Danlin Dany Huang
Interactive media foralternative soma experience.
Fungi Sync
by Danlin Huang, Botao Amber Hu, Xiaobo Aaron Hu
Key Words：
Concept
FungiSync is a mixed reality participatory ritual performance inspired by the mycorrhizal network "Wood Wide Web" to foster human plurality and collective wisdom. Participants wear masquerade-style mushroom-decorated mixed reality masks—metaphors for technology-mediated pluriversal worldviews—becoming living nodes in a dynamically evolving mycorrhizal network of shared consciousness. Through various ritualized secret handshakes, the most ancient protocols, they exchange and blend distinct worldviews, mirroring how fungi orchestrate resource sharing and signal exchange in the "Wood Wide Web." This embodied network performance manifests actor-network theory through interspecies dialogue, celebrating the entanglement of multiple worlds in a decentralized web of infinite collaboration, enhancing mycological awareness of decentralized technology's role in today's deglobalizing world. Let’s Celebrating Mycopunk!
Thematic Statement
Recent years, cascade of global disruptions - the U.S.-China trade war, COVID-19 pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and climate change pressures - has accelerated deglobalization. These crises exposed critical vulnerabilities in centralized institutions, compelling governments and corporations to reevaluate their external dependencies amid deepening ideological divides. As nations prioritized domestic resilience over global efficiency, the result was fractured supply chains, hardened borders, and heightened geopolitical tensions.
Yet this fragmentation catalyzed the emergence of alternative systems. Decentralized networks gained momentum, offering novel approaches to human organization. Nature provides an illuminating model through the Wood Wide Web - the vast mycorrhizal fungal network that underlies forest ecosystems.
While trees dominate the visible forest landscape, it's the unseen fungal networks beneath that truly bind the ecosystem together. These underground connections facilitate resource sharing and communication, creating resilient communities through distributed cooperation. This natural architecture parallels emerging decentralized technologies, which aim to build digital ecosystems based on peer-to-peer networks rather than centralized control.
The relationship between visible trees and unseen fungal networks offers a powerful metaphor for the complementary role of decentralized systems alongside traditional institutions. Just as forests thrive through the interplay of visible and hidden networks, human society might achieve greater resilience through a hybrid approach - maintaining essential centralized structures while nurturing decentralized alternatives that enhance adaptability and cooperation.
This natural model demonstrates how complex systems can self-organize and sustain themselves through distributed relationships, suggesting a path toward more resilient social and technological architectures.
One Liner
FungiSync is a mixed reality performance where participants wear mushroom-themed MR masks, each embodying a unique worldview. Through ritualized handshakes, they exchange perspectives, mirroring the resource-sharing of mycorrhizal networks' "Wood Wide Web," reflecting how decentralized technology can interweave our increasingly fragmented world.
Mask Design
We opted for a masquerade-style, mushroom-inspired “FungiSync” mixed reality mask that encases the HoloKit—a smartphone-based, open-source, optical see-through stereoscopic MR headset. The mask attaches to the HoloKit’s headpad via Velcro. An iPhone is mounted inside the HoloKit, and the mask is carefully shaped to avoid obstructing the phone’s camera and LiDAR sensor, thus preserving the headset’s 3D environment-sensing capabilities and ensuring an unobstructed optical see-through region for audience viewing. Inspired by Venetian-style masks used in masquerade balls, our design features a single-handed grip for enhanced user comfort and intuitive handling. The ergonomic handles reduce the headset’s weight strain and enable easy sharing between users. The branch-like handle is modeled in Rhino, 3D-printed in resin, and hand-painted to achieve a realistic wooden finish. Like Ikebana (Japanese art of flower arrangement), the handle’s hollow interior is filled with foam, allowing for the attachment of ready-made mushroom ornaments into the handlebar.AR Exhibiton Experience
Technical Foundations
FungiSync builds on the HoloField \cite{hu2023InstantCopresence} framework, a collocated multiplayer MR system that aligns the spatial poses of all local devices in real time. This synchronization allows multiple users to share a unified digital space, with seamless transitions between individual and collective experiences. We use Unity’s Visual Effect Graph to generate reactive virtual patterns, ensuring that each mask’s visual output responds fluidly to user movements, gestures, and ambient environmental cues.
Audiovisual Coordination
Throughout the performance, a live DJ manipulates music in real time to modulate collective behaviors. The audio feed drives various audio-reactive visuals in the masks, nudging participants toward certain movements—louder beats may prompt more energetic gestures, while melodic interludes can inspire slower, deliberate interactions. By embedding the auditory layer into the visual design, the DJ’s performance becomes a subtle yet powerful mechanism for shaping the group’s shared experience. (see the live DJ positioned in the side deck in Figure~\ref{fig:the-performance-setup}).
Spectator Engagement
FungiSync also caters to a larger audience beyond headset wearers. By displaying a third-person spectator view—combining feeds from collocated AR devices and fixed cameras on large TV screens—bystanders can observe how the virtual elements overlay the dancers’ and participants’ movements in real time. This inclusive setup allows spectators to appreciate the evolving MR environments from multiple vantage points, enhancing both the visual spectacle and the communal, participatory spirit of the performance
Cyberdelic Visual Effect of FungiSync Mixed Reality Experience
Indoor Participatory Performance in Public Exhibition
FungiSync made its official debut as a commissioned artwork during a technical public conference, where it occupied a dedicated booth in an art gallery setting. This immersive installation attracted participants from diverse backgrounds—including visual artists, technologists, ecologists, computer scientists, and sociologists—highlighting the interdisciplinary appeal of bio-inspired art.
The musician improvised in real time, drawing inspiration from subtle environmental changes—shifting light, participant interactions, and micro-level sonic feedback—to mirror the dynamic processes of FungiSync. The music performance enhanced the atmosphere and reinforced FungiSync’s theme of ecological connectivity through responsive soundscapes throughout the exhibition. This combination of live music and fungal-inspired mask visuals sparked curiosity and a sense of interconnectedness among conference attendees. Participancy gain the fungal network knowledge after the performance and exhibition. Feedback with Fun and educational for public audience of fungi network. to gain non-dualism awareness.
Exhibition in Devcon 2024 in Bangkok Thailand
Outdoor Performance in the Forest
Following the success of its indoor exhibition, FungiSync ventured into a forest setting to investigate how immersion in natural landscapes could further enrich its core themes. This site-specific performance featured professional contact improvisation dancers interpreting biological signals and patterns drawn from fungal networks. Contact improvisation—a movement practice emphasizing spontaneous, physical interaction through shared weight, touch, and reciprocal energy exchange—was particularly well suited to communicate the adaptive, give-and-take nature of mycelial ecologies.
Within the forest, FungiSync expanded contact improvisation to creatively explore various forms of body contact, fostering a heightened somaesthetic awareness and a profound sense of unity with the living environment. Echoing the principles of eco-phenomenology, this movement-based exploration paralleled mycelial networks by highlighting the continuous interchange that sustains both dancers and fungi alike. Eco-performance scholarship supports the notion that integrating live movement with natural settings can cultivate a deep sense of place-based embodiment, allowing performers and audiences to glimpse the subtle, interwoven layers of ecological interdependence that often remain hidden in everyday life.