I am Mushroom: Anticipatory Aesthetics, Futures Pheromones and Fungal Play

This paper takes the mycorrhizal as a metaphor for culture. It posits that we, you and I, and everyone else have deep roots in our cultures and that to engage environmental futures calls us to engage with this deeper level of being as part of what Donna Haraway calls ‘natural cultural histories’. This insight is explored through a series of fungal reflections in which ‘thinking as a body’ is central to destabilising the sense that we are individuals. Always our individuality is conditional and open, embedded as it is in cultural flows. The paper touches on some theoretical dimensions to this understanding and then turns to exploring how the author develops these understandings in his own work. To illustrate this fungal play and its pheromonal possibilities the paper is accompanied by illustrations from Cat McNicholl.