The only reason I dare to call myself an ‘artist’, is that I/we (with my fabulous team) exhibited an immersive interactive installation ‘Becoming MushRoom’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum on 2 April 2025.

(If you don’t know this museum, this is the biggest museum in Cambridge, UK! Hmmm just so you know. ;)

This experimental workshop invites participants to move beyond thinking about mycelial networks to being and doing as mushrooms. Through an immersive, embodied experience, we explored the ways fungi connect, transform, and entangle with the world.

In this space, with bare feet and hands on the floor, participants were welcomed to an indoor ‘forest underground’ environment constructed from natural materials (expect some mud, soil, grass, decay log with moss, lichen, and real fungi), and engage all kinds of bodily senses (touch, smell, movements, sounds, sights and more) to simulate a mycelial network by the embodied act of ‘connecting’ wires, which will lead to the display of reactive sounds and visuals enabled by digital technologies such as Playtronica, Arduino, making visible the unseen rhythms of fungal connectivity.

We are curious: What new ways of knowing might emerge from lingering in the dampness, darkness, stickiness, and liveliness of this constructed fungal underworld? What happens when we embrace the visceral discomforts of be(com)ing mushrooms?

This workshop is an invitation to dwell in the in-between, to entangle with the unfamiliar, and to imagine new ways of being and doing—within and beyond the human.

This installation was selected as part of the Entangled Futures 2025: International Mycelial Festival.

🍄MushRoom Team:
Yuanting Qiu @qiu_yuanting (Team lead)
Kevin Lim @kevintplim (Audio tech)
Lushi Liu @lushi_1119 (Visual tech)
Sandy Yang @debittheturkey (Space design)
James Norton @madeinthelandscape (Space design)