Joanna Steinhardt
New Orleans 2019: Living with
What can you make and do with fungus? This cross-kingdom, collaborative, and interactive set-up will allow visitors to experiment with (and in) the mobile, lo-tech, jury-rigged home lab of the do-it-yourself mycologist. I will have a home-made still air box, fungal cultures, spawn, and mushrooms–from Pontchartrain Mushrooms, a local mushroom farmer, and perhaps others from California–for people to experiment with. Visitors can play around with the methods of the home cultivation of mushrooms, take home a cardboard culture of oyster mushrooms, try to feed cellulose-based trash to a spawn bag, and get a quick history of these practices as they evolved in the lively subculture of amateur cultivation and experimentation. The presentation will be a celebration and demonstration of the collective ingenuity of DIY mycologists as well as an invitation to participate in the material practices of this subculture.