Forest
2025

by Shira Wachsmann, John Wild and Tom Simmons

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Forest – an augmented wander through dense, 1000-year-old forests, where the symbiotic intelligence of fungi, birds, and the entangled visual, sonic, and sensuous relationships between the geosphere, atmosphere, and electronic Noosphere come to life. Forest explores the symbiotic relationship between multispecies co-evolution within situated ecologies. In collaboration with mycelium networks, it rethinks artificial intelligence through the sporing of birdsong, symbiotic algorithms, and indeterminacy, moving into collective assemblage. Engaging with augmented reality (AR) and its relationship to AI-generated birdsong and human-bird soundscapes, it creates interactive portals into the forest as a form of intelligence.

Forest consists of three interconnected elements:

  1. An immersive LiDAR scan of an ancient banyan tree in a Hong Kong forest, accompanied by birdsong.
  2. A living mycelium network with sensors that enable an encounter with its internal communications.
  3. An augmented reality entity featuring AI-generated birdsong.

The installation creates a social space for rethinking dominant AI narratives around evolution and intelligence, allowing for new imaginaries of relationships between human, non-human, and technological intelligences.

Forest was presented as part of ReWilding AI: The Radical Mattering of Narrative Ecologies, held at Snap VisLab, Royal College of Art, on 28 March 2025.

Forest was a collaboration between Shira Wachsmann, John Wild and Tom Simmons

AR developed by @_samuelealbani_

Immersive projections supported by @rian.stephens




Symbiotic Intelligence Lab - explores how mycelium can perform a different form of intelligence in the AI digital age—one rooted in collective assemblage, symbiosis, indeterminate movement, and emergence. Through the development of responsive art installations, we are prototyping and advancing what we call the symbiotic algorithm—both a functional algorithm and a theoretical framework—offering a new narrative of what intelligence can be. 


  1. Forest
  2. Interference Spores 2.0
  3. Workshop: Interference Spores || Becoming Octopus
  4. Interference Spores


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