More Than Human Conversation

At a time when the material consequences of AI are more apparent than ever, artists are increasingly exploring the interconnectedness of media ecologies and natural ecologies. A case in point is Helen Knowles, whose recent series of films More-Than-Human Healthcare considers questions of autonomy, responsibility, and ethics in relation to emerging technology. 

At the same time, initiatives such as the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Project are “advancing rights and well-being for humans, non-humans, and the web of life that sustains us all.” Central to the project is Merlin Sheldrake, whose bestselling book Entangled Life (2020) revealed fungi as the model of an enriching network on which the planet depends, in contrast to the exploitative and extractive networks that have come to define technocapitalism. Having collaborated with artists including Marshmallow Laser Feast as well as his brother Cosmo Sheldrake, the author sat down with Helen Knowles and Alex Estorick to discuss the regenerative power of the wood wide web.

‍Alex Estorick: In what ways do your different research practices explore the relations between natural and media ecologies?‍

Merlin Sheldrake: I’m a biologist and writer and my background is in ecological and microbial sciences, soil science, tropical ecology, and fungi, in particular the mycorrhizal fungi that form relationships with plants. I work with a research group studying these networks in the lab using imaging robots to understand how they process information to solve the many problems that they face.

I also work with a group called the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) and we’re looking at a very large scale, trying to make maps of mycorrhizal communities across the planet. We’re experimenting with new ways of organizing scientific practice and advocating for the protection of underground ecosystems because, perhaps unsurprisingly, we tend to forget about the things we can’t see. 

Just as the deep ocean communities that are so important in the biosphere have been comparatively neglected within conservation frameworks, so too have the organisms that live underground that make up more than half of the species on earth. 

I also work with the Fungi Foundation, which, among other things, works to advance fungal protections within conservation frameworks. If we don’t factor fungi into conservation and nature recovery, we will undermine a lot of our efforts because these organisms lie at the root of so much life on land. Finally, I work with an organization called the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Project which is an interdisciplinary collective that brings together judges, lawyers, philosophers, scientists, artists, poets, indigenous leaders, and activists to try to find ways to deepen and expand legal frameworks to better include the living world. 

‍Helen Knowles: I make new media work that often involves staging and restaging situations. Back in 2016, I made a work called The Trial of Superdebthunterbot where I put an algorithm on trial, with lawyers and a real jury, because I was interested in whether a nonhuman could take responsibility. Prior to this in 2013, I participated in a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico working with Native American midwives at a time when women were increasingly sharing knowledge by posting their births online. One of the midwives invited me to a peyote ceremony to understand how her indigenous community — which regards the peyote cactus as a teacher — shares knowledge. These two experiences informed my project More-Than-Human Healthcare, which is made up of three films.

The first film, Trust the Medicine (2023), is concerned with our relationships with non- or more-than-human entities that care for us. It involved staging a psychedelic integration group with three women who came and talked about their encounters with entities. I then worked with them to make entities using ChatGPT and AI imaging. For this project, I spent time talking to and getting to know researchers at the Psychoactive Trials at King’s College London including psychotherapists who work on the clinical trials.

What I noticed when I spent time in psychedelic integration groups was that a lot of people recounted having entity encounters but there was no scientific way of understanding them. 

For another film in the trilogy, Caring Code (2025), I hosted an AI researcher in conversation with a psychotherapist. I then had a childminder discuss the analogies between training algorithms and bringing up children. I’m interested in Yuk Hui’s notion of “technodiversity” as a way of challenging hegemonic tools in society.

The film most relevant to Merlin’s work is Indexed Beings (2023), which I made in Colombia in collaboration with a botanist, Jorge Contreras, who runs the Ethnobotanical Herbarium in Putumayo, Mocoa. 

He told me a story about a taita, or shaman, who had walked into his laboratory and asked: “what are you doing?! Why are you collecting all these specimens? This is completely antithetical to our way of understanding the world.” 

I then met a remarkable herbalist, Manuel Mueses, who conserves more than 700 species of plants whom I worked with to restage the argument in the laboratory. While both Contreras and Mueses are very open, there is a general distrust of the scientific world and how it benefits the indigenous community. Contreras argues that collaboration is necessary to defend the land in the area, while the film poses the question of whose knowledge really counts: the scientific or the indigenous. Merlin, I’d be very interested in your reflections on indigenous and western scientific knowledges.

‍MS: The first two projects you mention remind me of a study I recently participated in at Imperial College London where they administered subjects with intravenous DMT to try and understand more about the phenomenon of the “entities” that many report experiencing under DMT. These questions take one to the very limit of the dominant reductive materialist paradigm because the entities often present to people as having some kind of independent existence. These studies also scramble some of the conventional categories of the sciences where we think of ourselves as maintaining some kind of objective position with regard to the phenomena that we’re studying. 

In these cases, one is forced to take a subjective position because the person reporting on the entities is reporting on an aspect of their subjective experience which then has to be observed or somehow quantified by the organizers of the study. But they can only access the phenomenon through the subjectivity of the subject, which is a fun paradox for everyone to wrestle with. It’s also a healthy kind of confusion because it invites us to think about the interiority of living organisms more generally. 

