embodiedfool

[embodiedfool]

WEEK 9

Over the last two weeks I’ve gradually read two chapters from Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. One chapter was Chapter 2 Living Labyrinths where Sheldrake discussed the nature of a fungus’ mycelium networks. This includes how a fungus grows, how it treats spatial problems, and the nature of fungus as a decentralized organism. The other chapter I read was Chapter 6 World Wide Webs, where Sheldrake talks about the ways fungus interacts with the natural world around it. 

CHAPTER 2: 

A fungus’ mycelium network is made up of a “swarm of hyphal tips” (in Sheldrake’s words pg . 53). This network is the true body of the fungus, with the stereotypical representation of them being the organism’s fruiting body, formed by a group of hyphae inflated with water. The fruiting of fungi has incredible potential force, with this growth being documented as capable of lifting up to 286 lbs (130kg). These hyphal tips control the growth of the fungus, with no central brain or body to control the movement of each hyphal tip. An experiment mentioned that helped me to best understand this was the Francis Alys performance, where a hole was poked in a can full of paint with Alys traversing a city with the paint trailing behind them. In this performance, Alys would be the hyphal tip, determining where the paint will trail to next, with all the paint of before trailing behind them. However, unlike the paint, a fungus can retract hyphal tips and reprioritize growth when it encounters greater resources in another direction or area. As said by Sheldrake, fungi are “flexible networks that ceaselessly remodel themselves” (pg. 76). 

All of these ideas are incredibly interesting to me. The intelligence of fungus is incredibly hard to conceptualize, as the organism itself is hard to understand. It has no central mind or central body, and yet it’s capable of making decisions on how to control a multitude of facets within itself. Each hyphal tip seems to manage itself, and yet is managed by the whole body as well. This body isn’t finite, and can grow almost infinitely, making the body inconstant. It’s also interesting that each part of the fungus is equally itself as another part. You cut off a section of the mycelium network and both parts are equally the same mycelium. However, you cut off the brain from the rest of the nervous system, and a human being is gone. It's interesting to think of a network with no center that can maintain itself without a center point for decision making. Rather, a fungus is a network purely for the transportation of information and, more importantly, resources; to take water from one area and distribute it throughout the whole organism. We explore this idea more in Chapter 6. 

CHAPTER 6: 

In this chapter, Sheldrake talks about how fungus interacts with the plant life around it. He starts by discussing Montropa, a plant that survives purely off of the resources provided by the mycelium network connected to it. When studied, scientists realized that mycelium isn’t only a network within itself; for sharing resources amongst its own body, and information along its own channels. It can also distribute resources amongst the plants it networks with. Fungal connections brought Montropa all the carbon it needed to survive, to the degree that it doesn’t even photosynthesize anymore, having lost its chlorophyll completely. This changes our ideas of plants completely. While plants can form root grafts on rare occasions, before it was thought that they all existed purely for competition, the same way animals live. This is true to a certain extent. Plants do compete for resources of light, space, and water. But despite this competition, fungal connections turn forests into communities. All these individuals fighting for survival begin to collaborate, a sign of intelligence that I’d only ever seen in animals before. It's interesting then that collaboration is such a universal part of the natural world, and such an integral part of intelligence on Earth.

[embodiedfool]

The goal of this assignment is to take each of our ideation visions and to merge them into one defined body of our creature. 

MY VISION:

A bug-like creature with extendable arms and tunneling abilities that can traverse the branches and roots of tree systems to care for a forest. 

GENIE’S VISION:

A humanoid creature with mushroom, samurai inspired outfit. It has a symbiotic relationship with roots and soil. 

HALLIE’S VISION:

A humanoid being that transforms into a non-humanoid when it’s time to travel. It’s arms transform into roots to merge with the roots of the trees, which it uses to travel. Possibly has energy ball ability. 

FINAL BODY: 

Semi-humanoid creature, with the body and skeletal structure of a human including the spine, hips, and upright orientation. However, the rest of its body and presentation would be either more bug-like, or naturally based. It has sensors and doesn’t rely as heavily on vision. It has 4 arms with extendable limbs and rather than having sticky hairs at the end, it has a root-like hand with mycelium fibers on the end. These hands allow it to meld with the bark to traverse branches, or roots when traveling through the root system. It also potentially will be able to disguise itself as a mushroom as a form of camouflage. 

Above you see an animation of how the extendable limb and root hands works.

[embodiedfool]

ASSIGNMENT 3.1

The goal of this assignment was to get a general understanding of what the body of our creature looks like. 

First off, I updated the environment to better fit Genie’s video game idea, utilizing ideas of levels and puzzles. The trees, rather than being fairly uniform, would be highly varied with different needs and different root/branch patterns, creating an even more varied maze experience for our creature. 

From there, I began to shape the creature’s body. 

My vision was a bug creature of sorts that is capable of tunneling under the ground as well as navigating the branches of the trees easily, quickly, and effectively. 

For the tunneling, the body would have two curved arms at the front. Its head is also conical to fully clear the newly made tunnels, as well as clear pre-existing tunnels as it goes through. 

For proper mobility, the creature would have extendable legs with sticky hairs at the end, allowing it to properly keep hold of a branch from any side, as well as reach farther to get to other branches or leaves. These legs are retracted mostly when tunneling, and retracted completely to clean the hairs of debris. Each leg can move independently of the other.

