Mycelium of the Future

Mycelium of the Future is a six-part generative video work that takes over the lobby of an Aalto University K3 building.

Winner of the invited art competition for the K3 building.

‘Mycelium of the Future’ consists of a generative text animation on LED displays. Launch by motion sensors at the entrance, the texts move sentence by sentence through six LED displays, which are situated around the building. The viewer can follow the sentences by moving though the spaces. The flexible LED displays bring impressive sculptural forms in the lobby spaces of the new and renovated K3 building.

The artwork is continuously changing, as each AI generated sentence is unique and has a wave-like form. Each sentence has an identity colour according to the Aalto branding colours. The initial texts are from Aalto University BA, MA and PhD thesis works (2003–2022). The original thesis abstract texts were used to train the OpenAI GPT-2 neural network and the resulting AI generated texts were then further manipulated with GPT-3.5 into poems. There are about two million poems made from about 6000 thesis abstracts. The texts in the artwork are therefore new but also typical research texts based on previous study and research results.

Programming and system administration: Eino Rauhala