FungiSync

Thematic Statement

Recent years, cascade of global disruptions - the U.S.-China trade war, COVID-19 pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and climate change pressures - has accelerated deglobalization. These crises exposed critical vulnerabilities in centralized institutions, compelling governments and corporations to reevaluate their external dependencies amid deepening ideological divides. As nations prioritized domestic resilience over global efficiency, the result was fractured supply chains, hardened borders, and heightened geopolitical tensions.

Yet this fragmentation catalyzed the emergence of alternative systems. Decentralized networks gained momentum, offering novel approaches to human organization. Nature provides an illuminating model through the Wood Wide Web - the vast mycorrhizal fungal network that underlies forest ecosystems.

While trees dominate the visible forest landscape, it's the unseen fungal networks beneath that truly bind the ecosystem together. These underground connections facilitate resource sharing and communication, creating resilient communities through distributed cooperation. This natural architecture parallels emerging decentralized technologies, which aim to build digital ecosystems based on peer-to-peer networks rather than centralized control.

The relationship between visible trees and unseen fungal networks offers a powerful metaphor for the complementary role of decentralized systems alongside traditional institutions. Just as forests thrive through the interplay of visible and hidden networks, human society might achieve greater resilience through a hybrid approach - maintaining essential centralized structures while nurturing decentralized alternatives that enhance adaptability and cooperation.

This natural model demonstrates how complex systems can self-organize and sustain themselves through distributed relationships, suggesting a path toward more resilient social and technological architectures.

Artwork

FungiSync is a mixed reality participatory ritual performance inspired by the mycorrhizal network "Wood Wide Web" to foster human plurality and collective wisdom. Participants wear masquerade-style mushroom-decorated mixed reality masks—metaphors for technology-mediated pluriversal worldviews—becoming living nodes in a dynamically evolving mycorrhizal network of shared consciousness. Through various ritualized secret handshakes, the most ancient protocols, they exchange and blend distinct worldviews, mirroring how fungi orchestrate resource sharing and signal exchange in the "Wood Wide Web." This embodied network performance manifests actor-network theory through interspecies dialogue, celebrating the entanglement of multiple worlds in a decentralized web of infinite collaboration, enhancing mycological awareness of decentralized technology's role in today's deglobalizing world. Let’s Celebrating Mycopunk!

Masks and shared worlds

The masquerade-style mask gives each visitor a distinct, sound-responsive visual world. Its branch-shaped handle leaves one hand free for meeting another participant. The HoloKit housing preserves the phone camera, LiDAR view, and optical see-through area; the resin-printed handle is painted like wood and decorated with mushroom forms. Mask design documentation.

Touch as an exchange

The 2026 manuscript develops the installation as a metaphor for plants connected through mycorrhizal fungi. Each participant begins with different visual elements representing resources such as water, sugar, or minerals. Bringing hands together blends elements between their views. The mixture grows during contact and leaves a fading trace after release, so a participant’s visual world carries a temporary history of encounters.

The shared spatial system aligns the masks in one room while allowing their visual layers to differ. Unity visual effects attach to the sensed surroundings and respond to sound. This is an artistic interpretation of ecological interdependence, inviting participants to negotiate when and how long to connect. Manuscript.

Demonstrations

• 2025 — FungiSync: Merging Cyberdelic Mixed Realities. Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH 2025). Vancouver, Canada. Immersive Pavilion. [→]

Preprint: Entangling Like Mycorrhizae: Mixing Realities Through Touch in “FungiSync”. Submitted for SIGGRAPH 2026; listed here as a preprint. arXiv manuscript

Exhibitions

• SIGGRAPH 2025 Immersive Pavilion, Vancouver, Canada — FungiSync: Merging Cyberdelic Mixed Realities. Conference program.
• Devcon SEA 2024, Bangkok, Thailand — participatory installation. Ethereum Foundation account.

Installation photographs