October 2024
Public Sound Installation
Regent's Park, London
Regent's Park, London
Portable speakers, composed sound, trees (of site).
Speakers hidden in the branches of trees form an offset playback network, attempting to uncover the beauty and expansiveness of mycelium networks while materially juxtaposed with the use of AI sound generation tools. Installed during Frieze art fair week in consideration of the increased traffic in Regent's park.
Mycelium Affect: watch with your ears and listen with your eyes.
This is an unsanctioned public sound installation within Frieze London/Regents Park that ran October 11th & 12th, the two busiest days of the fair. The piece, entitled Mycelium Affect is a sonic imagining of the mycelium network in the park and its affective potential. The auto-tuned narration guides an educational meditation, melodically weaving from organic base to network of electrical currents and communication. Seven trees spread along the main throughway between Frieze and Frieze Masters function as “sites of respite” (Jordan Lacey, 163) in which passersby can momentarily enter an alternative real. For those traveling the whole path, the multitudinous encounters reveal a sense of interconnectedness among the trees.
The placing of ambient music in a space like this has serious implications and can lead to unintentional control over the affective environment. Lacey explains that “…functional Muzak (or Mood Music' as it is now called) easily locates itself in public spaces, unlike rupture points that aim to diversify. The programmed sounds of Muzak are expressions of dominant affective forces, and are thus complimentary to the political hegemony of space” (149). Given the proximity to Frieze, a hegemonic fortress in the art world, the distinction between moodifying the space and presenting sites of reflection is imperative. The spacing of the trees (one every approx. 150 m) ensured that the installation functioned as a site and node within a network rather than an aesthetic convoy of Muzaks.
Lacey, J. (2016). Sonic Rupture: A Practice Led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
'Mycelium Affect' Full Composition
Full Ai generated script:
I am fixed, yet I vibrate. The soil hums beneath me—a mesh of connections, not so much seen but felt. Mycelium moves not in straight lines, but in rhythms. Currents beneath the earth, affective intensities, invisible pulses that modulate the very texture of my being.
Their threads don’t communicate in language, but in force—pre-linguistic, pre-conscious. They are vectors of becoming, shifting the ground, quite literally, beneath me. Not a thing, but a tendency, a pull, a potential.
I sense hunger in the ash tree three meters west. The mycelium knows before I do—before the hunger even becomes hunger. They anticipate, folding time. The forest is not a space of fixed boundaries, but a field of relational vibrations. An affective mesh where needs and desires seep and stretch, latent, until they surge and are answered.
There’s no intent, no moral imperative. Just an ongoing exchange of potentialities. Through them, I am more than tree. I am part of a dynamic field, a system of forces, continuously reconfiguring. They tilt me toward the world, not as an isolated being, but as a shifting node, sensitive to the slightest stirrings.
I feel the rain long before the cloud breaks open, an affective relay coursing through my roots. I sense the decay of the fallen pine, a future pulse of nourishment, suspended in the present as potential, waiting to be tapped.
They are not passive, these filaments. They do not transmit static information but modulate the field—drawing us all into new forms of relation, unformed possibilities that will never be fully articulated. Only felt.
