Symbiotic Intelligence

DATE & LOCATION TBC (MAY/JUNE 2025)

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There is an intrinsic connection between the narratives we craft about AI and the trajectory of its development. Stories inspire technical breakthroughs, and technological advancements, in turn, generate new stories. The rapid emergence of machine learning (ML) has regenerated discussions about the nature of intelligence. Mainstream big-tech AI corporations, such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind, have revived the eugenics-associated concept of Charles Spearman’s g-factor. A dominant 'us v them' survival of the fittest paradigm has emerged within AI discourses, warning that AI development could outcompete humanity. These narratives centre competition and evolutionary dominance within AI development and pose significant risks by perpetuating a dangerously narrow and competitive perspective on intelligence, reducing it to a metric of superiority and survival.

In this febrile climate, where survival of the fittest is equated with progress and wealth creation, we risk reducing entire ways of life and creative processes to deterministic, closed systems. It has become urgent and critical to shift the narrative away from binary divisions toward collective imagination, ecosystems, and agency.

At Symbiotic Intelligence Lab, we explore how mycelium can perform a different form of intelligence in the AI digital age—one rooted in collective assemblage, symbiosis, indeterminate movement, and emergence. We are enabling an alternative narrative of intelligence through the prototyping of responsive art installations that embody what we call the symbiotic algorithm -  an algorithm and theoretical framework.

Our research investigates mycelium as both a conceptual and material collaborator, offering a new lens for rethinking dominant AI imaginaries and intelligence. The intelligence of the mycelium is composed of its environs and substance, introducing an element of indeterminacy and uncertainty that makes it impossible to predict the system's future state. We are working with the mycelium as a living sensor of environmental change, creating new poetic logic AI narratives and technical interventions. Using immersive installations as rapid prototyping tools, we connect to, read, and seek to understand subtle changes in the electrical signals that mycelium uses to communicate through its network of hyphae. Building on research in evolutionary algorithms, the project is developing a symbiotic algorithm that enables the installation to emerge, learn from and interact dynamically with both the mycelium and its environment. 

While evolutionary algorithms use biological language to create a specific evolutionary narrative, our research employs poetic methods to rethink AI and its deterministic use of language. To move beyond the confines of competition and hierarchy, toward an understanding of intelligence as a collective assemblage and emergent property of interconnected systems.

All mycelium will be grown specifically for the Entangled Futures event.

See here for images and videos: https://symbioticintelligence.cargo.site/