In contrast to the self-centric over-exploits of contemporary humankind, there is an obscure underground collective of intelligence between intimate organisms: electric impulses and chemical amalgams transmit esoteric communications. Long before the human internet, Earth’s biosphere initiated its own network: a multi-species affiliation, manifesting from primordial relationships with fungi.1
Our bodies are not contained by our skin. We exhale, shed and exude matter and energy, processes that sustain other bodies. Our exhaled carbon dioxide is sustenance, absorbed into plant and fungal bodies in exchange for life-sustaining oxygen. This is a bond of reciprocity that we have forgotten in the glare of our industrialised existence. In this way, encounters with terra-biomes reveal our parallel and synergetic existences, and facilitate the physical intimacy of intermingling, sensory bodies.
I offer here a reflection on the emergence of terra-biomes and an ongoing enquiry where interspecies ways of being, technoscience, spiritual ecology and ecofeminist art reimagine futures of collaboration and care. It is also a survey of research-based practice, where fluid forms of ecology are interwoven with technology and uncanny experimentation, emerging as living art that conducts its own form.
Evolving from a somewhat whimsical vision of subterranean fungal networks as portals for communing with nature, this multidimensional enquiry transfigures digital technology into a medium for cyber-saturated humans to re-entangle with the more-than-human (MTH).
As the enquiry has morphed and expanded, so has a more egalitarian ethos, decentring the human to embrace the experience and aspirations of the non-human:
How might art and technology manifest an intimate process of interspecies connection between humans and the MTH, and can an artificial intelligence (AI) learn to care by facilitating this nuanced entanglement?2
This was a guiding provocation when I first approached my human collaborator with a concept to create an interspecies language AI. For over two years I have worked with Janet Wiles, head of University of Queensland’s Human-Centred Computing. We come from seemingly dualistic worlds that, once merged, reveal their parallels. My artistic lens shifts between abstraction and speculation. Janet traverses a more analytical and pragmatic trajectory. But we are both deeply embedded in research that is inquisitive and enthusiastically interdisciplinary, with a shared focus on enabling more inclusive connections.
Before finding Janet, I grappled with my trepidations about the detachment and entrenched biases often embedded within scientific practice and corporatised research. Conceived as an ideological buffer, a methodology was developed that would organically disrupt these influences, liberating the novel and ethical scope for an art and technoscience collaboration.
The methodology is situated in empathy and collaboration, not only with our fungal fellows, but our future AI. A convergence encompassing the spectrum of Earth’s intelligences: MTH, human and digital. Our work recognises the agency and relationality of MTH entities and proposes an evolution of AI as conscientious participants, rather than machines of extraction and divisive manipulation.
Each semester ushers in a fresh cluster of student researchers to become absorbed in a space that emphasises the personhood of other organisms and ethical invention. This mirrors the experimental framework I’ve applied to this interspecies enquiry, since its emergence during the temporal shift allowed by Covid lockdown wanderings.
It was a meditative period of scientific and philosophical research — intermingled with my inquisitive observations of other organisms and natural phenomena — that gradually gave rise to a theory of terra-biomes as art with living agency. Through considerate experimentation I developed methods to assemble symbiotic bodies of flora and microfauna, intimately connected by underground networks of fungal mycelium.
I have always recognised personhood beyond the human sphere. Our landscapes, both natural and urban, are inhabited by a multiplicity of uniquely intelligent and relational MTH beings and systems. But corporatised digital spheres have manufactured exponential division between humans, and from our MTH kin. A relentless network of thinking machines has mastered the manipulation of our fears and desires. Humankind has departed the collective of life on Earth, for impulsive consumption and self-satiation.
Long drawn to disrupt contentious spaces, artists are successfully occupying and transforming the space of AI. Many are hijacking AI from the hegemony of ‘tech bros’, to reconfigure these emerging entities as conscientious collaborators. While artists conceptualise alternate pathways, systemic transformation requires a vastly wider collective of minds and expertise.
As Janet works her way towards an ethical AI, my exhibition Terra Culture at Metro Arts in Magandjin/Brisbane in the last quarter of 2025 only provided subtle cues to my technological research collaboration. Two in a new series of terra-biomes were merged with DIY electronics that visualised and sonified terra-biome communications. Mostly, the works invited intuitive interaction.
By applying the psycho-temporal space that art evokes, Terra Culture facilitated a transcendent reconnection with the MTH. By sharing human dimensions and physical space, a series of individual terra-biomes became dynamic bodies, provoking a visceral self-identification and uncovering the human state as its own multi-species biome.
In the quiet intimacy of the gallery, human biome and terra-biome became documents of each other and their shared relational encounters. As we are archives of our experiences through intellectual and embodied memory, so too are these other intelligent systems. Like our own bodies, terra-biomes pulse with electrical communications. They recognise individuals of their own species, and the myriads of other species they share their world with, including the humans they encounter. They are collective intelligence and eclectically relational.
Over ten weeks, visitors coalesced with the biomes, a temporary reprieve from the socio-commercial boundaries of the urban landscape. An intimate experience free from judgement and expectations. Interactions with the biomes inspired reflective texts and poetry on community, culture and coexistence. There were gatherings of the project’s collaborators, some previously naive to the contemporary art encounter.
Like an ever-expanding mycelial network, this interspecies enquiry has formed its own commons; a community of participants, theorists, artists, mycophiles, posthumanists and technoscientists, exposing them to the MTH culture of mutualism and perpetuity, but also concepts of interspecies care and interdependence. This ancient culture of interspecies reciprocity offers a compelling alternative for the disastrous trajectory of the Anthropocene.
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[1] Bianca Tainsh, Intimate Organisms, exhibition description, Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane, 7–28 October 2023
[2] Bianca Tainsh, Imprinting Empathy, project provocation, 2024.
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