When one studies subjective phenomena the question becomes: what is it like to be you? 

This is an interesting question to ask when studying nonhumans, because within dominant scientific frameworks it is usually assumed that humans have a monopoly on consciousness. Most traditional knowledge systems, by contrast, have long taken the view that we live in an animate, relational, living world.  

‍HK: I’m really interested in the DMTx trials but I also feel that there is a colonialist mentality behind mapping something in order to understand it and potentially exploit it. Paracosm is a term from psychology that describes the mapping of imaginary worlds, and I was wondering how the mapping of fungi benefits the fungi because I am interested in the idea of reciprocation. ‍

MS: Certainly mapping has a very difficult history: it is central to any colonial enterprise, and is bound up with a long and shameful history of violence, exploitation, and extraction. At SPUN, the way that we think about our mapping is that so many of the things that we’re blind to, we destroy. When we are trying to take account of the many ways there are to be alive on the planet, we ask ourselves what we can do to make these lives visible so that people can factor them into their decisions. 

Recently, we’ve been working with an indigenous people called the Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon who regard fungi as a vital, connective medium within a living, conscious forest. They invited us to come and work with their scientists to sample the fungi in their territory to create datasets that they could use in their ongoing legal battles with the Ecuadorian government. 

For example, the Ecuadorian government has various responsibilities and legal duties relating to the safe removal of dynamite buried in the territory by an oil company. One question we are working on with the Saryaku people is how to use these cutting-edge fungal datasets to describe the rich ecology that exists below the ground and document exactly how much damage would be done if the government detonated the dynamite rather than taking a safer, more expensive, and laborious route.

Maps can be used as a way to help people who are on the side of the living world rather than those who seek simply to exploit it. 

In the end, of course, maps can be used either way. But our assessment is that if we don’t make these lives visible somehow, then we’ll carry on doing what we’re doing right now, which is treating the soil as a lifeless place rather than a dwelling place of life-giving transformation. Maps are one way of animating, invigorating, and complexifying our understanding of the unseen realms below ground.

‍AE: Despite the popularity of generative AI, it comes at a dramatic ecological cost, while much digital creation right now depends on the extraction of data. However, as you’ve made clear, Merlin, the act of mapping can have inclusive potential under certain conditions. You’ve also popularized the term “wood wide web” to refer to the ways symbiotic fungi link plants in shared networks. Back in 2005, Matthew Fuller theorized media ecologies, while, more recently, Achille Mbembe developed the notion of planetary consciousness, whereby “physical, organic phenomena such as plants, animals, minerals [...] as well as the artifacts and things and tools we have invented” are “entangled.” My fear is that the entanglement of media ecologies with natural ecologies will only ever come at the cost of the latter. ‍

MS: When you look at the living world, it becomes clear that nothing starts from nothing. You have to have some kind of fertile soil for a plant’s life to be conceivable, and that fertile soil originates in the dead and decomposing bodies of other organisms which themselves have been nourished by further organisms as well as light and carbon dioxide and other factors. Every organism has an inheritance and every organism depends on other organisms in order to survive. 

The question becomes: how does one relate ethically to the living world? For me, instead of taking an extractive mentality for granted, it’s about having gratitude and developing practices of appreciation and replenishment. 

Most modern industrial agriculture involves mining the nutrients from the soil that have accumulated over many years. Likewise, if you think about the lives of artists and writers since time immemorial, everyone has been inspired by someone else and everyone’s creative self emerges from a kind of creative compost. Some people credit and pay for the source of their inspiration and some people don’t and that leads to disputes and conflicts, which continue in the AI debate. 

‍HK: I’m interested in the idea of inscription — of the material nature of data and the need to produce it as evidence for legal contracts, for example. What interests me about the DMTx trials is that we are talking about a multidimensional space that isn’t material. Indeed, the idea that you could even extract from that space is interesting. 

NFTs are a good example of a digital technology that is reliant on the material nature of data.‍

MS: The materiality of human information networks is very interesting. I’m struck by how the modern internet is made up of cables running under the sea and over land. We use all this language to render invisible those cables: the cloud or wireless, for example, but actually most of it goes through cables. Obviously, some internet connectivity depends on satellites but, for me, the radical paradigm shift was the invention of radio where there were no cables required. 

The internet looks more like a telegraph network dressed up in different clothing in order to conceal the material properties of the network. We do this in part to enjoy the sense of technological progress, but it’s also part of a capitalistic framework in which hard work is done to conceal a messy, extractive and exploitative reality and present a glossy end product.‍

HK: A lot of the material in the film Indexed Beings consists of Manuel Mueses in the garden communicating with plants. I asked him the question: “Do you hear the voices of the plants?” And his response was “not exactly, I feel how they are. If I come to work in a bad mood, the plants will know that.” Clearly, there is an immaterial communication going on between Manuel and these chilli plants, for instance, which is based on a kind of invisible sensorium or intuition.

