Designing with Bioluminescent Fungi

Two Part Workshop

Saturday, March 29, 3pm-6pm

Sunday, March 30, 3pm-6pm

Join us to learn how to design with bioluminescent fungi, build your own lantern and explore different experimental habitats for our glowing friends.

In “The Endarken Project”, bioluminescent fungi are companion species that help us find a new sense of awe in darkness. Little is known in science about bioluminescent fungi, why they glow, or what ecological purpose they serve, but what we do know is that natural darkness - that allows us to admire a starry sky or the wonders of bioluminescent lives - is disappearing. In cities, we have colonized the nights with artificial light and pushed darkness to the “wilderness”, to a few dark sky sanctuaries. Growing bioluminescent fungi and living with them can help us attune our senses to darkness, and find sensorial restoration from our light-polluted cities.

In this workshop you will:

• Grow bioluminescent fungi in different scales and take home petri dish cultures and lanterns (jars)
• Create small-scale material experiments of habitats for bioluminescent fungi (laser cut mini architectures, textiles)
• Imagine how to collaborate with them to create darker nightscapes in New York City

COVID-19 Safety Notice:

If you are feeling unwell, suspect that you have been exposed to COVID-19 or test positive, please do not attend and let us know ASAP ([email protected]). If you cancel after our 7-day policy, we cannot refund your ticket, but we can exchange and offer credits toward future classes. If you have signed up for Biohacker Boot Camp, we will automatically transfer your registration to the next month’s dates unless you tell us otherwise.

Melissa Ingaruca Moreno (she/her) is a transdisciplinary explorer, working mostly at the intersection of multispecies thinking, urban design, and experiential futures. As a PhD researcher in “Multispecies Cities and Emerging Technologies”, she explores how to transform urban design practices to care for the wellbeing, cognition and agency of more-than-human species, to enable multispecies cohabitation. Her research-through-design project Endarken, awarded in 2022 by the School of International Futures (UK), rethinks the future of darkness at night for multispecies cohabitation. Through nocturnal walks to embody more-than-human perceptions of light pollution and ethnographic experiments to design and live with bioluminescent fungi, participants reconnect to more-than-human worlds and create experiential futures of darker urban worlds . She is also a co-founder of  Mycohackers, a Berlin-based transdisciplinary collective that explores biodesign with fungi and member of the global network NATURA (Nature-based solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene), and international speaker in events like the Dubai Futures Forum, The Nature of Cities Festival, among others.

Instagram:

Mel_ingaruca

endarken_cities

Host or Publisher Genspace NYC