is called Hidden Figures, a reflection of both the newly excavated icons and the hidden visual dictionary and biases that are brought to light.