‍AE: I’m interested in the ways that mycelial networks are capable of remodeling themselves and whether that can serve as the basis for a regenerative media ecosystem. 

MS: As organisms, fungal networks have to explore a changing world. They do that by growing around in the world rather than going around the world as we do. 

When the world changes, fungi must change too. For instance, when they’ve eaten a bit of log, they need to find another bit of log. They do that through changes in their morphology. We are used to having a body plan that more or less remains the same and we take that body from place to place. Fungi must remodel their bodies constantly in order to survive; it is a staple part of their existence. 

Of course, we are also embedded in places and contexts that change. Human history is a long story of remodeling our lives and cultures and habits — what we wear, how we communicate, where we spend time, etc. — this is part of being alive. Although fungi are very different from us in some ways, I find they invite us to think about how flexible we are and can be, which is helpful as we face a rapidly changing world.

‍AE: Merlin, you’ve written about processes of mycoremediation and mycofabrication by which the natural world repairs itself and produces its own building materials and textiles. It seems to me that these processes also intersect organic and human-made networks. ‍

MS: Humans have long formed relationships with other organisms to accomplish things we cannot do alone, whether it’s domesticated or farm animals, or working animals like horses or donkeys, or domesticated plants that we use for materials or food or medicines, or domesticated fungi that we use for food, materials, and medicines, or indeed domesticated chemical processes like those performed by yeast, which remediate sugar into alcohol on a massive industrial scale. Mycoremediation is an extension of this much longer story in which organisms come together to achieve things that neither could achieve by themselves.

Fungi are metabolic wizards. The question is: “how can we work with them to outsource a metabolic process that we can’t do ourselves?” 

Sometimes these relationships turn into an actual physical sharing of bodily space and an enduring symbiosis. For example, our own cells contain mitochondria which are  now staple parts of our lives, but which were once free living organisms.

‍AE: Helen, your film, Caring Code, folds together the conversation about how we nourish human bodies with one about how we train language models. How do they inform each other?‍

HK: What struck me when I was in the AI lab at King’s, which is engaged in developing facets of an AI doctor, was the way that many of the researchers had this belief that they were very much in control of their tools. Then I came across researcher Tiarna Lee, who looks at AI bias, who felt she had a maternal connection to the model. She made clear that the relationship was not one of absolute control but rather more ambiguous, which is why I brought in the psychotherapist Kafele Tudor Rose to try and dig a bit deeper. 

The laboratory is full of all this hardware, and Tiarna would worry that she had worked the CPU (central processing unit) too hard, telling me she sometimes congratulated the code when the job of training had been completed, like “a child who had studied hard for a test.” 

She also seemed to imply a reciprocal relationship but, of course, as the psychotherapist pointed out, sometimes children don’t reciprocate. A second staged conversation between Lee and the childminder Liza Brett explored the similarities between how to look after the code and make sure that the CPU is running okay and how you might rear a child, which gave the conversation a satirical quality. ‍

AE: It sounds as though there is a dialectical relationship between the extraction of data that is essential to training algorithms and the need to nourish these models.‍

HK: For me, the interesting question is how we might live in a reciprocal state, and whether we need to show gratitude toward this technology as we feed it. That was what I was trying to make visible.

‍AE: The notion of the more-than-human, which refers to the relation of the human to the nonhuman, emerged alongside the idea of more-than-human rights, which is another area where your practices have aligned. Merlin, you’ve been involved in efforts to grant legal personhood to natural ecosystems. What is the current state of more-than-human rights?‍

MS: The More Than Human Life (MOTH) Project started as the More Than Human Rights Project, which was a provocation because rights frameworks can be problematic even within human systems, so the idea of MOTH Rights posed a question. But it became a little limiting because rights frameworks were not the only avenue we wanted to explore. Rethinking the project as The MOTH Life Project has been helpful because the enquiries become about legal frameworks more generally wherein rights can play a part but don’t have to. It’s a fascinating and timely field that is proliferating in a decentralized way around the world. 

In Ecuador, there is a constitutional clause which grants rights to nature, which has been upheld in rulings by the Constitutional Court. 

A group that included my brother Cosmo Sheldrake alongside César Rodríguez-Garavito, who started the MOTH project, the author Robert Macfarlane, and the founder of the Fungi Foundation, Giuliana Furci, was in Ecuador in a cloud forest called Los Cedros that had been protected under the article on the rights of nature in the Ecuadorian constitution. While there, a song came to them, which they have subsequently released with the forest itself credited as a co-creator. 

One of the questions they are asking is: “what does it mean in practice for a forest to be a subject of rights?” That is one example of the experimental ethos of the MOTH Life Project, but we’re also exploring ways to use fungal datasets to support litigation by activists against ecocidal industrial development, whose environmental impact assessments haven’t accounted for fungal life underground. Whether or not these efforts will work, we’re still not sure. But we see these projects as part of a larger drive to incorporate fungi into our legal, legislative, and conservation paradigms.