LASER - April 28, 2023

Eryk Salvaggio is an interdisciplinary design researcher and new media artist. His work explores emerging technologies through a critically engaged lens, testing their mythologies and narratives against their impacts on society, culture, and the environment. His work exposes ideologies embedded into technology, fusing a visual culture & media theory lens, a critique grounded in social impacts, and an early background in media activism. His work has been exhibited at Michigan State University Science Museum, the UN Internet Governance Forum, Eyebeam, CalArts, Brown University, Turbulence, The Internet Archive, and in books including Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais’ At the Edge of Art, Alex Galloway’s Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, and Peter Langford’s Image & Imagination. He has presented talks, keynotes and works at the Systems Research & Design Conference (RSD10&11), the Advances in Systems Sciences and Systems Practice Conference (2022), Melbourne Design Week (2021), MIT Press (2021), the University of St. Gallen (2018), California College of the Arts (2018, 2019, 2020), the University of Maine, RightsCon (2020), and Gensler San Francisco (2017). As a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Brown University, he created the article on Algorithmic Bias in 2016. Eryk holds a Masters in Media and Communication from the London School of Economics and a Masters in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University. He earned two concurrent undergraduate degrees, in New Media and Journalism, from the University of Maine, where he was listed as visiting faculty as an undergraduate based on his early interactive, online net.art work.

 https://cyberneticforests.com

Worlding: Sympoietic Mycology

Worlding is a series of musical performances created by linking the internal communication patterns of Oyster mushrooms to a modular analog synthesizer. Mushrooms are a sprawling body — the caps which emerge to greet us are just one extension of their sprawling underground network. This network is exploratory: it seeks food, favorable light conditions, recoils from harm. It moves nutrients from one region to another, becoming entangled with the roots of plants and trees.

This outcome was the result of a design process wherein each decision engaged with a philosophical inquiry into human observation and presence, communication and transmission, and poetics of translation and ambiguity. The mushroom-synthesizer interaction is a microcosm for understanding what’s involved in questions about interfaces, information, and flows of exchange.