[embodiedfool]

Week 6

While going through the Cyberfeminism index this week, I found a paper that lead me down some interesting thought processes. The paper was ‘Why are Mammals called Mammals?’ This paper is about the cultural relationship between society and science, with our view of mammals being shaped by breasts, women, and animals. While this paper was more of a feminist look at scientific classification, it made me start thinking about evolutionary connections to intelligence. This is partially because in my other course, Poli 13DR we had just read Waller’s Perpatrators of Genocide, which at one point discussed the ways evolution affects our psychology, specifically in the cases of xenophobia and the formation of in-groups and out-groups. Both of these papers made me start thinking about the ways that evolutionary instincts have translated into social tendencies, and also by extension social intelligence. There are parts of the human psyche that still seem mysterious to us all. To some, our inability to understand our own mind’s complexity is evidence and symptom of our great intelligence. However, whenever I face the human mind through the lens of evolution those mysteries seem to be more like developments of instinct into situations that no longer call for that instinct. 

Our intelligence and ingenuity was a design from natural selection. The intelligent creatures that surround us were formed by the same forces. So it seems that intelligence is a natural byproduct of living long enough in the world for it to shape you for your environment. You don’t just understand the world around you inherently, you understand it as a tool for survival, that understanding shaped by the environment itself. 

All of this made me consider that in our final assignment, evolution should be something strongly considered. With the ecosystem and environment provided, in what ways would a creature be forced to genetically adapt? What ‘intelligence’ would suit the creature in this space? How would it be shaped to understand its world? 

[embodiedfool]

Assignment 2

Sensory Intelligence

The goal of this assignment was to define the environment/ecosystem and the behaviors of a hypothetical intelligent creature. 

ENVIRONMENT: Our being lives in the branches and roots of large expansive trees

This network of branches and roots is expansive, and almost maze-like, as the root of one tree connects to the roots of another. The environment also has harsh weather, with heavy rains and intense heat waves that force the being underground. 

The main threat is aggressive, tree-eating creatures that are slightly larger than our being and come in larger groups than our being (smaller number of the being in the overall ecosystem). These tree-eating creatures kill the tree in a relatively short time, about a week. They stay away from BRISTLE TREES as they have little wood (thin bark and hollow interior) and poisonous sap. This is the natural habitat of our being.

When a tree in this hypothetical environment dies, it doesn’t only fall, but also severs its root system from the main body. The roots alone will regrow the tree

BEHAVIORS: For the behaviors, we wanted to take the keywords CURIOSITY, CONNECTION, and INSTINCT and apply them to our tree root environment. The creature relies heavily on instinctual behaviors. Like, for example, it naturally moves into the root systems and underground in moments of harsh weather. These root systems lead it to other trees, as it actively ventures out to learn more of the larger root system. It’s able to recognize patterns of these new discoveries, actively mapping multiple tree branch and root systems after only one venture, as well as forever avoiding areas where it felt threatened by other creatures, or threatened by potential tree death. It makes the connection between excessive damage to a tree (or its roots), and death of tree which is frequently caused by a threat (presence of termite creatures) and also frequently lead to a threat (being crushed as the trunk falls to the forest floor).

[embodiedfool]

WEEK 4

The readings this week discussed the Physarum polycephalum slime and its connections to ideas of emergence. What I found interesting about these readings was the behavior and description of the slime, especially in connection to my keywords in the first assignment: network. The Tero et. all reading describes the physarum slime as an “amoeboid organism that forages for patchily distributed food sources” (paragraph 3), using its own body to create a network of direct connections, growing outward based on the resources it finds. In order to understand this fully, I looked up a video of the amoeba to see this behavior in action. The organism appeared to be almost fluid, the description of “slime” used being accurate in my opinion. The use of this slime in Sutela’s art pieces clearly displayed a form of intelligence to me, as it navigates through mazes and creates different forms based on its environment. I’d call it a low level of intelligence, but intelligence nonetheless. When connected to the idea of emergence discussed in the Pearson reading, it’s clear this low level of intelligence produces “organized complexity” in its behavior and appearance. 

It was an interesting display of my keywords: physical networking and cellular connections, rather than mental networks from logical connections. There still is a level of “mental” networking that happens with the amoeba, though I use that definition loosely. I simply mean that there’s a level of understanding that it needs food, understanding what is food for it, and understanding when it has found a food source. It searches blindly until it’s found what it needs, and then builds a stronger network around it, before branching out further in search of more.

[embodiedfool]

Assignment #1: Defining Intelligence

Intelligence is about the expansion of knowledge to form an understanding of the world and other people. Part of this expansion means recognizing new information, and creating a network out of this information. A fundamental part of creating this network is the identification of patterns, and with these patterns forming connections about and between different data points. The creation of these networks and connections is what brings true understanding on a subject, these abilities presupposing intelligence.

3 KEYWORDS: Network, Connections, Understanding

The first image is a sketching of my ideas for images to exemplify my keywords.

NETWORK: Image 2 is a result of a p5.js code I wrote that creates a network of nodes from two starting nodes. The colorful lines are connections made between nodes of the same color.

LINK TO CODE:

CONNECTIONS: Image 3 is a digital drawing I did on procreate meant to represent the patterns humans identify in nature, creating fictional connections. These patterns may not have any actual connection (the cloud isn't really a bunny, and the stars aren't purposefully representing anything we know), but they were connections we created due to our intelligence.

UNDERSTANDING: Image 4 is a collage between an anatomical image and a digital drawing. This is meant to be a representation of emotional recognition and sympathy, which is a way we understand other human beings. I wanted the anatomical aspect as a reminder that despite the fact it is an emotional reflection, they are still based on a subconscious logical connection. We can't sympathize without the ability to look at previously catalogued examples of our own emotions, as well as make the connection between that experience and the expressions of the person in front of us.

LINK TO REFERENCE IMAGE: