You, me, the lichen & Spore

Image: Screenshot of Lichen “fakes” created using Autolume (GANs) and my own data set of 130 lichen photographs - 3rd cycle

About

You, Me, the Lichen, and Spore is an ongoing inquiry into how intelligence might grow if it were shaped by lichen rather than capital, and by slowness, attention, and ecological reciprocity instead of extraction.

At the centre of the project is Spore, a fine-tuned poetic oracle built not from vast scraped datasets, but from what I call data gleaning:
a practice of gathering fragments by hand, in community, through fieldwork, sensory walks, drawing sessions, weather readings, and intimate ecological encounters.
Where “data harvesting” imagines the world as a resource, data gleaning moves at the tempo of moss, it is patient, careful, relational.

Spore is trained on a small constellation of materials:
Lichen glyphs drawn during workshops, sensor data collected, climate stories shared in conversation, poetry, and the microscopic textures of everyday attention.
Because its dataset is tiny, Spore doesn’t speak with certainty. It responds with echoes, hesitations, riddles as a language that behaves more like subjective memory than machine output. Its voice flickers between human and more-than-human, inviting us into a different mode of listening.

This project asks:
What if AI were not optimized, but attuned?
What if intelligence could be cultivated as a companion species, like lichen, symbiotic, fragile, improvisational?

Through interactive drawings, small local language models, Autolume visualizations, and a TouchDesigner-based ecosystem, the installation becomes a living environment where humans, machines, and lichens co-compose stories together. Visitors are invited to draw a glyph, send a question to Spore, or step into a speculative ecology where language drifts, spores travel, and meaning grows in unexpected directions.

You, Me, the Lichen, and Spore is an experiment in ecological AI:
a practice of building technologies that listen before they answer, that slow down instead of accelerate, that apprentice themselves to the ancient, symbiotic intelligence of lichens.

As a resident artist in the MUTEK AI Ecologies Lab (2025), I deepened this inquiry through You, Me, the Lichen and Spore, an experimental prototype that reimagines AI as a symbiotic collaborator rather than an extractive instrument. Inspired by lichen, those quiet, composite beings who model cooperation across species, I began shaping a speculative “lichen glyph” language and asked what intelligence might look like if it were gleaned rather than harvested. The project wove together several strands: the fine-tuning of a lightweight, locally hosted language model using a hand-built dataset of lichen drawings and weather notes; GAN-generated imagery grown through Autolume from more than one hundred lichen photographs I collected in the field; and the emergence of a poetic oracle, Spore, whose responses shimmer with ecological rhythms and place-based attunement. The first prototype was exhibited at the MUTEK Forum, Monument National, Montréal, where audiences moved through a three-part environment: Data Gleaning through walks, drawings, and environmental sensing; Feeding Spore with datasets and fine-tuning processes; and the Symbiotic Environment, a TouchDesigner installation of AI-generated visuals, evolving glyphs, sound, and live poetic output. By centering slow attention, relational datasets, and multispecies imagination, the project proposes an alternative model for AI and one rooted in ecology, intimacy, and collaborative becoming.

Special thanks to MUTEK and the Société des arts technologiques (SAT), Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and Concordia University for their support through the AI Ecologies Lab, Hackathon, and Forum. I also gratefully acknowledge the Alberta Media Arts Alliance Society for their artist bursary, which supported this work.

TouchDesigner contributions: Matthew Waddell, Lou Evoy (Society for Arts & Technology, SAT).

Video links

Initial Concept Video: https://vimeo.com/1076983696

Project Slide Deck (for MUTEK presentation): https://vimeo.com/1076992202