On this website you can listen to a random generated live stream of mushroom music. A Band of Floating Mushrooms is having a global jam session on the rooftop of the HEK House of Electronic Arts in Münchenstein/Basel. Sometimes you have to wait a little bit until the band is ready to go on with their performance. You can always check the live action in the grey music bar above.
Big cities are constantly changing. A layer of new buildings and constructions is replacing the old traditional urban structures at lightning speed. This progress would not be feasible however without the expanding connective possibilities of the digital networks growing at the same speed and forming a nutrient-rich humus for change.
Mushrooms can be taken as a metaphor for this. They consist of a huge invisible mesh of root fibres underground, and their visible parts can suddenly pop up at the most unexpected places. Actually the hidden mycelium is the dominant part, which regulates the growth and appearance of what we usually call a mushroom. Where urban change happens, there is always a complex web of communication at work, similar to the mushroom network.
On the other hand, a universal computer network could also be called a mycelium, if we look at it as an organism. Both can have roots of immense dimensions. The underground system of a mushroom can be as large as several square kilometres, which actually makes it the biggest living creature on earth. Still, if digital networks were allowed into the contest, the WWW would win the gold medal. It would be very difficult to construct the urban facilities of today's cities without the help of these digital champions.
But could a huge computer system eventually grow a sort of consciousness of its own? And how would it behave towards us, if it had a kind of personality? When a complex technical system gets uncontrollably out of hand, we tend to react with anxiety and discomfort (remember HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001?), but there might also be something positive attached to the upcoming development.
Now let's suppose this: In its spare time, the internet is growing groups of polygonal mushrooms at unusual sites of change, and is letting them make music for its own entertainment.
The music made by the band sounds a bit like a strange, eclectic electronic collage of various styles, accompanied by voice snippets and noise samples constantly put together in real-time, based on random numbers.
This is where A Band of Floating Mushrooms first appeared: sitting on the flat roof top of the House of Electronic Arts is a cluster of intertwined mushrooms of 6.5 metres height. They were digitally designed and CNC manufactured in white-coated aluminium. On the bottom of each mushroom is a cable, connecting all the band members to the internet. At least it looks like that to the spectator; the music performed by the mushrooms is not actually coming through these cables, but from a PC server. You can listen to the live stream either on this website, or you can borrow headphones at the bar in the lobby of the HEK.
In 2009, the Christoph Merian Stiftung asked us to work out a public art project as a replacement for an earlier public installation which had to be removed. We were happy when our proposition of a giant global mushroom jam session found their immediate approval. CMS asked us to realize the mushroom band; to find the right place on the Dreispitz area, to work on the music and to have the digital model constructed in large scale.
The construction in welded aluminium was done by Kunstbetrieb, Münchenstein/Basel. They only got raw 3D data and a paper model from us, and they organised everything, from CNC cutting to the mounting on the rooftop.
The inauguration of the finished work took place on 11.11.2011.
In the future, we plan to let more and more mushrooms grow at unexpected sites all over the globe, as a sign of connectivity and change.
For instance, we were invited to a workshop in Chongqing, China, and we did a hypothetical project with another band of mushrooms. We took long walks in Chongqing city to find urban situations on the borderline between old and new, where we could attach these mushrooms to an appropriate building. We found a lot of sites, but there was one particular location which we thought would be best suited. See our website to read about the details.
If per chance you have a smashing idea about where we should grow another mushroom group, and you have the funds, please contact us.
Personal contact: studer_vdberg@datacomm.ch
Gallery connection: Nicolas Krupp, Basel
If you kept reading until here, you will like these weblinks:
Our own web archive: studervandenberg.ch
More mushroom related projects, web finds, readings and stuff: Republic Of Fungi
A Band of Floating Mushrooms is a permanent public art installation commissioned by Christoph Merian Stiftung, Basel, and (literally) supported by HEK House of Electronic Arts, Basel.
