An interactive exhibition that imagines an alternative AI ecosystem: one that learns from a non-human intelligence beneath the soil and breaks the closed loops of the feeds we live inside.
Today's recommender systems are tuned to one thing: keep us watching, scrolling, agreeing. The result is a quiet machinery of repetition: echo chambers, polarisation, and a steady narrowing of the worlds we inhabit. Echoes of Balance asks a different question.
What if AI learned to grow, connect, and redistribute through fungal logic: actively feeding diverse perspectives instead of reinforcing engagement loops and consumption?Echoes of Balance
Oppressive. Repetitive. Confirmation-aware.
Following Tang et al. (2025), today's feeds operate as a confirmation-aware social model: they mirror human cognition, reinforce confirmatory content, and turn echo chambers and homogenisation traps into structural inevitabilities. Critical thinking thins; difference is filtered away.
Organic. Decentralised. Regenerative.
After Deleuze and Guattari, we imagine a rhizomatic counterpart: knowledge that emerges from many entry points, ideas that interact across categories, a flow that nourishes diversity instead of collapsing it. Mycelium becomes the model.
Visitors move through an AI system that first mirrors their preferences, then is interrupted by a mycelial pulse. The exhibition makes the shift from algorithmic repetition to biological redistribution visible, spatial and bodily.
Echoes of Balance proposes a speculative algorithmic system that does not mimic human behaviour. Instead, it listens to a non-human collaborator: the mycelial network beneath the forest floor.
Electrodes and biochemical sensors read three living signals from a mycelium body: microvolt fluctuations, resistance changes from moisture and metabolic activity, and chemical gradients of CO2, pH and nutrient shifts. Together they form a continuous data stream we call the mycelial pulse.
The pulse is fed into a recommender as an additional input layer: a source of biological randomness that the algorithm cannot optimise away. It rewards underrepresented nodes; it nurtures diversity. The design direction is borrowed straight from fungi: nutrients are distributed across the ecosystem, not hoarded by the loudest plant.
The result is a system that, in the words of the project, "doesn't mirror human behaviour — it introduces a non-human logic into the AI's data system."
Video — Mycelium and Echochamber video.
A living non-human agent with distributed sensing and adaptive growth.
Microvolts, resistance and chemical gradients, captured in real time.
A digital stream of biological noise feeding the model's input layer.
Content redistributed beyond the echo chamber, toward diverse nodes.
Visitors move through a single room that performs the system's logic on their own attention. The journey is staged in six moments: a passage from a familiar dystopia into a speculative utopia, with mycelium as the hinge.
Each visitor receives an NFC amulet. The object is a key, but also a small contract: it carries the choice you are about to make into the room.
The amulet selects one of several content worlds, each representing a familiar feed bubble. From this moment on, the room speaks back in your own preferences.
Projection-mapped imagery responds to a scroll gesture: the longer you scroll, the more the same content multiplies. After early experiments with blob-tracking and keyword silhouettes in TouchDesigner, we chose visual content over text because the mirror effect of today's feeds is felt, not read.
At a tipping point, the mycelial pulse enters the system. Bio-signal logic and biological randomness redistribute the visitors' echo chambers. The room rearranges itself into a rhizomatic network.
The atmosphere shifts from oppressive and repetitive to organic and regenerative. Sound slows; image diversifies. Other visitors' choices become legible as part of your own field of view.
On the way out, each visitor receives a printed trace of how mycelium redistributed their content: a small, uneven map of a momentarily decentralised feed.
The take-home cards turn the exhibition's biological counter-model into small printed prompts: connection without a centre, selective sharing, repair through relation, and adaptation instead of control.
Video — Echoes of Balance, final project video.
We began in La Goccia Forest in Milan, practising the studio's techniques of noticing, attuning and decentring: ways of slowing down enough to register a more-than-human presence.
We chose mycelium as our MTH body for two reasons. First, its rhizomatic root network forms a hub between plants, distributing nutrients, water and CO2, and communicates through chemical signals and electrical pulses, often described as the "wood-wide web." Second, it stands in direct opposition to the echo chamber: it shares rather than amplifies.
To translate that intelligence into a design language we ran a co-speculation workshop with the Nano-Banana model, interrogating mycelium's growth, language and memory.
From the dual-space dystopia/utopia draft we collapsed the story into a single room: to make decentralisation legible as a transformation, not a transition between rooms. The amulet, the projection, the climax and the trace imprint were sketched here.
Tang et al., Confirmation-Aware Social Dynamics (2025); Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics; Deborah Lupton, Data Selves; the Cambridge Analytica case; and the wood-wide web in Royal Society publishing.
The work will be presented at Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, within the Interdependence programme curated around more-than-human design. Visitors are invited to step inside the algorithm, and out of it.
Posters, light, printed cards and wall statements extend the argument beyond the interface: the feed becomes something visitors can physically stand inside.
