The spatiotemporal crises we are currently experiencing confront us more frequently with the signs of the melting of time, slippages that occur not only on a material level but also on an ontological one. What possibilities do we have to glimpse the workings of other worlds and recognize the existence of pluriverses? Starting from this same sense of estrangement toward contemporary viscosities opens up the possibility of imagining worlds designed by other non-human agencies, even after our time.

Visions of the Fungicene is a speculative approach to the articulation of new spatiotemporal frameworks for future ecosystems. Through digital media, it presents a possible scenario of planetary terraformation (post-Anthropocene) co-designed based on the biological principles contained in the morphological patterns of various fungal species. These patterns guide artificial intelligence algorithms to generate ecosystems, planetary landscapes, and neo-topographies: synthetic territories that would reconstitute, in another world, the current scenarios of devastation.

In approaching the design process of this imaginary, a bridge of symbiotic methodologies is enabled between fungal intelligence and artificial intelligence. Using databases containing photographs of three genera of basidiomycete fungi—Agaricus, Amanita, and Suillus—a machine learning model based on StyleGAN2 (an artificial intelligence program) is trained. This model learns the patterns of textures and morphologies of the fungi to generate new series of images based on these patterns.